Choose a Real-life Organisation That is Experiencing Major Challenges in Their Business: Organisational Change Management Report, UOE, Singapore

Questions: Choose a real-life organization that is experiencing major challenges in its business operations as a result of changing its operation systems, processes, new leadership, or even culture.

Given the above observation, study how the organization develops strategies to manage a change program/intervention to address the challenges that affect its business operations and organizational transformation. Please do not choose the SMRT organization. Outline and contents of your report should cover the following:

a. Introduction

b. Description, of the change, OD issues, or challenges facing the organization and their implications on its operation

c. Discuss the approaches or the actions taken by the organization to manage the issues and challenges facing the organization

d. Analyze whether the approach taken is effective or not and whether other approaches that are more effective can be considered given the contextual, cultural, and structural environment of the organization.

e. Make recommendations based on your analysis f. Apply at least two theoretical concepts/model(s)covered in the course

SMRT’s Challenges

SMRT Corporation Ltd is a privatized company with 32 years of history that provides public transport to the country. Its primary businesses are train services, coupled with the bus, taxi, and private 2 hire vehicle services. The organization structure is split according to main business divisions, which are then further divided into smaller divisions, comprising of key personnel that includes the board of directors, the chairman, CEO, and other senior managers who oversee the main business divisions and functions.

In 2012, SMRT underwent substantial changes in its management team with the resignation of its then CEO, Saw PhaikHwa, due to the organization’s growing unpopularity with their passengers and increasing maintenance failures due to underinvestment in maintenance (Sim, R., 2017). Under Saw PhaikHwa’s tenure, SMRT grappled with its worst security and service lapses the company has seen since it began operations in 1987. She was also criticized for choosing profits over the interests of commuters and neglect for train maintenance. Investigations have revealed problematic audit checks, admin lapses, and falsified maintenance records (Sim, R., 2017).

With the realization of its challenges in 2012, SMRT sought to tackle the organizational culture issues via a top-down approach by introducing a new CEO (Sim, R., 2017). The new CEO proceeded to replace key managerial positions with people from the military and private sectors and additionally introduced new core values for the company, believing that the military background would help to improve protocols (Chan, 2017; Sim, R., 2017). The new CEO, Desmond Kuek, cited work culture issues as the root cause of the company’s problems. However, the operational disruptions and work culture issues have remained and worsened from 2012 to 2016 (Chan, 2017).

The resignations of experienced employees and the lack of relevant experience of the new leaders have contributed to the organization’s inability to improve organizational culture (Sim, D., 2017). Investigations additionally revealed poor work ethics due to existing employees’ failure to oversee daily operations (Tay, 2016). Moreover, the organization had been focusing on addressing engineering issues rather than work culture issues, further contributing to the company’s difficulties to improve their organizational culture (Sim, R., 2017). It resulted in SMRT’s continued operational problems, including falsified maintenance records from both the technical employees and supervisors (Wong, 2017). The company’s profit in 2017 was recorded at 26 million dollars, a drastic drop of more than two-thirds as compared to the previous year’s profit (Tan, 2018).

Despite the company’s efforts to improve the organizational culture, subsequent reports have revealed that their attempts have been unsuccessful, with operational issues stemming from the cultural issues persisting (Stolarchuk, 2018). This led to the resignation of SMRT’s CEO once again 3 in 2018. One of the reasons for the ineffectiveness was Desmond Kuek’s and his management team’s inability to adapt their management style (Sim, D., 2017). Their military background resulted in a cultural shift towards an authoritative regime that failed to motivate employees in SMRT to improve their performance and minimize negligence. This culture additionally led to the increasing prominence of a work-blame culture in SMRT. The consequence was a loss of trust within the organization, causing a mass resignation of over 30 employees within one year (Tan, 2017; Salim, 2019).

More significantly, SMRT failed to address the root cause of their cultural issues, instead of selecting to focus on technical and operational problems. Their internal SWOT analyses evidenced this from 2017 to 2018, where they identified the company’s profitability as their only weakness (SMRT Corporation Ltd, 2017, p. 5). The ineffective approaches may have also been affected by external factors, such as financial pressures from shareholders and increased competition in the public transport industry.