Organizational change in General Motors
For your paper, you will consider a large organization like General Motors which has several locations (plants). You may use General Motors or any other company similar in size. For this paper imagine that the higher management of your plant has just been informed that the plant will close and about half of the employees will be moved to a different location across the country. There are about 1000 employees. Some will be offered early retirements, some will be offered a move (if there is a job for them available at the new location) and others will be laid off. Write a paper about the expected organizational changes that will most likely occur. Choose a change model and outline the steps of that model against the necessary actions that management must take. How will this company prepare their people for this planned move? Consider the period of two years for this complete shutdown to occur. Use a timeline for what and how you would proceed. Discuss the leadership styles that will be necessary during the various phases and the approaches to change that are applicable. Use terms and concepts from our studies.
Within your paper answer all the following questions:
1. Briefly summarize THREE key events of organizational change you expect during the transition.
2. How should the leaders handle the situations (key events), based on your knowledge of leading change? You should use concepts and terminology found in the text or other reading from the course.
3. How did the environment affect how the leaders managed change? This question is designed to help you understand how high stress, high demand situations may require different techniques than a “slower” and less stressful environment. Use terms and concepts from our studies.
4. Which group of employees resisted change the most? How were they best handled?
Discuss leadership styles and when and how they will change during the timeline. Which approaches to change are most appropriate? The paper should be in APA format and approximately 4-5 (not including title and reference pages) pages in the main body of the paper. Each page should have approximately 350 words. Papers without at least 1400 words of text (not including title and reference page) will have deductions. Make sure you clearly show the answers to the above questions. If you use quotes in your paper you should have more than 1400 words to compensate for the quotes.
