PS391 Unit 6 Leading Change Paper Example

The Headsets Arrived on a Tuesday: A PS391 Unit 6 Leading Change Paper

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

PS391: Psychology of Leadership

Unit 6 Leading Change Paper

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The writer, the warehouse, the crew and every figure are composite and illustrative; the articles cited are real.

The Change

In October, the company that runs our Columbus distribution warehouse announced that the night crew would move from handheld scanners to voice-picking headsets. Instead of reading the next location and item on a screen, pickers would hear instructions through a headset and confirm by speaking a check digit. Other warehouses had seen faster picking and fewer errors. The announcement came by email from the regional office, two weeks before the headsets arrived, and the training was a single forty-five-minute session.

As night-shift supervisor, I had not been asked about the change and learned about it from the same email as my crew.

The First Week

The headsets arrived on a Tuesday. By Thursday, twenty-two of my twenty-eight pickers had signed a petition asking to keep the scanners. Picking rates fell about fifteen percent below normal. Several older pickers said the headsets made their ears ache by the end of a shift, two pickers who speak Spanish as a first language said the system kept rejecting their check digits, and Marlene, who had worked nights for nineteen years, quit on Friday. Two crew members told me privately they believed the headsets were a way to track them more closely before layoffs.

Why People Resisted

Oreg et al. (2011) sorted sixty years of measured studies of how staff respond when their workplace changes. What predicted a response fell into a few groups: who the people were, how the change was run (whether they had a say, how they were told, whether they trusted the managers behind it), whether the change looked like a gain or a loss for them, and the setting around it all. Those factors shaped how people felt, what they believed and what they did about the change, and those reactions in turn showed up in how satisfied and committed they were and whether they planned to quit.

Nearly every antecedent they described was working against us. The crew had no say in the decision. Communication was a single email. Trust was low, because the warehouse had cut a shift two years earlier. The perceived harms, sore ears, rejected words and fears of surveillance, were concrete, while the benefits were described in terms of company metrics. Marlene's resignation was the kind of consequence the review links to poorly handled change.

The crew was not resisting headsets; they were resisting a change that had been done to them.

What the Change Message Was Missing

Armenakis and Harris (2002) argued that people get behind a change when the message answers five questions they are already asking. Is something wrong with how we work now (discrepancy)? Is this the fix that suits the problem (appropriateness)? Can we actually do it (efficacy)? Do the bosses mean it (principal support)? And what is in it for me (personal valence)? The regional email addressed discrepancy and appropriateness in company terms and said nothing about efficacy or personal valence. Nobody had told my crew whether they could succeed with the new system or what it would mean for their jobs.

The Second Week

I could not undo the decision, but I could change how it was carried out on my shift. On Monday of the second week, I held a meeting before the shift. I said plainly that I had not been consulted either, that the headsets were not going away, and that I would take their problems to the regional office and report back. I asked the operations manager to attend, and he answered the layoff question directly: the company's plan included no cuts to the night crew, and he put that in writing.

Then we worked on efficacy. Rafael and two other pickers who had adapted quickly became headset coaches, spending the first hour of each shift with anyone struggling. I asked the vendor to send a technician, who retrained the voice system on each Spanish-speaking picker's pronunciation, which fixed most of the rejections in a night. For ear pain, the operations manager approved a second style of headset with lighter ear pads.

Finally, personal valence: I shared what pickers at another site had found, that once the system learned their voices, their hands were free and their eyes stayed on the shelves, which some found less tiring.

My Own Part

Looking back, my role in the second week fits what Bass and Riggio (2006) call individualized consideration, attention to what each person needs, more than any grand vision. The crew did not need a speech about the future of warehousing. Marisol, one of the pickers whose check digits kept failing, needed the system to understand her voice. Hector, whose ears ached by midnight, needed a lighter headset. Two pickers needed to hear, in writing, that their jobs were safe. Each fix was small, and together they turned a change the crew felt had been done to them into one they could manage. I also tried to model the behavior I was asking for: I wore a headset for two full shifts, picking alongside the crew, and complained out loud when it rejected my own check digits, which got the first laugh anyone had shared about the system.

Marlene

I called Marlene the week after she left. She said the headsets were the last straw after years of feeling that the night crew was an afterthought. I could not change her mind, but I passed her comments to the operations manager, and they shaped how he talked about the night crew in the next all-hands meeting.

Results

By the end of the second week, picking rates had returned to normal; by the end of the month, they were about eight percent above the old scanner rates, with fewer mispicks. The petition was withdrawn. Two pickers still preferred scanners, and I passed their comments to the regional office along with the crew's other suggestions for the next site that converts.

What I Would Do With More Say

If I lead a change from the start next time, I would involve the crew before choosing equipment, run a pilot with volunteers and give people a voice in how training is designed. Those steps address the participation and trust that Oreg and colleagues found so important.

Conclusion

The headset change met resistance because nearly every condition Oreg and colleagues link to negative reactions was present, and the message lacked the efficacy and personal meaning Armenakis and Harris describe. Honest communication, written answers about jobs, peer coaches and fixes for real problems turned the second week around.

References

Armenakis, A. A., & Harris, S. G. (2002). Crafting a change message to create transformational readiness. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 15(2), 169-183. https://doi.org/10.1108/09534810210423080

Bass, B. M., & Riggio, R. E. (2006). Transformational leadership (2nd ed.). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Oreg, S., Vakola, M., & Armenakis, A. (2011). Change recipients' reactions to organizational change: A 60-year review of quantitative studies. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 47(4), 461-524. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021886310396550