An investigation into the factors that lead to organisational inertia within a South African organisation.

Abstract

A study was undertaken at the University of Johannesburg in Gauteng South Africa to investigate the phenomenon of organisational inertia. Staff members that worked at the institution were asked to complete a Likert Scale that had organisational inertia constructs. The University of Johannesburg was chosen as the organisation of study because of its unique formative nature. The institution was birthed from a merger of Rand Afrikaans University (RAU), Technikon Witwatersrand (TWR) and Vista University (Soweto and East Rand) campuses. Traditionally and culturally these three were diverse institutions formed in apartheid South Africa. After the 1994 elections, the need for an all-inclusive tertiary education sector became necessary. The result was that these three institutions were previously traditionally and racially diametric merged and this gave birth to the challenge of bringing synergy, uniformity and ultimately creating one identity out of these formerly very different institutions. Organisational change theory and literature was also dissected in order to fully understand the phenomenon of organisational inertia. The study found during the merger, the four factors found to promote organisational change and to assist in dealing with organisational inertia at the University were Change in Leadership, Change management practices, Change related systems and Work unit change orientation as shown below: • Organisational culture and support (associations between the variables and all components) • Institutional composition (associations with the variables and eight out of nine components). • Change management practices (associations with the variables and 11 out of 15 components). • Change related systems (associations between the variables and all components). • Work unit change orientation (associations between the variables and all components). • Motivation for change (associations between the variables and five out of six components), and • Emotional impact (associations with the variables and eight out of nine components). Emotional impact was also linked to motivation in that an employee’s ability to control emotions within the organisational change process may be influenced by how motivated they are on the job. Further, it was found that motivation for change also played a significant part in the organisational change process. The study realized that gender, age, position in the institution, the highest level of education, and years in service all influence the emotional impact of the change process on employees. While the study found that Position in Institution influences most constructs at the University, it is recommended that future studies look at detailing the variable further to reveal the effect of the constituents of the variable on the constructs. This further analysis allows management practitioners to acknowledge that their beliefs must change, for example their beliefs about organisational culture and support. Development of an organisational culture must be a shared responsibility of professionals and other staff. An organisation that allows this to happen stands a better change of culture acceptance by every employee and avoids a situation where professionals go to external service providers for training while other staff are trained inhouse. This scenario generates the ‘them and us’ syndrome that underlies change resistance and helps instill organisational inertia. The splitting of the various components of a variable as opposed to using its combined attribute helped to realise significant associations at the item level. Had all components been combined per variable, most such inferences would have been lost.