Identification of Stakeholders in an Organisational Change Process

Abstract

This is a fictional case examining the consequences of an engineering organisation that adopted a new marketing identity based on customer service and the activities it set into practice to influence both existing and new staff to also adopt this new organisational identity. Previously, the emphasis was on engineering skills. Though these skills were continuously maintained and regularly updated, they became secondary in importance after adoption of its new identity. The case examines the company’s approach to introducing this new mindset in all employees and thus achieving congruence of objectives. It presents how the organisation, a Hong Kong subsidiary of a multinational corporation, introduced the new identity of the parent company and further developed a new strong organisational identity within their operations. Activities such as setting up a steering committee to overview the change process and a task force to plan and implement the change process, identify stakeholders, and establish change tactics are described, and their impacts are investigated. Among all these activities, stakeholder identification is one of the crucial prerequisites so that organizational communication and changes can be targeted to the right respondents. This case study offers a few effective and practical ways that can be applied in different situations to identify stakeholders in an organizational change process. Students will need to consider the problems organisations face when pursuing change to their organisational identity, what this means to their stakeholders, and what strategies to pursue in order to develop organisational identification.