Change Management and Conflict of Interest

Conflicting of the interests in institutions or organizations occurs when there are preceding situations and events that cause someone to make fair/unfair decisions and conclusions, only because they anticipate benefits from the said decisions. It is common knowledge that, during change in organizations, there is anticipated change in organizational structure of the whole organization. There is a concurrent integration, elimination, and transformation of processes thus, leading to a great effect on job grades, titles and overall running and working the organization jobs. It is of paramount importance that the companies do not involve senior employees of the targeted departments as change managers, since they would have a conflict of interest, especially if their job grades are to be promoted. In this paper, I will vividly bring out the conflict of interest, as it is portrayed when management change is tasked to the employees of the targeted department.

In line with change management, the overall implication of the implementation is that many employees will be affected in either a negative or a positive way. There has always been the rivalry within organizations. Mostly junior employees are likely to be resistant to change, if they feel their positions will be affected negatively. It would even be worse, if the change implementers were the senior employees of the targeted organization or department. This is because they would view it as a measure to get rid of them, especially if the senior ones were not apt to their positions and, instead, were afraid of the potential that their juniors portrayed. In many cases the senior employees make decisions with the aim of achieving the whole change. This will eventually lead to gains in terms of job grading, which of course means salary increment. These reasons and situations can make change implementers to stray or deviate from the objectives of the project. This is due to the perceived benefits they would reap from the success of the implementation completion with total disregard to the well-being of the other employees, and the organization at large.

The project managers of change management should ideally be outsourced to avoid conflict of interest. If the whole company’s structure is not to be affected, then change managers from other departments can be used. Recently, conflict of interest has been considered in some quarters as a form of corruption. It violates the integrity of law and leads to loss of moral standards, as well as loyalty. As a result, it propagates private gain and total disregard of the laid down procedures and objectives of any project or organizational goals (Benson, 1992). This is one of the reasons that disqualifies change managers from the targeted department by the change implementation to be the leaders of the projects. Moreover, due to the foreseen benefits it is likely that they would be blinded by gains in the end-results, thus, overlooking all the implications of the project to the organization and preventing them from reporting accordingly. All these inside leaders should be contracted to evaluate the implementation to see if their employees are adjusting to the changes accordingly. In addition, they are better placed to tell whether the systems and process are moving efficiently and according to the postulated results.

In conclusion, conflict of interest is an enormous problem and companies should not encourage the use of their internal employees to be the project managers, if there are perceived gains because of change implementation. Bias is expected when insiders are leaders in projects affecting their day-to-day operations through their outcomes. Thus, it is highly recommended that project leaders should be outsourced, or at least be from a different department for efficient running and achievement of project objectives, if the company is aimed to prosper. Many companies consider it cheap to use the leaders in their respective departments to oversee the change implementation. They decipher the hidden motives of the leaders in making the projects be implemented regardless of the route they take. This ends up implementing projects that are off the target according to the objectives.