When Asda Employees Joined the Wal-Mart "Family"

Asda is a UK based supermarket merging with Wal-Mart. Joining the large family that is Wal-Mart is not a decision that is made lightly. What happens to your employees? Are they along for the merger? How will the change affect your organization? According to Asda, the most critical element to this entire merge is preparation. The company wanted to prepare its employees. The company also stresses that it has been up front and honest with employees, making a bond of trust.

In the beginning of this merger, not all people at Asda were on board. Many didn't want the company to change or be taken over, and certainly not by an American company, one of the world's largest retailers. However, the merger was not as threatening as some employees feared. One reason for that was the similarities between Asda and Wal-Mart. Their value systems and structure were very similar. Godfrey Owen, deputy chief executive of Brathay, a company that provides people-development solutions, explained, "It is important that when working through a change-management program that people work towards a common goal and that firms empower their employees to put them into action. If staff are not focused on the organization's objectives, the process is almost certain to fail."

Asda prides itself on being a company their employees can trust. The employees have to trust that the decisions made by the business are for the best, not only for the customers but also for the people. With this said, Marie Gill, head of Asda's organizational development, remarked," People do not usually resist change -- they resist being changed." In her book, Organization Theory, Hatch discusses organizational change in Chapter 12.

The overview of Chapter 12 describes organizational change as dynamic and processual. Classical theorists want to focus on how to make organizations stable and routine. When merging companies, this is usually unattainable for awhile. Postmodern theorists want to describe organizational change in terms of environmental change and want to predict change in products, markets, technology, and society. In this day and time, with our changing worlds and our merging companies, theorists need to develop and shift the focus from static models to dynamic models of organizational change.

Change theory is something that has evolved over time. Looking at Lewin's model of change, I can see the simplicity of the theory. A company is 'frozen' in its routine. It must be unfrozen for the change to occur, then after the change, the company is then 'refrozen' into the new routine it has established. There is no dynamic processes occurring, nothing to constantly keep the company new and inventive. Most theorists did not care for the model, describing it as 'quaintly linear and of static conception' and began to look for new models.

Today, change theory has evolved into many different elements. Many theorists are constantly looking for new ways to describe organizational change. It is wonderful to see that change can occur in change theory. For example, culture has become a large part of change theory with many cultures coming together, such as Asda's UK based company and Wal-mart's U.S. based company. Theories occasionally have the tendency to be static and unchanging. It is nice to see that issues and themes in organization theory can broaden and change with the world's changing markets and mergers.

Posted by Anne W.

References
Hatch, M.J. (2001). Organization Theory. New York: Oxford University Press.

Pollitt, D. (2004). When Asda employees joined the Wal-mart 'family'. Human Resource Management International Digest. 12(6), p. 18-20.