TRANSFORMATIONAL CHANGE AND EMPLOYEE BURNOUT
Introduction
The contemporary world has left many organizations struggling to survive in a turbulent and progressively changing business environment. Change is an essential phenomenon in any organization seeking to enhance performance both at the personal, organizational, and team level to survive and remain competitive in the global market. Transformative change is a critical tenet of work-life with changes being needed at both the organizational and personal employee level. While advanced organizational behavior is a symptom of transformative change, changes such as those brought about by the fourth industrial revolution can lead to high levels of job stressors and demands including psychological uncertainty, role ambiguity, and increase workload, which have the capability to increase the level of burnout in employees. Accordingly, it is essential to examine the advanced organizational behavior as a symptom of transformative change and the influence of the fourth industrial revolution on employee burnout.
Advanced Organizational Behavior and Transformative Change
Transformational denotes to areas in which change is likely to result in interaction with the forces within and outside the environment, which require totally new sets of behaviors on the part of the members within an organization. Advanced organizational behavior is a symptom of transformative change due to the fact that moving the people to behave in a certain way both at the personal and team level is a shift to new directions indicative of change. Organizational behavior places emphasis on the behavior of employees in organizations, including their interaction with each other and how they work within structures, technology, and systems of an organization. This behavior can help explain, predict, and influence the achievement of organizational goals while assisting organizations in responding to various actions and decisions. Knight (2017) points out that managing employees depicting a specific behavior is by pointing out the reasons behind their behaviors and effecting change accordingly. Emergent behavior in an organization dramatically results in the formation of behavioral norms within the organization’s working groups. Organizational behavior is guided by the culture of the organization encompassing a set of overt and covert rules, values, and principles. When employees begin to portray a specific type of behavior, it is an indicator that the challenges related to the culture of an organization, which then necessitates change.
Besides, advanced organizational behavior can either be positive or supportive of the goals of an organization or negative that is incongruent with the organization’s goals. Accordingly, this advanced organizational behavior develops into a normative profile that gives the statements if the strengths and weaknesses of an organization are on a behavioral level. For instance, team tensions and defiance behavior is a significant indicator of an organization’s inherent problem, which calls for transformative change.According to Knight (2017), organizations ought to be mindful of group dynamics as the tension created by these teams can lead to harmful organizational norms as symptoms of transformative change.Given a comprehension of the impact of the strengths and weaknesses of advanced organizational behavior on the achievement of the goals of an organization, transformative changes geared towards changing the organization’s behavior and group norms are undertaken.As a result, the transformative change would help organizational teams gain the right behavior needed for task effectiveness. This explains why advanced organizational behavior is a symptom of transformative change.
Transformative organizational change entails driving adoption of the new corporate practices. How people behave in an organization helps promote the need for change in an organization. For instance, inappropriate behaviors in an organization might cause identity challenges within an organization, which calls for change to be undertaken. Abrahamson (2004) points out that to protect the organization from damaging outcomes, the executives should monitor the symptoms of repetitive change syndromes such as employee cynicism and change-related chaos. According to Abrahamson (2004), change-related chaos demonstrated in employee behavior is a symptom of transformative change as the anxiety caused by these behaviors impacts employee productivity. Consequently, this inhibits the realization of the goals of an organization and thereby necessitating transformative change.
How the Fourth Industrial Revolution can Influence Burnout
The Fourth Industrial Revolution comes with advances in technology and innovation that are changing the globe and yielding transformations in the world we work in (Rana and Sharma, 2019). The primary technology types leading this transformation are the cloud and mobile computing, machine learning, advanced robotics and sensors, and intelligent manufacturing. While the fourth industrial revolution presents lots of opportunities, its unfamiliarity negatively impacts employees, leading to an increased rate of burnout among employees. Salem defines employee burnout as a situation whereby the employee becomes psychologically worn-out and emotionally exhausted due to excessive demands at work. Employee burnout falls intro three dimensions. These are the overwhelming exhaustion due to too much work, feelings of cynicism and detachment from work and finally ineffectiveness and lack of accomplishments at the job setting. According to Salem (2015), the age of digital technologies, automation, machine learning, and the internet of things has brought excessive work demands, making them psychologically worn out and increasing the rate of employee burnout. For instance, since the integration of robots and automated machines into work environments, robots have become part of organizational teams, resulting in employee stress and exhaustion, which translates to burnout. The allocation of roles to both employees and robotics calls for substantial attention as the interaction between the human and robot evokes issues of distrust of automation, complacency, abuse, disuse, and negative impacts of the various facets of human performance.
Notably, the introduction of innovative systems in places of work can result in a lack of autonomy and skills, which in turn lead to stress, demotivation, and emotional exhaustion and, in the long run, cause employee burnout. Garrad and Chamorro-Premuzic (2016) point to the fact that while the fourth industrial revolution encourages employee engagement, highly engaged employees suffer from work interference, which pushes them into burnout. Machine learning and automation have increased employee engagement as these technologies require skills and expertise, making them so involved that they forget about their lives. Accordingly, when employees are engaged, they become burned out and therefore impacting negatively to the job performance.
In conclusion, advanced organizational behavior is a symptom of transformative change because these behaviors are indicative of the challenges within a corporate culture, which then necessitates change. Also, when these behaviors areincongruent with the goals of an organization, it calls for transformative change to release organizational goals. While transformation in terms of technology is critical, the organizational shifts towards the fourth industrial revolution cause distress and demotivation psychological exhaustion, resulting in employee burnout.
Reference List
Abrahamson, E., 2004. Avoiding repetitive change syndrome. MIT Sloan Management Review, 45(2), p.93-95
Garrad, L., and Chamorro-Premuzic, T., 2016. The dark side of high employee engagement. Harvard business review, 16, pp. 3-5
Knight, R., 2017. Developing Employees: How to Manage Your Star Employee, pp. 3-9
Rana, Geeta, and Ravindra Sharma, 2019. Emerging human resource management practices in Industry 4.0. Strategic HR Review, pp176-189
Salem, Islam, El-Bayoumi, 2015. Transformational leadership: Relationship to job stress and job burnout in five-star hotels.” Tourism and Hospitality Research 15.4: 240-253.