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TopChange Management & Health Sector
Organizational change is a process moving the organization from a certain point to another one reacting to internal and external driving forces.
People specialized in information technology consider the adoption of a new technology as an event, that is as something happening in a certain time and lasting shortly (Merlyn & Parkinson, 2007). Over the last years, the term “change” has probably been misused to the point that the act and/or the fact of changing, togheter with all its synonymous, has been widely used to identify several and different things but perceived as crucial for people looking at it (Reina, 2008). According to an organizational meaning, it often ends to favor the presented key of those actions clearly oriented and focused towards a change within the organization (Quaglino, 1987). This is why it is important to operate a distinction: if the variable of an analysis is at individual level, then it is preferable to use the concept of “individual change”; when the focus is on the impact at organizational or community level, it is better referring to “organizational change” (Reina, 2008).
So, the change is a fundamental requirement for the survival of health care organizations, since they have to be able to adapt to their surrounding dynamic environment. In that situation, the organizational change can be considered as a dynamic whole of actions and retroactions among several variables (inside and outside the organization) and among the several actors involved within the change (Caccia, 2008).
It is necessary to underline that each kind of analisys and study on the health care organizations, should start from the understanding of the existing working context (Bergamaschi, 2009); only the health care sector, over the last twenty years, has been characterized by an intense and deep wave of change regarding different aspects that have contributed to modify the physiognomy of the sector itself (Del Vecchio, 2001). Such transformation processes, impacting on the health care organization environment provoke further changes on the working conditions of each company, inducing them to develop new competitive strategies both for surviving reasons and for exploiting other opportunities. Consequently, companies care more and more about change, referring to its frequency and complexity.