Change management in steel industry: Issues & challenges

The business environment is a dynamic one. Constant developments are taking place in the internal as well as external business environment. Some organizations face greater federal regulation, while others experience deregulation. Some find their markets shrinking, while others thrive into the global marketplace. Many organizations face mergers, hostile takeovers or downsizing problems which have severe psychological and economic effects on their employees. One of the survival and winning business strategies is to bring organizational changes which can cope up with such critical issues. However, in most of the cases, whenever the organization introduces change mechanisms, people in the organization resist such changes. Therefore, such organizational changes need to be effectively managed and implemented which ultimately aims at organizational growth and development. Managing changes, thus, becomes an integral part of the manager's job. Constant assessment of where the system is, as contrasted with where it should be, alerts managers to the changes that need to be embedded in it. This paper discusses the issues and challenges faced by the steel industry, and to combat it a set of suggestions to manage it more successfully. It also discusses the different strategies and their relative effectiveness that managers commonly use to introduce change.