University of Twente Student Theses

Veranderingsbereidheid in de Gemeentelijke Organisatie: Een onderzoek naar de vorming van veranderingsbereidheid bij een middelgrote gemeente ten opzichte van het Antwoord© concept

Verhage, S. (2010) Veranderingsbereidheid in de Gemeentelijke Organisatie: Een onderzoek naar de vorming van veranderingsbereidheid bij een middelgrote gemeente ten opzichte van het Antwoord© concept.

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Abstract:	This report presents the findings of a study on the willingness to change among municipal employees, regarding the implementation of the Dutch Answer© concept. This research has taken place at a middle-sized municipality, which stands at the beginning of an extensive change process. In recent years governments worldwide are facing necessary reforms. These reforms don’t only effect the design of public services, but also the design of government organizations. First of all, the contact with citizens will become more and more interactive. For that, governments will have to make a change in the strategy on how they offer their services. Instead of just offering services based on their availability, governments will have to start offering them based on the public’s demand. A change has to be made from operating from a supply-oriented approach, to one that is demand-oriented and will eventually become demand-controlled. On the same time, governments are expected to break down bureaucratic structures and take on more and more the structure of a government by network. In order to give shape to these government reforms, the Dutch federal government has designed the Answer© concept. This concept centers on the construction of a so-called Customer Contact Centre, at each municipality. These centers will eventually have to become the main portal for customer contact for all Dutch government services. For the municipality this means the start of a big change process, in which bureaucratic structures have to be thrown down, a culture of change needs to be formed and work proceedings will have to become more process oriented. Implementation of the Answer© concept will involve a complex change process, characterized by a high degree of uncertainty, in which the organization will have to cope with resistance to change. This research centers on measuring the willingness to change. Willingness to change is defined as the positive counterpart of resistance to change and is dividable in three different components: the intentional willingness to change, the affective willingness to change and the cognitive willingness to change. Intentional willingness to change is similar to what is often referred to as behavioral intention. Cognitive willingness to change is a positive attitude to change, resulting from expected advantages and disadvantages in daily work. Affective willingness to change is a positive attitude to change, resulting from the employees emotions, raised by the upcoming change. Based on desk research, a selection of variables was made, which are expected to determine the degree of intentional willingness to change. These variables were included in the preliminary research, which consisted of seven interviews with the members of the management of the municipality. Based on these interviews the contextual relevance of the variables was determined, and a new selection was made. This final selection of variables formed the input for a questionnaire on the willingness to change, which was answered by 84 employees in the organization. Intentional willingness to change was in this study determined by the affective willingness to change, the cognitive willingness to change and the degree in which a person experiences change fatigue. Additionally, personal variables in which attitudes are measured appear to be of bigger influence on the intentional willingness to change, than the more organizational oriented variables like experienced degree of participation and experienced degree of transformational leadership, in the organization. The results of this research show a high degree of both intentional- as affective willingness to change, in the organization. A less degree was measured for the cognitive willingness to change. Translation of the Answer© concept into more concrete benefits in the work of individual employees, therefore needs to become a main point of interest for the management in this municipality.
Item Type:	Essay (Master)
Clients:	Gemeente Enschede
Faculty:	BMS: Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences
Subject:	05 communication studies
Programme:	Communication Studies MSc (60713)
Link to this item:	https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/60584
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