As organizations struggle to remain competitive, often their work processes must evolve to ensure efficiency or at least prevent clogs in task completion. Any such clogs threaten to severely undermine an organization’s performance, and so an organization has strong incentives to eliminate any clogs and ensure a complete smooth operation. That is the predicament the United States Cellular Corporation faced in that employees were using too many email communications which was clogging up work as those emails were taking up a significant amount of the employees’ time. To try to remedy the situation, CEO Jay Ellison introduced a “No Email Thursday” Rule so that employees would spend more time on their work; they were not consulted beforehand. However, that elicited fierce resistance since employees said they depended on those emails to do critical work, even though any actual critical email was not covered in this prohibition. Hence change management is a clear issue for Ellison to confront. This report first view the types of changes confronting the organization and the theoretical changes made. Then it will look at the theoretical perspectives of change and the role of leadership and review the critical application of a specific change and leadership theory. This will be …show more content…
Ellison implemented the No Email Thursday Rule without first reviewing the role of email in the organization, and he also did it without understanding a proper alternative to the email clog (indeed, without much of an understanding of how the email clog piles up in the first place as well). There was also no understanding of how to differentiate between urgent and non-urgent emails because there is no one standard email format or indeed much of any rules governing office