The Innovation and Change Agent Role

In their proactive role, HR practitioners are well placed to observe and analyse what is happening in and to their organizations as it affects the employment of people, and intervene accordingly. Following this analysis, they produce diagnoses that identify opportunities and threats and the causes of problems. They propose innovations in the light of these diagnoses that may be concerned with organizational processes such as interaction between departments and people, teamwork, structural change and the impact of new technology and methods of working, or HR processes such as resourcing, employee development or reward. As innovators they have to be experts in change management.

Impression Management

The danger, according to Marchington (1995a), is that HR people may go in for ‘impression management’ – aiming to make an impact on senior managers and colleagues through publicizing high-profile innovations. HR specialists who aim to draw attention to themselves simply by promoting the latest flavour of the month, irrespective of its relevance or practicality, are falling into the trap that Drucker (1955), anticipating Marchington by 40 years, described as follows.

The constant worry of all personnel administrators is their inability to prove that they are making a contribution to the enterprise. Their preoccupation is with the search for a ‘gimmick’that will impress their management colleagues.

The HR Specialist As Change Agent 

Caldwell (2001) categorizes HR change agents in four dimensions:

1. Transformational change – a major change that has a dramatic effect on HR policy and practice across the whole organization. 

2. Incremental change – gradual adjustments of HR policy and practices that affect single activities or multiple functions. 

3. HR vision – a set of values and beliefs that affirm the legitimacy of the HR function as strategic business partner. 

4. HR expertise – the knowledge and skills that define the unique contribution the HR professional can make to effective people management.

Across these dimensions, the change agent roles that Caldwell suggests can be carried out by HR professionals are those of change champions, change adapters, change consultants and change synergists.

Gratton (2000) stresses the need for HR practitioners to: ‘Understand the state of the company, the extent of the embedding of processes and structures throughout the organization, and the behaviour and attitudes of individual employees’. She believes that ‘The challenge is to implement the ideas’ and the solution is to ‘build a guiding coalition by involving line managers’, which means ‘creating issue-based cross-functional action teams that will initially make recommendations and later move into action’. This approach ‘builds the capacity to change’.