Organizational Change during crises. The transition to E-learning at the university of Udine during the COVID 19 emergency

Chapter 1. Organizational change 
 
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environment is not fixed and change at every moment. This environmental change 
creates in every moment new winners and new losers. One typical example is Kodak’s 
company and the digitalization process where the firm had, in its hand, the possibility to 
change and innovate itself and increase more its position, but prefer not to do it. They do 
not make this transformation losing a significant part of its market. 
If the firm can coordinate all the internal activities and, in particular, it can manage the 
change will be able in the “worst-case” remain only on the market, in the better case, 
increase its productivity and competitiveness. Control and change internal activities 
permit the firm to reduce difficulties and problems caused by the external environment.  
External transformation is difficult to predict for the firm because it depends on many 
factors. It depends on political considerations, customers, and competitors’ decisions. 
However, if the organization can understand what to change to forecast the market, this 
would be a substantial comparative advantage.  
Change, in general, is a process for changing something in an organization because the 
firm has to adapt to meet the shifting demands. The objective is to maximize the joint 
efforts of all people involved in the change trying to make the transformation easy. The 
difference is how the firms and leaders can manage this situation, which generally is very 
complicated.  
This topic is deeply felt, in particular by the Human Resource and, of course, by 
Change Management staff, where they must encourage people inside the organization to 
follow the manager’s change. The main problem is that the human mind is largely 
neophobia; this means that the people do not want to change.  Transformations are not 
natural because, as Founder and AD’s HC - Capaci di Futuro said, change is not a fight 
against something outside the people but inside them (Zapelli, 2019). 
At this point, it can be useful to understand the definition given by Cawsey to 
Organizational Change, that is: “[…] planned alterations of organizational components 
to improve the effectiveness of the organization.” (Cawsey, 2012).  
In this case, for organizational components, the authors mean every single element 
present in the firm. It is starting from mission and vision to people that make up the