Identify a model of change to help explain change within an organization I have experienced

Factors affecting the likelihood that a particular innovation will be adopted

1. Innovation attributes
Rogers (1995) argues that there are five attributes of an innovation which influence its rate of adoption: relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, trialability and observability.

2. Adopter characteristics
Adopters can be categorised according to their tendencies to adopt – innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards (Rogers, 1983). Each group is ideally targeted with a different diffusion strategy (Green and Johnson, 1996).

3. Environmental/ context characteristics
Low environmental uncertainty increases the tendency of organisations to remain stable or to avoid change (O'Neill, et al., 1998).

4. The characteristics of those promoting the innovation
Opinion leaders are especially important for interpersonal networks whose members differ in many respects (Rogers, 1983; Kautz and Larsen, 2000).

5. Communication channels
Mass media communication channels are more effective when there are large numbers of potential adopters and low levels of complexity, and when the goal is awareness raising (Rogers, 1995).


Can we use this model of change in our organizations and how to implicate?

The model of change can be use in school environment, as characteristics and ability of teachers and students are different. They can classify to be innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards. I think the most important role is the opinion leaders role, how to diffuse the new ideas to staffs and make them respect and follow it. The opinion leaders should be promoting the ideas and listen adopters’ needs and problems.


Change within an organization I have experienced

The school hopes to promote self-learning to the students, by introduce the online platform WebCT, they hope students can prepare and study the materials before and after class. But the problem is that most of the teachers are not familiar with the new system and some are refuse to use a new method to teach students, since they don’t want to use extra time to learn it. At last, quite a little number of students can use the WebCT platform since teachers haven’t introduce and demonstrate to them.

After a review in a meeting, some IT teachers suggest opening some training courses to other non-IT background teachers, the situation have improved and more teachers willing to use the new system since they have proper training and real practice to the system, and they see the improvement of the students’ self-learning practices.