...HUMAN RESOURCES Conference Paper Abstracts A CHANGE RECIPIENT PERSPECTIVE ON TRAINING AND COMPETENCE DEVELOPMENT DURING ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE Olsen, Trude Hogvold; Harstad U. College; trude.olsen@hih.no Stensaker, Inger G.; NHH Norw.Schl of Economics and Business Adm.; inger.stensaker@nhh.no As organizations change and adapt to pressures in the external and internal environment, managers and employees are required to learn new competencies and skills. Ideally, new skill requirements should be identified and developed early in the change process in order to ensure that managers and employees are ready to face their new tasks and roles when the changes are implemented. However, despite good intentions at the top management level, employees and middle managers often report uncertainty and a lack of the necessary skills required to implement change. In this paper, we report from a qualitative study of two planned organizational change initiatives in the public sector. The changes involved new work tasks and managerial roles for a group of middle managers. Although the skill requirements appeared to be clear and formal training was initiated, a number of uncertain and ambiguous issues emerged among the change recipients. We examine the types of uncertainty and ambiguity that emerged and how change recipients attempted to handle these challenges. Our findings suggest that although necessary and important, formal training procedures are not adequate for resolving competence-related...
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