CHANGE MANAGEMENT AS A COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE FOR ROMANIAN COMPANIES

Considering the current dynamic business environment, the importance of organizations' ability to adapt to their environment in order to accomplish their objectives and the associated high costs in case of inefficient change projects, change management becomes an important competitive advantage, securing organization's progress and facilitating outperforming its competitors. The importance of this competitive advantage is proved by various research results showing that highly effective organizations in change management are much stronger financially and efficient. Based on an exploratory quantitative research, this paper reveals insights on the peculiarities of change management in Romania, discussing the level of implementation of change management's methodologies and Romanian organizations' efficiency in change processes. The results show that while 88% of Romanian organizations developed strategies in order to implement changes, only 9% of their managers are very satisfied and 36% are satisfied with the implementation results. Also, change processes' efficiency in Romanian organizations is half as in their international counterparts. The main reason for this low satisfaction and efficiency level, as revealed in this paper, is that Romanian managers don't value enough the second most important factor determining the success of a change initiative (as in foreign companies' perspective) structured approach of change management.