Is There a Causal Relationship between People’s Experiences of Change and the Status

Abstract

This treatise gives an account of transformational change within an offender correctional environment, which signifies a major paradigm shift from the punitive approach to the rehabilitative approach in terms of treating sentenced offenders. The focus of the study was on exposing the importance of the human dimension of transformational change, and this was done by establishing and exploring the relatedness of correctional officials’ and offenders’ experiences of the DCS transformational change to the status of the DCS transformational change. The exposition of this causal relationship between the experiences of change and the status of change was meant to show that unless managers pay serious attention to the human dimension of transformational change, organizations will never overcome the high failure rate in the implementation of organizational change initiatives. Limited empirical evidence on the critical role that the human factor plays in the success or failure of transformational change efforts has been blamed for change strategists’ and change implementers’ neglect of the human element in the transformational change planning and implementation process and consequently their inability to deal with change management challenges that crop up and which are associated with the human dimension of change. For purposes of contextualising the relatedness of experiences of change to the status of change within the setting of the Department of Correctional Services, an extensive literature study was undertaken. The literature study was followed by an empirical study whereby data was collected by means of two survey questionnaires, namely one for correctional officials, and the other for offenders. The study found that the experience of change exogenous variable had a significant influence on the status of change as an endogenous variable, thereby confirming that there was indeed a causal relationship between correctional officials’ and offenders’ experiences of the DCS transformational change and the status of the DCS transformational change. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n2p595