From the research project, there are some change management issues that have been noted; the issues related on how to change the behaviour, culture, beliefs, attitudes and perceptions of the students to adopt changes in the system. The issues can be classified broadly as institutional change challenges, individual change issues, and structure change challenges (Beringer, Wright & Malone, 2008).
Under the title individual change, the research shown that differences in people orientation and socialisation has an effect on change. Students who have been socialized in the same environment or social settings are likely to have the same issues when it comes to change. For instance the Americans were more willing to change than the case was among the Britons.
Individual factors are other attributes that were noted to influence the degree and rate at which change was to happen. Individual level of understanding and the kind of exposure that someone has had has an influence on how well he is going to embrace change occurring in the organisation. There were some students who repelled change not because of any apparent reason; other students were noted to accept changes in the institution without an understanding of the effect of the change (Brinkhurst, Rose, Maurice & Ackerman, 2011)
From the institutional level, as the case is in a community, numerous higher education institutions in Canada has their way of living and some organisational culture; to implement change effectively, there was need to change the culture of the institutions which proved challenging. Students seemed to have developed a certain systems of doing things and changeling to another version was challenging.
One constant thing that was coming all along is that students were understanding the need to change, they were appreciating that a change in the system and attain sustainable measures was necessary, however the challenge that cut across them was that they were resistant to the change. Despite the wide understanding of the positive effect of the change, students were not willing to leave their traditional system of operation to adopt the new suggested one.
The third challenge that appeared was in the institutional level, the structures Canadian institutions have set seem to reinforce traditional system of operation. The structures include how orders and decisions were given in the institutions. It was evident that there were some rules and power structures that were not challengeable; they seemed to have prevailed in the institutions since their inceptions.
Some of these policies and structures were hard to change and they had negative influence to the change process. Institutional structures were strong determinants of the opinions and systems that the change prevailed in, when departmental heads and administrators failed to support a certain change agenda, the success of the agenda or the change was always challenging (Conway, Dalton, Loo & Benakoun, 2008).
Institutional management and administrators seemed to have high resistance to change; they were not willing to change the structure and mode of life that they had lived for the better part of their employment in the institutions. As was accepted, there were some resistance to change even from the people who were the change agents. For change to be effected in the right manner, institutional administrators, student heads, and students should join efforts and press toward the change; it was challenging to have the three focuses on the change. Communication and effective method of passing information among students fraternity was a strong promoter of change in Canadian institutions (Helferty & Clarke, 2009).
References
Beringer, A., Wright, T. & Malone, L. (2008). Sustainability in higher education in Atlantic Canada. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, 9 (1): 48-67.
Brinkhurst, M., Rose, P.,Maurice, G. & Ackerman, J.D. (2011). Achieving campus sustainability: top-down, bottom-up, or neither? International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, 12(4):338-354.
Conway,T.M., Dalton, C., Loo, J. & Benakoun, L. (2008).Developing ecological footprint scenarios on university campuses: A case study of the University of Toronto at Mississauga. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, 9 (1):4- 20.
Helferty, A. & Clarke, A. (2009). Student-led campus climate change initiatives in Canada. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, 10(3):287- 300.