Who is reffered to as change agent in an organisation?

[luttu]

Define change agent

[nbm]

Any planned change needs change agents. These are the persons who initiate change in the organisation. Behavioural scientists have taken frequently somewhat divergent positions on the question of who should initiate an organisational change, what type of person this would be and what methods should be followed. Though management as a whole is involved with innovation as a continuing process, its role is somewhat limited to regular change. In a planned change, however, the type of requirements may be different and internal management has to take the help of external change agents. Thus, there may be two types of change agents: external and internal.
External change agents are in the form of consultants for change. These are the persons who are normally experts in the specific area of organisational change. The internal change agents are from the existing organisational personnel, from any level or department, depending upon the needs of the change. Often both these agents work in harmony. A good deal of interaction in early contacts between internal and external change agents is implicitly related to developing a relationship of mutual trust so that each of them can understand the views of others. Afterwards, the internal change agents are trained by the consultants to implement the change as an on-going process. For this purpose, the consultants devise certain change strategy.