Final Project:

Introduction

At its heart, every company is a dynamic network of promises. Promises are the strands that weave together coordinated activity in organizations. (Sull & Spinosa, 2007) Promises. Dynamic. Companies work hard to be dynamic, to have their employees be dynamic. Companies make promises to keep the organization current, trained, environmentally friendly and to succeed for all stakeholders. In 2010 the Northrop Grumman facility in Rolling Meadows, was mainly a paper driven site for Human Resources (HR). The HR department handled most of the tactical activities and very little strategic opportunities for the organization. The managers relied on HR for this type of support as the site experts. By mid-year 2011 the following activities are now either handled by the managers themselves or an off-site service center: applicant tracking, hiring process and onboarding, transactional items such as terminations, leaves of absence and address changes, merit planning and manager and employee direct access system and expense reports. Over the past two years the transactional portion of HR has been pushed to the managers. According to J. Kingma, “By doing this we have built a wall between HR and managers, we have passed the tactical activities to managers and left them in the dark.” (personal communication, December 7, 2011) In the following we will examine organizational change and how communication plays an important part.

Introduction to Organization

Northrop Grumman Corporation has four operating sectors and an employee service center. Each sector has a hierarchy of a president and vice-president for each functional area. Within the Electronic Systems Sector (ES), we have four divisions. Each division and functional area home rooms to their group at sector headquarters. Human Resources (HR) at the local level is in charge of