Meeting business goals and managing office bandwidth: A predictive model for organizational change

Abstract

While it is recognized that implementing organizational changes impacts both employee and organizational health, there is a lack of research that utilizes these known impacts to empirically build functional models that are predictive of future change event outcomes. Although diagnostic tools are available to businesses to guesstimate the impact of large-scale corporate changes, these tools are not designed for assessing impact rapidly, nor are these designed to effectively assess the impact of concurrent changes. Additionally, a clear link between the issues identified by the diagnostic tool and what occurs when the change is rolled out cannot be made. The purpose of this work was to build a predictive model of organizational change impact that incorporates the achievement of strategic business goals. Prior knowledge of change-related impacts is of particular importance when a change or multiple changes must occur and must be implemented rapidly. By building a predictive tool that eliminates the need to undergo lengthy evaluations of the viability of each individual change, the organization can adapt the business at the pace of market demand without severely disrupting its operational performance. A procedure was developed to prioritize initiatives based upon alignment with corporate strategy and a scientific predictive model was constructed that quantitatively predicts the impact of change initiatives.