Organizational change failure: Framing the process of failing

Abstract

Despite what we know about how organizations and their members respond to change, organizations continue to spend an inordinate amount of time confronting, mitigating, and dealing with failure during change. This special issue focuses on what happens when organizational change fails. Its goal is to enhance knowledge and advance theory regarding the processes and mechanisms that underlie the emergence of organizational change failure. In this editorial, we first take stock of the established perspectives on failure, and introduce an integrative approach to offer a more holistic account of the process of change failure. The framework constitutes a multilevel, interlocking strategy for future scholarship. It highlights how the evolving experience defines, creates, and enacts failure during change across three structures: the surface (i.e., context), intermediate (i.e., building block dimensions), and deep (i.e., enduring aspects) structures of failure. With this frame as its basis, the articles in the special issue prompt discussion of what exactly failure means for organizations and their members dealing with different accounts of change failure.