Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing: The Role of Artifacts in Interpretive Schema Change

Stefan W Konlechner,Wolfgang H Güttel,Barbara Müller,Karin Link,Irina Koprax

doi:10.1007/s41464-016-0012-9

Stefan W Konlechner, Wolfgang H Güttel + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1007/s41464-016-0012-9

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Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the role of artifacts in a failed project that aimed at implementing a new culture of dealing with errors in a hospital by transferring safety standards from the aviation industry. We apply the interpretative method of objective hermeneutics to elucidate the role of artifacts as linking pins between diverging interpretive schemata and collective action during attempts to modify organizational routines. In particular, we show how the implementation of artifacts may serve as a means to satisfy a new espoused schema, while at the same time they are created and interpreted in ways that strengthen the old enacted schema. Although on the surface everyone would appreciate changes in treatment routines that help to avoid errors, the guiding norms of individual vigilance and self-centeredness, a culture that emphasizes hierarchy as a core value as well as the lack of sanctions for enacting the old schema led to a situation where the new espoused schema was never enacted. Instead, artifacts were used to stabilize a divergence between espoused and enacted schemata. Failure remained a cultural taboo.

Highlights

In recent decades the health care sector has been increasingly adopting procedures and standards from the aviation industry with the aim of increasing patient safety (Tamuz and Thomas 2006, 919)
We show that changing organizational routines by creating new artifacts cannot be successful if these artifacts are – like sheep in wolf’s clothing – used in a way that still satisfies prevalent social norms, which are deeply embedded in the collective understanding of organization members and, are further enacted in shared interpretive schemata
Our findings reveal how artifacts introduced as tools for schema change led to a decoupling of interpretive schemata and collective action and impeded change

Summary

Introduction

In recent decades the health care sector has been increasingly adopting procedures and standards from the aviation industry with the aim of increasing patient safety (Tamuz and Thomas 2006, 919). Implementing new safety standards in the health care industry requires managing organizational change processes in health care organizations. Managing organizational change is far from easy, especially if it involves “second-order change” (Bartunek 1984), which focuses on altering interpretive schemata that capture shared assumptions, values and social expectations (Balogun and Johnson 2005; Elsbach et al 2005). Changing long-established patterns of collective action often requires such a cognitive reorientation of the organization (Gioia et al 1994) by espousing new or different interpretive schemata (Isabella 1990; Labianca et al 2000). Extant research that addresses the question as to how interpretive schemata and collective action are interrelated How espoused schemata are enacted and which mechanisms contribute to this enactment has remained under-investigated

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