Abstract
This paper reviews the different ways that academics and practitioners write about and discuss change management, to develop an understanding of whether there is a divide between the theory and practice of change management. This research used scientometric research techniques to compare three corpora: one based on the most cited research in the general management literature on change management; one based on the most cited research in specialist change management journals; and one based on interviews with practising change managers.It was found that the general management literature emphasised an abstract understanding of knowledge management and the learning organisation, while the change management literature focused more on issues associated with value, culture and social identity. The practitioners emphasised issues at the individual, project and team levels, the need for the effective use of targeted communication to achieve organisational change objectives, and the value of rapidly identifying key drivers in a new context. This research found significant differences between these three corpora, which lends support to other researchers’ claims of a divide between theory and practice in change management.
Highlights
Organisational change management, both as topic of academic research and as a practical discipline, focuses on managing and understanding the ways that organisations adapt and change
The different emphases that practitioners and academics place on change management has been examined through the analysis of three corpora: one based on the abstracts from highly cited general management articles on change management; the second composed of the most cited articles in the specialist change management literature; and the third composed of the transcripts of interviews with practising change managers
It was found that there are significant differences between the corpora, which supports other researchers’ claims that there is a divide between change management theory and practice. Both academic corpora showed an emphasis on generalised models, theory and frameworks that was not apparent in the corpus based on interviews with the practitioners
Summary
Organisational change management, both as topic of academic research and as a practical discipline, focuses on managing and understanding the ways that organisations adapt and change. The 2014 Project Management Institute Research and Education Conference included a dedicated track on change management, while the publication of Managing Change in Organizations: A Practice Guide (PMI 2013) suggests that change management is becoming part of the mainstream for project management practice. The inclusion of stakeholder management as a tenth knowledge area in the Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMI 2013b) suggests that there is a general shift towards issues more commonly associated with change management in the normative project management literature, while Hornstein (2015) advocates for further integration between project management and change management
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