Major Change Efforts Research Articles

Leading Organizational Change in the Post-COVID Pandemic Era.

Leading Organizational Change in the Post-COVID Pandemic Era.

Strategic change in the academy: controlling and/or enabling strategies

ABSTRACTThis study describes the strategic change efforts of a university in the United Kingdom which changed its form and resource deployments to focus on the production of interdisciplinary research. A problem-oriented case study method was used to chronicle and analyse the leadership strategies and tactics employed and their consequences. We found that the reliance on a vertical leadership (controlling) strategy led to external legitimization but not internal legitimacy. We also found instances these strategies created unintended consequences which inhibited the strategic change initiative. In particular, horizontal leadership (enabling) strategies that spoke to the academic heartland were muted. We concluded that in universities undertaking major strategic change efforts controlling influence actions may be necessary but they are insufficient to levers of strategic change. The study is particularly important because it contributes to an understanding of strategic change in universities at a time when most such efforts fail to meet their objectives and there is a limited empirical literature to draw upon.

Teacher Preparation in Changing Times: One Program’s Journey Toward Re-Vision and Revision

The purpose of this paper is to describe a major revision process to the early childhood teacher education program at our 4-year university. We briefly outline the major policy and standards changes that we have witnessed impacting our work as early childhood teacher educators that were, in part, the impetus for our program changes. We describe our teacher education program as it was configured 2 years ago and as it exists today after major change efforts, highlighting the purposes and desired outcomes of these changes. We have conceptualized this journey as both a revision of the program and a re-visioning process. We focus on our attempt to integrate the intentions underlying policy and standards changes into our work in preparing teachers for the full range of early childhood program auspices, as well as for any and all of the children who are enrolled in them. In particular, we emphasize the integration of coursework and classroom experiences to more fully prepare our teacher candidates for effective practice with dual-language learning young children and their families. One result of this work, we hope, is the normalization of “difference” for our teacher candidates and the resultant disposition toward responsibility for educating all children.

Employment First: A Beginning Not an End

Employment is the first question we ask about most adults in society. In part, every adult is defined by their contributions, their work. Even as employment for people with intellectual and/or developmental disabilities has gained attention, there has been a growing awareness that the labor force participation rate for this population has remained flat (Butterworth et al., 2011). Although there is variability across states, there is an absence of a clear message at state and national levels regarding employment of persons with disabilities. This has resulted in inconsistencies in employment policies, practices, and procedures. There are, however, an increasing number of states that are taking notice of this and seeking to develop a clear message that employment for persons with disabilities must be a priority (Hoff, 2011). Some state developmental disabilities agencies have embraced a presumption of employability or the option of employment for all persons with disabilities. This is clearly seen in the efforts of the State Employment Leadership Network (SELN), a network of 23 state developmental disability agencies sponsored by the Institute for Community Inclusion and the National Association of State Directors of Developmental Disability Services (http://www. communityinclusion.info). These state efforts have often been framed under the umbrella of Employment First. Employment First, reflecting a series of policies, practices, and procedures based upon a collection of guiding principles, is leading states and providers to the adoption of service delivery strategies for persons with disabilities, including those with the most significant disabilities, that lead to systemic change and competitive integrated employment. The main point about Employment First is that employment should be the very first option offered to any adult with a disability, before any kind of nonemployment option. There are currently over 25 states that are focused at some level on the concept of Employment First (Hoff, 2011). In some cases, the focus is specifically on individuals with intellectual and/or developmental disabilities, while in other cases this effort is cross-disability. Some of these efforts have been spearheaded by public systems, and in other cases have been grassroots in nature, with advocates pushing for changes in policies and practices that prioritize community employment. Central to Employment First are the establishment of clear public policies (e.g., legislation, policy directives that prioritize community employment. To date, approximately 10 states have such policies in place. As in all major systemic change efforts, there are a set of guiding principles that help shape these change efforts. For Employment First these guiding principles are being discussed by a wide array of people in policymaking, self-advocacy, and practitioner roles. Although there is not always consensus, these principles include:

Transitional Identity as a Facilitator of Organizational Identity Change during a Merger

We adopted an interpretive, grounded theory approach to study the processes by which organizational identities changed during the initial phases of a merger between two formerly rival healthcare organizations. Our investigation of two top management teams attempting to instigate this major change effort and lead their organizations toward completion of the merger revealed that the emergence of a transitional identity—an interim sense held by members about what their organizations were becoming—was critical to moving the change process forward. The transitional identity allowed executives in the two organizations to suspend their preexisting organizational identities and work toward creating a shared, new identity. The transitional identity appears to have been effective because it was ambiguous enough to allow multiple interpretations of what the merged organization would become to eventually coalesce into a common understanding, but not so ambiguous as to be threateningly unfamiliar. Overall, we present a process model of organizational identity change during a major change event that spanned two organizations, with the concept of transitional identity as its centerpiece.

How do you modernize a health service? A realist evaluation of whole-scale transformation in london.

Large-scale, whole-systems interventions in health care require imaginative approaches to evaluation that go beyond assessing progress against predefined goals and milestones. This project evaluated a major change effort in inner London, funded by a charitable donation of approximately $21 million, which spanned four large health care organizations, covered three services (stroke, kidney, and sexual health), and sought to "modernize" these services with a view to making health care more efficient, effective, and patient centered. This organizational case study draws on the principles of realist evaluation, a largely qualitative approach that is centrally concerned with testing and refining program theories by exploring the complex and dynamic interaction among context, mechanism, and outcome. This approach used multiple data sources and methods in a pragmatic and reflexive manner to build a picture of the case and follow its fortunes over the three-year study period. The methods included ethnographic observation, semistructured interviews, and scrutiny of documents and other contemporaneous materials. As well as providing ongoing formative feedback to the change teams in specific areas of activity, we undertook a more abstract, interpretive analysis, which explored the context-mechanism-outcome relationship using the guiding question "what works, for whom, under what circumstances?" In this example of large-scale service transformation, numerous projects and subprojects emerged, fed into one another, and evolved over time. Six broad mechanisms appeared to be driving the efforts of change agents: integrating services across providers, finding and using evidence, involving service users in the modernization effort, supporting self-care, developing the workforce, and extending the range of services. Within each of these mechanisms, different teams chose widely differing approaches and met with differing success. The realist analysis of the fortunes of different subprojects identified aspects of context and mechanism that accounted for observed outcomes (both intended and unintended). This study was one of the first applications of realist evaluation to a large-scale change effort in health care. Even when an ambitious change program shifts from its original goals and meets unforeseen challenges (indeed, precisely because the program morphs and adapts over time), realist evaluation can draw useful lessons about how particular preconditions make particular outcomes more likely, even though it cannot produce predictive guidance or a simple recipe for success. Noting recent calls by others for the greater use of realist evaluation in health care, this article considers some of the challenges and limitations of this method in the light of this experience and suggests that its use will require some fundamental changes in the worldview of some health services researchers.

Two Faces of Organizational Irony: Endemic and Pragmatic

This paper puts forward a perspective on organizational irony framed in terms of two reciprocal faces, as a contribution to the developing interest in irony as a tool for organizational analysis. Endemic irony explores theoretical approaches implying that irony is a characteristic of all organizations, extended by contingent manifestations in contemporary organizations. Pragmatic irony conceptualizes how organization members engage in ironic strategies and deploy verbal irony as modes of coping — with both endemic discrepancies between intention and outcome, and contingent contradictions generated through major change efforts. This perspective is offered as a heuristic for exploring organizations whose members are inherently confronted by irony. First, those philosophical, literary and organization theory approaches to irony are reviewed which relate most closely to organizational irony. Second, the endemic nature of organizational irony is elaborated. Third, distinctive manifestations of irony in contemporary organizations that extend endemic irony are discussed. Fourth, instances of pragmatic irony in contemporary organizations, conceived as the reciprocal of endemic irony, are explored. Finally, the value of an ironic perspective as a means of understanding organizations is asserted and suggestions offered for future theory-building and research.

MULTI-SEASON CLIMATE SYNCHRONIZED FOREST FIRES THROUGHOUT THE 20TH CENTURY, NORTHERN ROCKIES, USA

We inferred climate drivers of 20th-century years with regionally synchronous forest fires in the U.S. northern Rockies. We derived annual fire extent from an existing fire atlas that includes 5038 fire polygons recorded from 12,070,086 ha, or 71% of the forested land in Idaho and Montana west of the Continental Divide. The 11 regional-fire years, those exceeding the 90th percentile in annual fire extent from 1900 to 2003 (>102,314 ha or approximately 1% of the fire atlas recording area), were concentrated early and late in the century (six from 1900 to 1934 and five from 1988 to 2003). During both periods, regional-fire years were ones when warm springs were followed by warm, dry summers and also when the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) was positive. Spring snowpack was likely reduced during warm springs and when PDO was positive, resulting in longer fire seasons. Regional-fire years did not vary with El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) or with climate in antecedent years. The long mid-20th century period lacking regional-fire years (1935-1987) had generally cool springs, generally negative PDO, and a lack of extremely dry summers; also, this was a period of active fire suppression. The climate drivers of regionally synchronous fire that we inferred are congruent with those of previous centuries in this region, suggesting a strong influence of spring and summer climate on fire activity throughout the 20th century despite major land-use change and fire suppression efforts. The relatively cool, moist climate during the mid-century gap in regional-fire years likely contributed to the success of fire suppression during that period. In every regional-fire year, fires burned across a range of vegetation types. Given our results and the projections for warmer springs and continued warm, dry summers, forests of the U.S. northern Rockies are likely to experience synchronous, large fires in the future.

We've never done it this way before: Prompting organizational change through stories

AbstractOrganizations have discovered that storytelling is a powerful change management tool for addressing the emotional issues that have torpedoed many an initiative. Leaders from five businesses discuss how stories finally enabled employees and other stakeholders to get on board with major change efforts. The cases include organizations that used metaphors to create a common team vision, a road map for new business strategy, and the future vision for a massive high tech merger, as well as leaders who used personal stories to convey the essence of a difficult business issue for a skeptical audience.This article is reprinted from the book, Wake Me Up When the Data Is Over: How Organizations Use Stories to Drive Results, by Lori L. Silverman (Jossey‐Bass, 2006) © 2006 John Wiley & Sons.

Healthcare Restructuring and Hierarchical Alignment

Healthcare organizations have undergone major change efforts in the past decade. Sustained change is related to continued alignment among organizational participants and may fail with incongruent perceptions of change. This study identifies factors contributing to the alignment in perceptions of organizational change outcomes between executives and all other employees. The sample included 10 hospitals with survey responses from 421 executives and other employees. Using hierarchical linear modeling (HLM), perceptual alignment was modeled at the first level as a function of goal commitment, goal clarity, goal acceptance, goal specificity, staff participation, available skill set, and knowledge and at the second level as organizational size. Descriptive statistics showed employee perception of outcomes differed among personnel levels. HLM results showed that goal specificity, appropriate staff training, reward incentives, effective communication, information sharing, and organization's ability to sustain changes induced perceptual alignment in change outcomes. Staff involvement in designing change efforts increased perceptual misalignment, whereas involvement during implementation and maintenance phases increased alignment. This research uses cross-sectional data from 10 hospitals. Data were gathered from surveys that may have recall bias as hospitals were surveyed at different times after the implementation of their restructuring. Our findings enhance the understanding of processes and mechanisms that enable healthcare organizations to align organizational participants' efforts during change. Results suggest that decision-makers should create incentives to encourage innovative practices, institute effective communication mechanisms, selectively disseminate information, and involve participants in implementing and maintaining changes to achieve intended outcomes. ORIGINALITY/VALUE OF ARTICLE: This article provides unique insight into the importance and causes of organizational alignment after major restructuring. Too often, organizations' change efforts fail after implementation. Effective change requires continued effort and alignment to embed the desired changes.

Managerial information behaviour: Relationships among Total Quality Management orientation, information use environments, and managerial roles

This paper integrates disparate literatures to develop a summary model that proposes how different orientations (control or learning) toward a major organizational change effort, Total Quality Management, will generate different managerial information use environments, will require different managerial roles, and will thus involve different managerial information behaviours, in order to foster successful TQM implementation.

Perceptions and Misperceptions of Major Organizational Changes in Hospitals: Do Change Efforts Fail Because of Inconsistent Organizational Perceptions of Restructuring and Reengineering?

Over the past decade, many hospitals have invested in major restructuring and/or reengineering efforts designed to enhance their competitiveness by improving product quality and/or reducing costs. For a variety of reasons, these significant changes have not been systematically evaluated. This research provides an objective look at the results of restructuring/reengineering hospitals and an examination of the influences on employee perceptions of reengineering's outcomes. This research demonstrates that employees, including upper management, had little or no objective knowledge of the outcomes of their change efforts. However, perceptions of all employees involved in a major change effort are critical if their full participation is to be sustained. The ultimate sustainability of many hospital strategic change efforts may rest largely on subjective assessments of its outcomes. The research reported here suggests that such perceptions vary significantly by organizational level and may not be stable over time. While the passage of time sees improvements in managers' perceptions of reengineering results, line personnel become increasingly skeptical and less positive. Further objective research is encouraged to more definitely distinguish the impact of employee perceptions on change efforts' outcomes and sustainability.

Strengthening Organizational Change Processes

Although the existing organizational change literature identifies the steps in organizational change, it has not conceptualized those steps to provide a comprehensive process model. In particular, the relationships between the change process at the organizational level and the change processes at the inherent individual and group levels have not been fully described. Using a case study and related data from a major organizational change effort in a corporate audit department of a U.S. bank, this article explores change processes by answering two questions: (a) What constitutes a comprehensive change process as initiatives move from the organizational level to the group and individual levels of implementation? and (b) What does an analysis of the individual and group change processes in large scale organizational change add to our understanding of organizational change processes? This article proposes a more detailed and complete change process model and provides further insight into the differences and transition among the change processes at the individual, group, and organizational levels.

Enterprise programme management: Connecting strategic planning to project delivery

Companies today face many conflicting priorities in remaining competitive. Some of the challenges include leading company staff in thinking bigger, operating in direct relationship to customers and stockholders’ needs, while staying flexible and adaptable to economic and market shifts. How does a facilities manager stay connected to the business strategy, manage more projects with less staff, and still provide responsive service, while the business environment the manager supports is changing rapidly? The manager may be faced with consolidating facilities owing to a merger or company restructuring. Consolidation presents several challenges that must be met. The manager must work with executives to align equipment deployment and facility use to merger goals and objectives. He/she must consolidate facilities management infrastructure into a cohesive unit from the different approaches of the original companies. This requires the ability simultaneously to coordinate the strategic, tactical and technical aspects of consolidation, while maintaining the seamless operation of the company. If it is a large operation, with facilities spread across a region, facilities management may have been distributed, with each location responsible for their own projects and maintenance. A major change effort such as consolidation requires a centralised facilities management structure that is tied directly into the strategy of the company. The answer for many companies in meeting these challenges is enterprise programme management (EPM). Enterprise programme management is a way of thinking, communicating and working, supported by an information system, that organises an enterprise’s resources in direct relationship to leadership’s vision, and the mission, strategy, goals and objectives that move the organisation forward. Simply put, EPM provides a 360‐degree view of an organisation’s collective efforts.

Best Laid Plans: Establishing Fairness Early Can Help Smooth Organizational Change

The article reports on a study pertaining to managing organizational change. Researchers examined how the planning process for a major change effort can impact employee attitudes, including feelings of trust toward management. They found that trust in management increased over time if employees felt that they were given significant opportunities to provide input and the plan was explained and justified adequately. The results suggest that planning for organizational change represents an opportunity to build trust among employees.

A Case Study in Implementing Emotional Intelligence Programs in Organizations

AbstractSome may still scoff at the apparent “softness” of the concept of emotional intelligence. But, way back before the term had entered the popular vocabulary, American Express Financial Advisors benefited from recognizing the role of emotional intelligence in business success. And the story of how the organization went about this groundbreaking work can offer a model for other early adopters of unconventional and passing solutions. It especially illustrates the critical need for leadership commitment in major change efforts. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Fundamental Dynamics in Complex Organizational Change: A Longitudinal Inquiry into Hydro-Québec's Management

Co-operation is the essence of an organization's existence and a key condition for its long-term survival: but change efforts can put such co-operation to a harsh test. Too often this is caused not by change itself, but managers' tendency to stick to oversimplified ideas or tools and to pursue their implementation to the exclusion of other factors. Lacking a stable beacon, managers are often led adrift by the momentum of the change they initiate. This article uses a 20 year long longitudinal study of Hydro-Québec, one of the largest power utilities in North America, to show how the dynamics of change led away from the need to maintain co-operation and thus tend to emphasize trivia. We argue that, in a major change effort, co-operation will only be achieved by maintaining a balance between Position in the environment, organizational Context and the behaviour of People in the organization's community. This three-legged PCP framework is proposed as a structure for understanding and managing complex change efforts. The dynamics of the PCP framework are also examined to derive patterns and recommendations for managers keen to avoid a drift towards trivia.

EFFECTIVE ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE: NEW INSIGHTS FROM MULTI-LEVEL ANALYSIS OF THE ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE PROCESS.

Existing organizational change models have not fully explained the organizational change process, or the relationship between the organizational change process and the inherent individual level and team/group level change processes (Armenakis & Bedeian, 1999). Yet, large-scale organizational change does not occur without widespread individual change; that is, employees use different work routines and employ different mental models or values, such as quality or customer service as opposed to efficiency, to guide their actions and behavior. In addition, a given organizational change often has different implications when considered for different groups, departments, or locations. This paper explores the implications of level of analysis for change by addressing three questions: (1) How does the change process vary when considered across levels of analysis? (2) What happens in actual change implementation as change initiatives move across levels of analysis? and (3) What does analysis of the change process across levels of analysis add to our understanding of how to successfully implement change? This study answers these questions by presenting and analyzing a case study and related data from a major organizational change effort involving four separate but intertwined change initiatives in the corporate audit department of one of the twenty largest U.S. banks. The paper discusses three aspects of the organizational change process which need to be more fully understood: the group level and individual level change processes inherent within organizational change, how change initiatives move from one level to another, and change process steps specific to a single level of analysis.

Applying Large‐Group Interaction Methods in the Planning and Implementation of Major Change Efforts

Public policy makers, planners, and managers are increasingly relying on what might be called large‐group interaction methods to involve large numbers of people (from as few as eight to more than 2,000) in planning and implementing major change efforts. These methods are structured processes for engaging large numbers of people to: (1) enhance the amount of relevant information brought to bear on a problem; (2) build commitment to problem definitions and solutions; (3) fuse planning and implementation; and (4) shorten the amount of time needed to conceive and execute major policies, programs, services, or projects. Proponents of such methods claim that they provide sets of concepts, procedures, and tools that can help public and nonprofit organizations and communities deal effectively with change. On the other hand, a number of boundary conditions surround the successful use of the methods. The authors compare and contrast seven approaches most frequently used in the public sector in the United States and abroad (i.e., Real Time Strategic Change, Search Conferences, Future Searches, Strategic Options Development and Analysis, Strategic Choice, Technology of Participation, and Open Space Technology) to illustrate their comparative strengths and weaknesses and to develop an agenda for research.

Manufacturing managers' perceptions of resistance to change: an empirical study

This paper reports the findings of a survey that investigates management's perceptions of resistance in manufacturing organisations. Manufacturing organisations have faced a mandate for change for some time now. Industry leaders and government heads have repeatedly called for efficiency increases, productivity improvements and general industry reform, such that businesses can remain competitive in the international market–place. However, managing a major change effort is a complex task and examples of successful change efforts have been few and far between. Resistance has been identified as a critical aspect in the process of change, an aspect that can significantly influence both positive and negative outcomes. To this end, approximately 250 companies were surveyed throughout Australia with the objective of clarifying how resistance to change is understood by managers and the effects this approach may have on their methods of change management. The results indicate that resistance is predominantly viewed adversarially by manufacturing managers as an impediment to change that must be removed – a problem that must be overcome if the organisation is to achieve successful change. We conclude, however, that this approach may in fact be inappropriate. Rather, a more conciliatory response is suggested that looks to evaluate and possibly utilise resistance in an effort to achieve successful organisational change.