Research In Organizational Change Research Articles

Antecedents of Individual Readiness for Change with the moderating effect of Behavioral Resistance to Change in the Software houses of Islamabad Pakistan

This study seeks to contribute to the existing body of knowledge on individual readiness for change, a topic that has garnered considerable attention from both academia and the broader public over the past few decades. This is because more and more individuals want to feel that their work has value, and because positive organizational change and positive psychology research are both expanding fields. In order for employees to actively adapt themselves in response to the fast-changing environment and produce more meaningful work, this study aims to understand the sources of meaningful work. The target audience consists of software engineers (programmers and developers) employed by Pakistan's Evacuee Trust in its software companies. There is little data on this industry and this level of employees, making it an appealing study target.

Research in Organizational Change and Development: Reflexive Conversations of ROCD 30 Authors

Research in Organizational Change and Development: Reflexive Conversations of ROCD 30 Authors

Methods in Organizational Change Research: Dialogue on the Past, Present, and Future of Organization

Methods in Organizational Change Research: Dialogue on the Past, Present, and Future of Organization

Organizational Change & Restructuring: Analisis Bibliometrik & Literature Review pada Basis Data Scopus (1987–2021)

Change is essential for organizations in sustainable growth and especially in a highly competitive business environment. The literature on the concepts of organizational change and restructuring is important in an effort to provide a reference for academics in exploring scientific developments as well as being useful for practitioners in providing options regarding the application of these concepts in the field. This study aims to provide an overview of the past, current and future research directions from the research field of Organizational Change & Restructuring, namely to see and provide links or relationships between the fields of organizational change and restructuring through bibliometric analysis. The method used in this study is a combination of quantitative and qualitative by mapping the relationship between Organizational Change and Restructuring research using a two-step research approach: 1) Bibliometric technique to analyze 263 publications by presenting publication distribution data, mapping visualization & network density, and keyword analysis. 2) Furthermore, based on document citation data, analyze the 12 articles that occupy the top number of citations. For further review of the literature, comparing with research findings before or after according to the theme of each article. The results of the study indicate that there is still a lot of room for exploitation and exploration of the combined study of Organizational Change and Restructuring, so it is hoped that by taking the two analytical steps above, it will eventually provide some kind of recommendation for future research.

Research in Organizational Change and Development: Conversations with ROCD 28, 29 and 30 Authors

The first annual volume of Research in Organizational Change and Development (ROCD) was published by JAI Press in 1987. Since then, ROCD has provided a special platform for scholars and practitioners to share new research-based insights in the annually published research volumes as well as at Academy meetings. Due to COVID-restrictions the longstanding tradition of a yearly AOM ROCD presenter symposium was interrupted for 2020 and 2021. We now re-start and combine the contributions of volume 28, 29 and 30 authors as catalyst for a lively dialogue around thought-provoking and timely ideas in the realm of change research and practice. Chapter presentations will be grouped under five central questions that are directly connected with the 2022 AOM theme. These questions invite the exploration of the relational conditions, the inquiry methods, the role of technology, issues of identity and the necessary future research and theorizing that will position the field of organization change and development as an important player in “creating a better world together.” As an integral part of former Organization Development and Change (ODC) Division programs, we resume the tradition of volume authors engaging with participants in roundtable conversations. With the new format and the current pertinence of change-oriented questions, we envision a symposium that might also attract members of other divisions who are interested in researching, understanding, and impacting organizational and social change dynamics for world betterment. Designing for Collaboration: Don’t Just Focus on the Team, Focus Also on the Context (Volume 29) Presenter: Brenda Barker Scott; - Presenter: Michael R. Manning; Benedictine U. The Laboratization of Change: What is it with Labs and Change these Days? Presenter: Mathis Schulte; HEC Paris Toward Reconfiguring Sociotechnical System Design: Digitally Infused Work Systems and the ‘Platform- Presenter: Oguz N. Baburoglu; Sabanci U. Digitalization in Schools: Four Examples of Embeddedness Presenter: Jan Löwstedt; Stockholm U. Are OD and Analytics Twins Separated at Birth? Toward an Integrated Framework Presenter: Alec Levenson; U. of Southern California Presenter: Alexis Fink; Facebook Aligning Strategy and Digital Technology in Government Organizations: A Call for Action Presenter: Joe McDonagh; Irish Management Institute / Trinity College Dublin Reflections: Change Management is not Organization Development Presenter: W. Warner Burke; Teachers College, Columbia U. Management is Missing in Change Management Presenter: Jeffrey D. Ford; Ohio State U. Reflections: Individually and Jointly Reconceiving OD to Foster a Hospitable Future Presenter: Susan A. Mohrman; U. of Southern California Presenter: Jean M. Bartunek; Boston College From Psychological Dispositions To Social Positions: Applying a Habitus Oriented Approach To Organiz Presenter: Baruch Shimoni; Bar-Ilan U. Constructing the Professional Identity of the Renowned Women of Organizational Change Presenter: David B. Szabla; Western Michigan U. Creating and Building Shared Scholarship in Organization Development and Change: A Metalogue Presenter: David Coghlan; Trinity College Dublin Presenter: A.B. Rami Shani; California Polytechnic State U. Applying Management and Organization Theory to Organization Change and Development: More than Meets Presenter: Thomas G. Cummings; U. of Southern California Presenter: Chris Worley; Pepperdine Graziadio Business School Research in Organization Development and Change: A Personal Journey Presenter: Philip H. Mirvis; Babson Social Innovation Lab The Social Media Presence of OD: A Social Network Analysis Using Big Data Presenter: Donna Ogle; Rockford U. Presenter: Ram Tenkasi; Benedictine U. Presenter: William Brock; Colorado Christian U. The Role and Relevance of Discourse and Discursive Perspectives in Organizational Change and Develop Presenter: Clifford Oswick; City U. London Presenter: Yuan Li; Saint Mary's College of California Developing a Sustainable High Commitment, High Performance System of Organizing, Managing, and Leadi Presenter: Michael Beer; Harvard Business School Context-Levels-Culture: A Diagnostic Framework for Consulting to Diversity, Equity, Inclusion Change Presenter: Frank D. Golom; Loyola U. Maryland Presenter: Mateo Cruz; Bentley U. Values in Concert: Subjective Values Enabling Exploitation and Exploration in Executive Teams Presenter: Mikael Hansson; Orrebro U. Presenter: Johanna E. Pregmark; Chalmers U. of Technology Presenter: Tobias Fredberg; Chalmers U. of Technology Community In The New World Of Work: Implications For Organization Development and Thriving Presenter: Gretchen Marie Spreitzer; U. of Michigan Why Honest Conversations are Transformative Presenter: Michael Beer; Harvard Business School Change in Tightly Coupled Systems: The Role and Action of Middle Managers Presenter: Rita Berggren; Chalmers U. of Technology Presenter: Bjorn E. Frossevi; Chalmers U. of Technology Exploring the Richness of Action Learning Research to Exploit Action Learning in Networks: A Journey Presenter: David Coghlan; Trinity College Dublin Opening the Doors of the Ivory Tower: Action Research as a Tool Supporting Cooperation Between Unive Presenter: Beata Jalocha; Jagiellonian U. Presenter: Ewa Bogacz-Wojtanowska,; Jagiellonian U. Presenter: Piotr Jedynak; Jagiellonian U.

Empowering faculty to initiate STEM education transformation: Efficacy of a systems thinking approach

Just a decade ago Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education: A Call to Action was released, catalyzing several initiatives to transform undergraduate life sciences education. Among these was the Partnership for Undergraduate Life Sciences Education (PULSE), a national organization commissioned to increase the adoption of Vision and Change recommendations within academic life sciences departments. PULSE activities have been designed based on the recognition that life sciences departments and faculty are embedded within institutions of higher education which, similar to other large organizations, are complex systems composed of multiple, interconnected subsystems. The organizational change research suggests that effecting large-scale changes (e.g., undergraduate STEM education transformation) may be facilitated by applying systems thinking to change efforts. In this paper we introduce the approach of systems thinking as a professional development tool to empower individual STEM faculty to effect department-level transformation. We briefly describe a professional development experience designed to increase life sciences faculty members’ understanding of systems thinking, present evidence that faculty applied a systems thinking approach to initiate department-level change, and discuss the degree to which transformation efforts were perceived to be successful. Though focused on faculty in the life sciences, our findings are broadly transferable to other efforts seeking to effect change in undergraduate STEM education.

The case for a further development of organizational change research: some contemporary reflections

The case for a further development of organizational change research: some contemporary reflections

School Principals’ Experiences and Learning from the Covid-19 Pandemic in Norway

ABSTRACT This exploratory study present findings from semi-structured interviews with 15 Norwegian school principals elaborating on their experiences and learning from the school closures, transition to digital education, and educational leadership in the first six months of the pandemic. Three main themes emerged from the interviews: (1) “We took a quantum leap into the digital world” addressing how the school principals supported and experienced a rapid transformation to digital education; (2) “We tried to be close, even if we could not be” elaborating on worries regarding teachers and children with special needs; and (3) “We had to adjust” elaborating on the unpredictable and constantly changing nature of the situation. These themes are detailed and discussed in the context of research in crisis management, organizational change, role requirements, and leadership responsibilities. In closing, we discuss how the transformative experiences from the pandemic may have implications for educational leadership in future crisis situations.

Organizational change in response to environmental complexity: Insights from the business model innovation literature

AbstractOrganizational change research to date has tended to proliferate on a conceptualization of change as a deliberate process driven by rational and formal strategic planning and fuelled by the expansion of exploitative resources. This conceptualization entails that change is essentially a process of reproduction in that it occurs along existing (incremental and cumulative) trajectories. Prompted by the need to manage increasingly complex and uncertain environments and foster progress towards sustainable development, the question of what are the exploratory forces that stimulate the capacity of business organizations to engage in discontinuous shifts towards new (flexible and creative) trajectories, without excessively disrupting existing ones, has comparatively been neglected. This paper contributes to address gaps in existing research by exploring how organizational change in response to complexity is framed in the literature on business model innovation. Three core categories of constraints to change are identified: relational flaws, functional flaws and the lack of moral motives; and three interacting forces that can be harnessed to overcome these constraints are suggested: sociability, agility and moral inclusivity. The resulting framework has broad implications for organizational change theory, practice, policy and research.

Leaders as change executors: The impact of leader attitudes to change and change-specific support on followers

Organizational change research has long regarded leaders as instrumental for the successful implementation of change. Leaders, however, are not always initiating change but rather executing it. In those cases, leaders may hold negative attitudes with regards to the change content or even resist change implementation while also being less effective in supporting their followers. This study tests whether, and to what extent, leader attitudes alongside leader change-specific support impact follower resistance to change. Using survey data from school principals and teachers in the public education sector in Germany, findings from multilevel linear regression show that leader resistance is positively related to follower resistance while leader attitudes to change content are unrelated to follower resistance. Leader change-specific support strengthens the relationship between follower attitudes towards change content and their resistance to change. Thus, this study raises awareness of the negative impact leaders can have on their followers when they are executors rather than initiators of change.

Are We Stuck in the Predigital Age? Embracing Technology-Mediated Change Management in Organizational Change Research

Technology-mediated change management (TMCM) refers to an organization's use of digital technologies to facilitate change implementation. The use of digital technology is deeply penetrating change practice. However, alarmingly, few have theorized about or empirically investigated TMCM. A rich body of research informs change management, however, less is known about how technologies are changing the nature of managing the change itself. We stimulate new conversations on this topic by discussing how TMCM provides both valuable benefits and creates new risks in terms of the (a) adaptiveness, (b) personalization, and (c) openness of the change process. TMCM requires urgent attention as it has the potential to help shape the future of change research and practice. We call for scholarship that is reflexive about both the benefits and risks associated with TMCM and we offer directions for research in this relatively new area that may very well determine the future of our field.

No Change Is an Island: How Interferences between Change Initiatives Evoke Inconsistencies That Undermine Implementation

Organizational change research has concentrated on the challenges of implementing isolated changes, paying little attention to the interactions among concurrent change initiatives. Our longitudinal...

Front-Line Management during Radical Organisational Change: Social Exchange and Paradox Interpretations

External shocks have severely affected the aviation sector with detrimental impacts on airport service employees. Service-sector organizations tend to implement radical organizational change to survive and front-line managers face often-opposing demands. This study aims to shed light on how front-line managers cope by utilizing social exchange-based strategies during radical organizational change. This study uses an exploratory qualitative design and thematically analyses data obtained from 40 semi-structured interviews with senior managers, front-line managers and employees working for an airline services provider operating in a major international airport in Australia. The study finds that front-line managers employ several social exchange approaches to overcome the paradoxical challenge of facilitating change while maintaining current operations. We find evidence of four approaches that the front-line managers utilize that are based on social exchange: (1) building relationships with clients’ representatives; (2) utilizing relationships with experienced employees to facilitate radical organizational change practices; (3) rewarding employees in exchange for helping to manage personnel shortages; and (4) motivating employees by various morale-enhancing techniques. The study contributes to organizational sustainability and change research by developing a deeper understanding of the importance of social exchange in facilitating the work of front-line managers in the airport services sector.

Picturing Topics Related to Change: Drawing and Its Underlying Elicitation Processes

This article suggests including drawing, a participative visual method, when designing organizational change research. It is based on a comparative analysis of three research protocols that have integrated drawing as a data collection method. Examining how drawing has been used in these studies leads to the identification of four elicitation processes—contextualizing, exemplifying, focusing, and reflecting—by which drawing gives access to data that would be more challenging to collect with conventional research methods alone. The article shows that these processes bring the participants’ emotions, lived experiences, and cultural influences to light in ways that may considerably enrich organizational change research. It ends by providing a set of guidelines on how to employ drawing in triangulation with other data collection methods.

An Exploratory Case Study of the Merger of Two Companies: Problems in Staff Adaptation Process

The paper reports on the merger of two independent financial services institutions. It is explored how the employees of a financial services institution (FSI) experienced its recent merger through the analysis of different narratives circulating within the organization. An exploratory case-study research project was conducted framed by the key concepts of organizational culture, change, and narrative research. A narrative approach was adopted to analyze the research material focusing the main analysis, which concentrates on analyzing the structure of narratives following the five elements of agency, temporality, event, context and format. The findings show how employees at FSI created counter stories to the positive messages, leadership sent across, threatening not only their economic situation, working conditions and roles but also their sense of self and their personal identities. The results of the empirical study strengthen the suggestion that narratives represent a powerful means to explore the underlying individual and social processes involved in situations of organizational change that may foster resistance to change ultimately inhibiting successful post-merger integrations. The empirical findings represent the groundwork for further, more comprehensive and elaborate research drawing upon a more diverse set of partici-pants from various levels representing all organizational departments.

Bridging the Dialectical Histories in Organizational Change: Hysteresis in Scandinavian Telecommunications Privatization

Conventionally, organizational change research has viewed history as objective facts associated with path dependencies, making change difficult. However, started with the work of Suddaby et al. (2010), a different stance has emerged, viewing history as a subjective, narrative construction that can be utilized to facilitate change. This paper responds to calls for ways of bridging these two perceptions and increasing historical consciousness in organizational change studies. To these ends, the paper explores the capacity of Bourdieu’s construct of hysteresis as a bridging construct. Based on an ethnographic study, the paper operationalizes hysteresis to analyze the response strategies of technicians and shop stewards to organizational change following privatization in a Scandinavian telecommunications company. The paper argues that hysteresis constitutes a valuable alternative to bridging constructs available in extant literature and holds the potential to open new avenues for exploring the implications of history for organizational change.

Employee coping with organizational change in the face of a pandemic: The role of transparent internal communication

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused many businesses and organizations to implement changes to manage operational and economic challenges. Understanding how employees manage such changes during the process is critical to the success of organizations. Integrating the literature from transparent internal communication, the transactional theory of stress and coping, and organizational change research, this study proposes a theoretical model to understand the role of internal communication and its effects on employees’ management of organizational change. An online survey was conducted with 490 full-time employees in the U.S. during the second and third weeks of April 2020. The findings of this study demonstrate that transparent internal communication can help encourage problem-focused control coping, reduce uncertainty, and foster employee-organization relationships during organizational change. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

A Balance of Rigor and Relevance: Engaged Scholarship in Organizational Change

Organizations face increasing demand to make meaningful, sustainable changes based on shifts in their external environments. This presents an unprecedented opportunity for insightful, useful research in the field of organizational change. As in other management science disciplines, the field suffers from a gap between research-favoring rigor and practice-favoring relevance. Through the framework of engaged scholarship—a collaborative approach to knowledge production—we present organizational change research as particularly well-positioned to utilize existing gap-related tensions to advance the field in terms of effective academic- and practice-based outcomes. We highlight empirical efforts in organizational change applied research that have contributed to theory building, method development, and practice knowledge. We include interview data collected from scholar-practitioners in the field and focus on the work of W. Warner Burke, in particular, for this special issue honoring the legacy of his rigorous and relevant contributions to the science and practice of organizational change.

Why Some Practices are Harder to Change than Others?

We address a persistent question in organizational change research that has proven practically and theoretically generative: Why is it often so difficult to bring about planned organizational change? We argue that even ostensibly minor change initiatives typically involve the need to transform a bundle of different organizational practices at the same time. These practices are reproduced in different ways and for different reasons, making some more amenable to particular change strategies than others. To be effective, change interventions therefore need to take into account the varied process histories of the specific organizational practices involved. We introduce a theoretical framework for systematically analysing this practice specificity of organizational change. Through an illustrative application of this framework to the Cambridge University Boat Club (CUBC) we show how it can enable a substantively contingent understanding of organizational change to complement existing approaches.

Attitudes, Self-Efficacy, and Feasibility: Exploring Social Work Students’ Perceptions of Evidence-Based Practice

ABSTRACT Purpose The literature on evidence-based practice (EBP) in social work indicates a complex relationship between practitioners’ attitudes, views on feasibility, and self-efficacy related to EBP implementation. Method Qualitative interviews and a self-report questionnaire were completed with 8 social work students. A conceptual framework of their perceptions was developed through thematic analysis. Results Participants reported mixed EBP attitudes, as both a practice “ideal”, but also oppressive, rigid, and dehumanizing. Low confidence regarding research skills affected participants’ self-efficacy. Resource constraints impacted feasibility through organizational culture and available practice-relevant research. Discussion EBP misconceptions critically impacted educational practices, organizational culture, and practitioners’ attitudes. Comprehensive education mindful of professional identity may address misconceptions and enhance self-efficacy. EBP-enabling organizational change and practice-relevant research may alleviate resource constraints. Conclusion Research should expand on how EBP attitudes and social work identity intersect, the impact of research skills on self-efficacy, and EBP barriers and facilitators in education and organizations.