All change? Managers' experience of organizational change in theory and practice

Purpose - This paper aims to examine the usefulness of organizational change theory for management practice. Design/methodology/approach - The authors present an exploratory, empirical study of managers who were taught organizational change theory as part of a postgraduate degree. Building on the study findings, they analyse managers' subsequent experiences of organizational change; of how they use change theory in practice and the impact on their practice of their earlier formal study. Findings - The paper finds that the complexities of managing change in practice reflect distinctive organizational environments and cultures. The skills and knowledge which managers found most useful were those that enabled them to "make sense" of the organizational change they subsequently experienced. The main impact of their earlier studies was to prompt informative, discursive and reflective approaches to change management. Practical implications - The paper discusses the implications for future teaching of organizational change and the development of organizational change theory. Originality/value - The qualitative findings of the study add to, and help to explain, earlier research findings on the questions of how managers' experience change, how they use organizational change theory and its impact on their practice.

[1]  S. Cartwright,et al.  Thirty Years of Mergers and Acquisitions Research: Recent Advances and Future Opportunities , 2006 .

[2]  C. Ward-Griffin,et al.  Implementing organizational change in health and social services , 2006 .

[3]  Linda Rouleau,et al.  Micro-Practices of Strategic Sensemaking and Sensegiving: How Middle Managers Interpret and Sell Change Every Day , 2005 .

[4]  Kathleen M. Sutcliffe,et al.  Special Issue: Frontiers of Organization Science, Part 1 of 2: Organizing and the Process of Sensemaking , 2005, Organ. Sci..

[5]  Jae-Won Moon.  Reflection in Learning and Professional Development: Theory and Practice , 2005 .

[6]  A. Pinnington.  Learning in a competitive field: MBA students' improvised case studies of IHRM , 2005 .

[7]  H. Anheier.  Nonprofit Organizations: Theory, Management and Policy , 2005 .

[8]  J. Porras,et al.  A Historical View of the Future of OD , 2004 .

[9]  Denise Skinner,et al.  Primary and Secondary Barriers to the Evaluation of Change , 2004 .

[10]  J. Apker,et al.  Sensemaking of change in the managed care era: a case of hospital‐based nurses , 2004 .

[11]  P. Salipante,et al.  Managers as knowledge generators: The nature of practitioner‐scholar research in the nonprofit sector , 2003 .

[12]  Christopher Grey,et al.  Beneath and Beyond Organizational Change Management: Exploring Alternatives , 2003 .

[13]  John D. Aram,et al.  Bridging Scholarship in Management: Epistemological Reflections , 2003 .

[14]  Raymond Caldwell.  Models of Change Agency: A Fourfold Classification , 2003 .

[15]  Julia Balogun,et al.  From Blaming the Middle to Harnessing its Potential: Creating Change Intermediaries , 2003 .

[16]  M. Daly.  Governance and Social Policy , 2003, Journal of Social Policy.

[17]  P. Shaw.  Changing Conversations in Organizations: A Complexity Approach to Change , 2002 .

[18]  Donald D. Tippett,et al.  The “death valley” of change , 2002 .

[19]  B. Burnes.  Managing Change: A Strategic Approach to Organisational Dynamics , 2001 .

[20]  Ken Starkey,et al.  Bridging the Relevance Gap: Aligning Stakeholders in the Future of Management Research , 2001 .

[21]  Karl E. Weick,et al.  Gapping the Relevance Bridge: Fashions Meet Fundamentals in Management Research , 2001 .

[22]  J. Newman.  Modernizing Governance: New Labour, Policy and Society , 2001 .

[23]  Reuven R. Levary,et al.  Determining the relative efficiency of MBA programs using DEA , 2000, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[24]  Valerie Priscilla Goby,et al.  Using Experiential Learning Theory and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator in Teaching Business Communication , 2000 .

[25]  Mike Doyle,et al.  Mixed Results, Lousy Process: the Management Experience of Organizational Change , 2000 .

[26]  J. W. Grubbs.  Cultural imperialism: A critical theory of interorganizational change , 2000 .

[27]  Adrian Carr,et al.  Critical theory and the management of change in organizations , 2000 .

[28]  J. Whitehead,et al.  The Collaboration Challenge: How Nonprofits and Businesses Succeed Through Strategic Alliances , 2000 .

[29]  M. Connolly,et al.  Leadership in Educational Change , 2000 .

[30]  David Collins.  Organisational Change: Sociological Perspectives , 1998 .

[31]  W. Warner Burke,et al.  Understanding the management of change , 1996 .

[32]  R. Greenwood,et al.  Understanding Radical Organizational Change: Bringing Together the Old and the New Institutionalism , 1996 .

[33]  Joseph A. Maxwell,et al.  Qualitative Research Design: An Interactive Approach , 1996 .

[34]  I. Nonaka.  A Dynamic Theory of Organizational Knowledge Creation , 1994 .

[35]  Paul A. Sabatier,et al.  Top-Down and Bottom-Up Approaches to Implementation Research: a Critical Analysis and Suggested Synthesis , 1986, Journal of Public Policy.

[36]  J. Dewey,et al.  The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action , 1960 .

[37]  M. Hazen,et al.  Challenges in Creating Reflective OD Consumers: Distilling the Essence of Organizational Development for Non-OD Specialists , 2002 .

[38]  Philip J. Streatfield,et al.  The paradox of control in organizations , 2001 .

[39]  Anselm L. Strauss,et al.  Basics of qualitative research : techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory , 1998 .

[40]  Andrew Pettigrew,et al.  The New Public Management in Action , 1996 .

[41]  D. Schoen.  Educating the reflective practitioner , 1987 .