Search results

Change drivers are events, activities, or behaviors that facilitate the individual adoption of change initiatives and the implementation of organizational change. The purpose of this paper is an exploratory study of whether gender differences exist for change drivers.

This paper involves a three‐year study of an organizational change in the banking industry, and uses survey and interview data.

Data show that the mean perceived significance of change drivers to the understanding and adoption of change initiatives by male and female employees is similar and does not vary at a statistically significant level. Statistically significant gender differences do exist in terms of the relationship between change drivers and employees' reported individual adoption of change initiatives. Qualitative data from the interviews support those quantitative findings, showing gender differences in how change drivers are perceived; differences in change‐related vision, leadership, communication and positive outcomes as drivers are discussed.

This is an exploratory study and needs to be replicated with other organizational changes in a variety of industries with varied employee demographics and differences in change leadership gender.

Change drivers are a form of resource allocation. Better understanding of gender differences in terms of the perception of and significance of change drivers to individual employees' understanding and adoption of change initiatives can result in more effective allocation of resources by change leaders.

Very limited prior research explores gender or other demographic differences for change drivers. This research provides an empirical study of gender and change drivers and extends prior research on change drivers and the change process.

This paper aims to present that deliberate change is strongly associated with formal structures and top-down influence. Hierarchical configurations have been used to structure processes, overcome resistance and get things done. But is deliberate change also possible without formal structures and hierarchical influence?

This longitudinal, qualitative study investigates an open-source software (OSS) community named TYPO3. This case exhibits no formal hierarchical attributes. The study is based on mailing lists, interviews and observations.

The study reveals that deliberate change is indeed achievable in a non-hierarchical collaborative OSS community context. However, it presupposes the presence and active involvement of informal change agents. The paper identifies and specifies four key drivers for change agents’ influence.

The findings contribute to organisational analysis by providing a deeper understanding of the importance of leadership in making deliberate change possible in non-hierarchical settings. It points to the importance of “change-by-conviction”, essentially based on voluntary behaviour. This can open the door to reducing the negative side effects of deliberate change also for hierarchical organisations.

This study aims to explore and understand a beyond budgeting-inspired initiative to abandon budgeting in a multinational bank.

Analysing data from semi-structured interviews with actors involved in and affected by the change initiative, this paper draws on Kasurinen’s accounting change framework as well as concepts from institutional theory to investigate the rationale for and the challenges of budget abandonment.

Although the improving financial market stability and the increasing accountability of banks after the global financial crisis motivated the initial organisational changes, the appointment of a head of finance with experience of beyond budgeting was a major catalyst of change. This change-promoting leader was of utmost importance in providing relevant training and support, facilitating the change initiative and overcoming the initial resistance to change. However, the remnants of former budgeting practice did not regress as intended, and the change initiative stalled.

This research contributes to beyond budgeting and accounting change studies by illustrating a stalled change initiative in the context susceptible to beyond budgeting ideas and highlighting the importance of aligning discourse and meaning with practice and routines.

Strategy scholars have theorized that a firm's strategic leaders play an important role in firm dynamic capabilities (DCs). However, little research to date has studied how leaders shape the development of DCs. This inductive theory-building study sheds new light on the multilevel architecture of DCs by uncovering that the three core DCs – sensing, seizing, and reconfiguring – operate through distinct individual, group, and organizational processes. Further, the role of strategic leadership is critical as organizational processes create DCs only when they are purposefully designed by firms' strategic leaders to enable change and opportunity pursuit. Whether strategic leaders design processes for change and opportunity pursuit, in turn, reflects the extent to which they view change as positive and desirable. Our insights about the role of strategic leaders' positive attitude toward change as an important aspect of firm DCs uncover new interconnections between strategic leadership, organizational design, and the micro-foundations of DCs. Collectively our findings about the role of positive attitude toward change, the purposeful design of processes for change, and the varying manifestations of these processes at different levels of analysis reveal the coupling of strategic and organizational processes in enabling strategic dynamism and change.

High-quality nursing home (NH) care has long been a challenge within the United States. For decades, policymakers at the state and federal levels have adopted and implemented regulations to target critical components of NH care outcomes. Simultaneously, our delivery system continues to change the role of NHs in patient care. For example, more acute patients are cared for in NHs, and the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has implemented value payment programs targeting NH settings. As a part of these growing pressures from the broader healthcare delivery system, the culture-change movement has emerged among NHs over the past two decades, prompting NHs to embody more person-centered care as well as promote settings which resemble someone's home, as opposed to institutionalized healthcare settings.

Researchers have linked culture change to high-quality outcomes and the ability to adapt and respond to the ever-changing pressures brought on by changes in our regulatory and delivery system. Making enduring culture change within organizations has long been a challenge and focus in NHs. Despite research suggesting that culture-change initiatives that promote greater resident-centered care are associated with several desirable patient outcomes, their adoption and implementation by NHs are resource intensive, and research has shown that NHs with high percentages of low-income residents are especially challenged to adopt these initiatives.

This chapter takes a novel approach to examine factors that impact the adoption of culture-change initiatives by assessing knowledge management and the role of knowledge management activities in promoting the adoption of innovative care delivery models among under-resourced NHs throughout the United States. Using primary data from a survey of NH administrators, we conducted logistic regression models to assess the relationship between knowledge management and the adoption of a culture-change initiative as well as whether these relationships were moderated by leadership and staffing stability. Our study found that NHs were more likely to adopt a culture-change initiative when they had more robust knowledge management activities. Moreover, knowledge management activities were particularly effective at promoting adoption in NHs that struggle with leadership and nursing staff instability. Our findings support the notion that knowledge management activities can help NHs acquire and mobilize informational resources to support the adoption of care delivery innovations, thus highlighting opportunities to more effectively target efforts to stimulate the adoption and spread of these initiatives.

The purpose of this paper is to study the status of the individual self in the emergence of change initiatives in organizations.

This theoretical paper examines the emergence of change initiatives through the building of agents’ capacity to act, based on a theory of action inspired by Paul Ricœur.

This paper identifies the “course of recognition” to favor the emergence of change initiatives and the building of the capacity to act of agents, respecting the autonomy at the individual level, a sense of care at the group level and justice at the institutional level.

The theoretical research can be extended with empirical studies dealing with the role of agents’ capacities in conflict management, the role of the “narrative self´” in change processes in organizations and the conjoint operationalization of autonomy care and justice to determine the agents’ capacity to act for initiatives to emerge.

It is important to develop a sense of shared leadership to nurture the capacity to act of agents to make change initiatives emerge in organizations, increasing organizational members’ feelings of being recognized.

So far, research has not provided satisfactory answers to the question about how to best initiate organizational change. The use of Ricœur’s theory of action adds value to the existing approaches as it addresses the source of the emergence of initiatives from agents’ feelings of their capacity to act, and integrates individual, group and institutional levels, which are rarely contemplated together.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a generalized framework that illustrates the potential for the resources, events and agents (REA) model to integrate business strategy and information systems planning. The essential point of connection, the business process, enables the REA to form a complementary platform to integrate strategic change information to support change strategies.

The paper uses a case study to illustrate application of the framework.

The framework illustrates how the expanding ontology and semantic granularity and scalability features of the REA enterprise domain ontology, support mapping a range of change strategies structured using Venkataraman's change framework.

This paper is exploratory in nature. The method uses existing case information, but the nature of the work does not lend itself to the traditional descriptive approach.

Integration of business strategy and information systems planning is critical for organizational success. Poor integration between change initiatives and systems poses a challenge in implementing change strategies. Conceptual models that support change initiatives provide users an effective medium to use domain knowledge to support change strategies.

The paper integrates existing concepts in the REA model (with some modification to the process view of the REA to adapt to multiple change initiatives). To the authors’ knowledge, there are no other papers that have offered a generalized framework for conceptualizing change initiatives of different levels.

Understanding how organisations can institutionalise the outcomes of process improvement initiatives is limited. This paper explores how process changes resulting from improvement initiatives are adhered to, so that the changed processes become the new “norm” and people do not revert to old practices. This study proposes an institutionalisation process for process improvement initiatives.

Firstly, a literature review identified Tolbert and Zucker’s (1996) institutionalisation framework as a suitable conceptual framework on which to base the enquiry. The second phase (the focus of this paper) applied the findings from two case studies to adapt this framework (its stages and related factors) to fit process improvement contexts.

The paper presents an empirically and theoretically supported novel institutionalisation process for process improvement initiatives. The three stages of the institutionalisation process presented by Tolbert and Zucker (1996) have been respecified into four stages, explaining how process changes are institutionalised through “Planning”, “Implementation”, “Objectification” and “Sedimentation” (the original first stage, i.e. “Habitualisation” being divided into Planning and Implementation). Some newly identified Business Process Management (BPM) specific factors influencing the institutionalisation processes are also discussed and triangulated with the BPM literature.

The study contributes to the BPM literature by conceptualising and theorising the stages of institutionalisation of process improvement initiatives. In doing so, the study explicitly identifies and considers several key contextual factors that drive the stages of institutionalisation. Practitioners can use this to better manage process change and future researchers can use this framework to operationalise institutionalisation of process change.

This is the first research study that provides an empirically supported and clearly conceptualised understanding of the stages of institutionalising process improvement outcomes.

This paper aims to examine the impact of organisational change on public sector employees utilising the implementation of the UK Government's “Back to work” programme (BTW) as a case study example. The paper seeks to explore the employee response to the changes they experience as a result of this new initiative.

A qualitative approach was adopted for this study, employing in‐depth interviews across the UK. The interview strategy sought to focus on the individual experiences and perceptions of those involved in the operation of the programme.

The findings highlight how the interviewees face organisational change as part of their everyday life, with the pace of change increasing and becoming more radical. Many of these organisational changes are related to the introduction of new initiatives that require amendments to existing working practices. It was found that a lack of permanency and constant switching of initiatives, imposed by central government, could result in cynical attitudes towards a new initiative as interviewees await the newer, bigger and brighter programme.

The study indicates that when a new initiative is introduced this involves change which impacts on employees and there needs to be a management response to this challenge to ensure that initiatives are successful. Notably there needs to be a move from quick fix, early‐win outcomes as new programmes take time and effort.

The paper presents empirical evidence of the impact of change as a result of a new initiative involving public sector employees. It demonstrates how the political context driving new initiatives like the BTW programme affects employees on the “shopfloor” and emphasises the need for management to respond to this challenge.

The literature on innovation/change predicts that entrepreneurial initiatives will be killed by the established organizational system. The general answer is to put innovations in separate units. This is not possible for corporate entrepreneurship initiatives, however. In this action research study, we focus on corporate entrepreneurship initiatives’ strategies for survival. We collected data by following 11 corporate entrepreneurship initiatives as they were pursued. We summarize their effort in three transformation mechanisms: aligning with purpose, creating trust, and creating attachment with autonomy. The data indicate that these factors not only contributed to the success of the initiatives but also to renewing the organizational system.