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Despite the breadth of knowledge on self and identity formation across the study of organizations, the field of organizational development and change has limited research on the construction of professional identity. Much has been written to describe the “self-concepts” of those practicing and researching in the field, but there have been no investigations that have explored how these “self-concepts” form. In addition, although women have contributed to defining the “self” in the field, men have held the dominant perspective on the subject. Thus, in this chapter, we address a disparity in the research by exploring the construction of professional identity in the field of organizational development and change, and we give voice to the renowned women who helped to build the field. Using the profiles of 17 American women included in The Palgrave Handbook of Organizational Change Thinkers, we perform a narrative analysis based upon the concepts and models prevalent in the literature on identity formation. By disentangling professional identity formation of the notable women in the field, we can begin to see the nuance and particularities involved in its construction and gain deeper understandings about effective ways to prepare individuals to work in and advance the field.

The Perception of Change Strategy Scale (PCS) measures an individual’s perception of the change strategies being used by change agents during an organizational change. To ground the reader in the tool’s history, two published studies are briefly discussed: one in which the measure was developed and a second in which the tool’s reliability was appraised. In a third study presented here a confirmatory factor analysis was conducted to test the theoretical framework and to select the best fitting model amongst several competing models of the constructs identified in the PCS. The results support a three-factor model as the best fit for a change strategy framework based on Chin and Benne’s (1961) three-part conceptualization for leading change: empirical-rational, power-coercive, and normative-re-educative.

Much has been theorized about what change strategies to employ given particular types of organizational change. Organizational theorists have linked participative strategies with culture change, strategies based on logic and reason with new technology implementations, and power strategies with the introduction of new laws and legislation. However, to what degree are these suggested recommendations carried out in organizations? In this paper, we explored the extent to which change recipients perceive the use of theorist recommended strategies when undergoing specific types of organizational changes. Using survey research (N = 88), we investigated the perceived relationship between two components of change: change content and change strategy. The results partially follow the ideals proposed by previous theorists, but they also highlight a significant relationship between power-coercive strategies and episodic change events that is contrary to those ideals. For practitioners, our findings draw attention to the connection between change content and change strategy in the hope of offering some guidance to those change agents who must determine how to lead a particular change initiative. Additionally, since our investigation is original and exploratory, we incite future research aimed at understanding the congruency between change content and change strategy formulation.