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The purpose of this paper is to investigate how and why different forms of organizational change have different levels of organizational intensity, which in turn differentiate its impact on commitment to organizational change (COC). Its purpose is to also identify how procedural justice can reduce change-related stress and buffer the strain inducing effects of job demands.

The authors tested the hypotheses using data collected from two sources in Korea. First, the authors conducted a survey in several organizations to identify employees’ attitudes and stress during organizational change. Second, the author surveyed MBA students to evaluate the degree of organizational change intensity (severity) across the types of change.

There is a hierarchy of the severity of organizational change and the most severe forms of change are the ones that impact employees’ job security and organizational identity. The influence of job demands (represented as organizational change intensity-severity) on COC can depend on the nature of COC. Procedural justice not only facilitates employees to accept values and goals pertaining to organizational change but also adapt themselves to pressures of external change. Buffering effects of job resources (represented as job resources) had significant impacts only on normative commitment to organizational change (NCOC).

This study contributes to the job demands-resources model by considering organizational change intensity as job demands and procedural justice as job resources and showing the relationships among them. Future studies can further extend the model by identifying other variables related to job demands and resources during organizational change and extending the nomological networks of NCOC and continuance commitment to organizational change.

The results of this study provide important insights for human resource managers who plan and implement organizational changes. Procedural justice and organizational change intensity-severity should be considered to increase commitment to change.

This study is one of the few studies to identify the different types of organizational change and quantify them to measure organizational change intensity-severity. A new finding is that the buffering role of job resources (procedural justice in this study) can be marginal when the influence of job demands on employees’ attitudes is strong.

This study aims to investigate innovation intensity by exploring the roles of internally focused and externally focused information technology (IT) use intensity and innovation culture on innovation intensity and organizational performance.

A model exploring the effects of internally and externally focused IT use, plus two key dimensions of innovation culture – collaborative and entrepreneurial – on innovation intensity and organizational performance is tested via a structural equation model using partial least squares with data collected from 395 top executives.

The results indicate that intense use of internally and externally focused IT and the collaborative dimension of culture positively affect innovation intensity, which, in turn, increases operational and financial performance.

Innovation is an important driver of performance, for both internal efficiency and competitiveness. The role of IT in the innovation process is key: it allows information, knowledge and idea sharing. Top managers should make a wide array of IT tools available to increase internal and external information exchanges. They should also develop an organizational context that stimulates innovativeness and promotes collaboration.

IT helps employees acquire and use the knowledge needed to innovate within and outside organizational boundaries. To be innovative, employees need to work in an organization with a strong innovation culture, a primary determinant of innovation intensity. This study is one of the first to examine the effects of an organization’s innovation culture and its use of IT on innovation intensity and organizational performance. In addition, constructs of innovation intensity and internally and externally focused IT use are developed and tested.

Redundancy, delayering, downsizing and various other forms of organisational change, often accompanied by the managerial fad of the moment, have become increasingly prevalent over the last ten years. This paper is based on the results of a four‐year University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST)‐Chartered Management Institute (CMI) research programme (the Quality of Working Life Project) that was designed to explore the changing nature of managerial work in the UK and also to assess the impact of different forms of organisational change on managers’ perceptions of the organisations they work within. The analysis reported here indicates clearly that some forms of change (notably redundancy and delayering) have had particularly damaging effects on managers’ experiences in the workplace and ultimately on their behaviours within and beyond their organisations. The objectives of this paper are, first, to paint a picture of recent organisational change in the UK based on the responses of members of the CMI, second, to explore how change has affected managers’ perceptions of their organisations and their working lives and, third, to explore if different forms of change (particularly redundancy and delayering) have had a differential impact on managers’ perceptions of their organisations “as a place to work”.

The purpose of this study is to develop a more comprehensive framework that would provide better insight into the characteristics of organisational transformation (OT) of the public sector organisations in the e-government era. Despite the widespread opinion that successful implementation of information communication technology (ICT) is strongly correlated with the appropriate OT of the public sector, a critical analysis of the available literature within the field indicates that this important dimension of e-government development has been dealt with only partially. Accordingly, the paper attempts the following: to develop a more comprehensive framework for observing OT, to empirically explain the framework through analysis of three Slovenian e-government projects and to develop some general characteristics of ICT-induced OT in the public sector.

The development of the framework is based on an analysis of the available literature, whereas the explanation of such is based on a multiple-case study approach.

The paper contributes to a clearer understanding of what the main characteristics of OT in the e-government era are and how they should be observed.

The findings can help researchers to more accurately focus their attention on the most critical aspects of OT. The identified attributes can provide an important basis for future research, particularly from the methodological perspective.

The framework can help public managers to focus their attention on the most important attributes of ICT-induced OT to exploit ICT potentials more efficiently.

The paper attempts to demystify the concept of OT in the e-government field and place it in a more solid theoretical and empirically explained framework.

The purpose of this paper is to examine organizational leadership in a traditional, non-western country where citizens’ happiness drives the practices of the public administration managers.

This study uses the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ) to examine leadership in a traditional, non-western country where organizational change dominates the public sector. Triangulation of quantitative and qualitative research methods is used.

Triangulation of quantitative and qualitative research methods reveals that the way managers respond to organizational change leads to utilizing an adaptive leadership style; a mixture of dynamic and rigid practices. Organizational change creates peculiar circumstances that make it thus imperative for managers to mix transformational and transactional practices in order to not only survive, but also excel. While some of the findings conform to those of previous studies, they indicate that the MLQ does not seem to adequately reflect the impact of organizational change on leadership. The study also provides evidence that adaptive leadership is driven by cultural and organizational necessities.

The limitations of the study can be avoided in future research. In particular, the number of interviews has limited the ability to better reflect all dimensions of the adaptive leadership style. Due to time and resource availability, the inability to focus more on the individual level of the cultural factor and its impact on leadership style may have limited the scope of the analysis. Finally, the present study did not examine the cultural variations within the United Arab Emirates universal culture especially in relationship with region, age group, and gender of the managers.

The paper examines leadership in the Middle East context where rare studies in leadership have been conducted. The study also examines the usability of MLQ in Arab context where organizational change persists.

Much has been written, in recent years, on the subject of learning organisations and knowledge‐based businesses. Most research in this area, however, focuses upon large businesses. In this type of firm, it appears the concepts of “organisational learning” and “learning organisation” can be, and often are, used interchangeably to describe learning‐based individual and collective development. Until recently, issues relating to organisational learning in small businesses were mostly ignored or marginalised. This paper sets out to redress the balance. It reports a study of organisational learning in the small business sector of the UK economy. Research data, collected over the 1996‐1998 period, through telephone surveys, in‐depth interviews and case studies, were analysed through quantitative and qualitative methods. The results indicate that although learning can occur in the majority of small businesses in the sample, only a minority of these manage new knowledge strategically to sustain and advance their competitive advantage.

The purpose of this paper is to revisit Schein’s proposed process-consultation approach as a general framework for management consulting in the light of some premises of the agency theory, namely the behavior induced by the asymmetry of information between the principal (leader-client) and the agent (consultant).

Empirical research consisted of an in-depth, qualitative and phenomenological analysis of 13 cases of organizational intervention based on the practice of four senior consultants in a Canadian management consulting firm whose philosophy is based on organizational development principles and practices. All the cases chosen are characterized by a situation of strategic change as a result of governmental reforms in the healthcare sector between 2005 and 2008.

Overall, the study shows that the relationship between leaders-clients and consultants varies from one stage to another throughout the consultation process and that the information asymmetry does not always benefit the agent as stated in the agency theory. The consultants are required to play diverse roles, either in combination or alternation, during the consultation process; the facilitator’s role, stated as the more efficient role in Schein’s perspective and the more altruistic from the point of view of the agency theory, is not necessarily the role preferred by managers. Moreover, results highlight the idiosyncrasies of healthcare organizations, namely the phenomenon of escalating indecision that comes into play during the implementation phase of change, worth taking into account in the practice and theories of management consulting.

This analysis raises a number of questions about the general understanding and applicability of the process consultation as defined by Schein. Perhaps the four consultants have not perfectly mastered the interpersonal skills that Schein’s model presupposes. One may also conclude that the model does not always respond to the expectations and needs of leaders and managers and that, for many consultants, it is difficult to adopt only one role model throughout the consulting process. One may also question its realism in a context of interventions in public organizations, with a plurality of interest groups and ambiguity of goals, where governmental reforms are pressuring managers to control costs.

According to Eisenhardt (1989) and Hendry (2002), the agency theory offers promising avenues if combined with other theoretical anchors such as the field of organizational behavior. This study scrutinizes the leader-consultant relationship, and more specifically the type of assistance requested by healthcare leaders as they experienced strategic change and how consultants responded to these requests.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how rhetoric of cooperation is expressed and constructed during rituals of consultation and how this rhetoric is integrated into the consultant’s dramaturgical awareness that incorporates both impression management and the expression of self.

This paper uses a discursive approach and semi-structured interviews with directors and consultants working in the healthcare sector, a sector that routinely employs consultants to accompany directors in organizational change management. Rhetoric is constructed around four narrative lines that also constitute the four ritualized phases of the consulting process.

The mantra of “respect rituals of passage and avoid breaking frames” is an integral part of the consultant’s dramaturgical awareness throughout the process, so as not to infringe upon the order of the interaction established with the directors. Moreover, the development of cooperative relations with other members of the organization is based largely on a rather vast repertoire of action resources that the consultant will have to deploy to face four areas of uncertainty in the rites of interaction; namely, anticipation, interpretation, delegation and adherence. Furthermore, this cooperation is far from definitively acquired and must be reflected upon along the way to maintain control over the definition of the situation. This study expands upon the interrelations between the strategic actor and the reflective practitioner in a consultant’s dramaturgical awareness.

Practical implications are highlighted using the notion of reflective contract (Schön, 1983) for managers as clients, the transcendental precepts of authenticity put forward by Coghland (2008) for consultants as practitioners, and progressive forms of critical theory performativity as suggested by Spicer et al. (2009) and Wickert and Schaefer (2015) for researchers.

The concept underlying this study is dramaturgical awareness. It is a concept but sparingly explored in the literature, yet nonetheless present among advocates who promote organizational dramaturgy based on the work of Goffman. This concept is linked to Crozier and Friedberg’s theory of the strategic actor and Schön’s theory of the reflective practitioner.

Notwithstanding the extensive body of knowledge on entrepreneurial intentions, there seems to be relatively little research on explaining intentions in the corporate entrepreneurship context, nor has organizational justice been previously linked with employee entrepreneurial intentions (EEI). The purpose of this study is to determine to what extent different dimensions of organizational justice are associated with EEI.

The study context is the financial and services sector where technology enabled banking solutions have become the norm, and the need for entrepreneurial behavior has become essential in this industry. Survey data are collected (n = 204) from full-time employees working in the South African financial services sector. Initially instrument validity and reliability is tested and the hypotheses are investigated using multiple regression analyses.

Across the dimensions, results reveal positive yet non-significant relationships with EEI. However, as a control variable gender plays an important role in the relationship between procedural justice (PRCJ) and EEI. The findings are supplemented with a qualitative assessment that adds value and helps explain the results.

Corporate managers must foster EEI while at the same time considering perceptions of workplace justice in terms of interactional justice, distributive justice and PRCJ.

By combining insights from two sources of literature – organizational justice and EEI, a clear empirical contribution is made to the literature that opens up avenues for future research. Moreover, given that the original scales have primarily been employed in developed economies, by verifying their psychometric properties in an African market context, this now allows for replication studies to take place in other emerging market contexts.