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Volume 19 of Research in Organizational Change and Development includes chapters by an international diverse set of authors including Michael Beer, Victor J. Friedman, Luis Felipe Gómez and Dawna I. Ballard, Ethan S. Bernstein and Frank J. Barrett, Karen J. Jansen and David A. Hofmann, Guido Maes and Geert Van Hootegem, Tobias Fredberg, Flemming Norrgren and Abraham B. (Rami) Shani, and William A. Pasmore. The ideas expressed by these authors are as diverse as their backgrounds.

High rates of failure in organizational change efforts call attention to the need to identify and address persistent problems that threaten success. This chapter outlines issues that frequently hinder progress in various stages of the change process and offers advice to consultants and their clients in overcoming these issues. While models to guide intervention have advanced and the field has progressed, more attention still needs to be paid to the issues outlined here in order to enhance success rates in major change initiatives. New directions for research are suggested that would aid the field in continuing its evolution.

Drawing on the experience of the Observatories, a set of interconnected research centers in Italy, this chapter explains why academics are in one of the best positions to orchestrate interorganizational initiatives of change and development, and highlights two prerequisites that appear necessary to render salient this orchestrator role of academics: (i) the extensive use of multiple approaches of collaborative research and (ii) the creation and maintenance of a platform allowing the management and diffusion of the network-based learning mechanisms underlying each change and development effort. The contributions extend existing knowledge on organization development and collaborative research.

Given the opportunity to reflect on the three decades of research and practice that have passed since the first volume of Research in Organizational Change and Development was published, we note a number of shifts in our world that are causing us to rethink what we know and how we intervene. These shifts, and their attendant effects on individuals, organizations, and society, have opened up exciting possibilities for the advancement of the field. These advances can be achieved through combined research and action, aimed at producing new insights into core topics like motivation, leadership, and organization design. We suggest an ambitious agenda for current and future scholar-practitioners that we hope will stimulate enough thoughtful work to help fill the next three decades of volumes of Research in Organizational Change and Development.

This chapter reports on a longitudinal quasi-experimental field study within an organizational design of a global consumer products manufacturer moving toward high-performance work systems (HPWSs) in North America by integrating business centers and self-directed work teams (SDWTs) coupled with 13 other action-levers within an integrated and bundled high-performance organizations (HPOs) re-design. The results of this organizational design effort are assessed using different types and levels of organizational outcomes (hard record data, behavioral, and attitudinal measures) along a 5-year temporal dimension punctuated by multiple time periods (baseline, during, and after). The organization, which was “built to change” (Lawler & Worley, 2006), in this research had already highly superior or “exemplar” (Collins, 2001) levels of organizational performance. Consequently, the real research question becomes: “What effect does state of the art organizational design and development have on an exemplar organization?” The study also calls into question the field's ability to truly assess exemplar organizations with existing measures of organizational change and development.

The first annual volume of Research in Organization Change and Development was published in 1987. Since then, ROCD has provided a special platform for scholars and practitioners to share new research-based insights.