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Organisational Development (OD), with its focus on partnership working and distributed leadership, is increasingly advocated as an effective approach to driving change. Our evaluation of the impact of OD on delivery of integrated care in three London boroughs sheds light on how OD is being understood and implemented within health services, and what impact it is having on delivery of care.

The findings presented here are based on a qualitative and participatory evaluation. The authors looked at how health and social care professionals communicated and coordinated delivery of care and evaluated the impact of current OD activities on the ground to evidence whether and to which degree they are enabling frontline staff to change their working routines towards greater coordination.

Our findings highlight the limited reach and scope of a top-down approach to OD based on ad hoc coaching and staff engagement events, often delivered by external consultancies, and mostly focused at the senior management level. This approach fell short of enabling the creation of sustainable, integrated and collaborative organisations. Instead, some of the professionals that participated in our study tried to develop spaces that facilitated ongoing dialogue and mutual support among professionals on the ground.

Initiatives of bottom-up OD such as those described in this paper have greater potential to change working routines as they enable staff to move towards more collaborative and coordinated work.

These findings contribute to the literature on OD in public services and highlight the benefits of a context-sensitive, pragmatic, and long-term approach to OD to help create sustainable collaborative organisations.

The effects of the spread of COVID-19 across the world are devastating, both from a health and an economic perspective. However, we also see encouraging examples of collaborative and innovative initiatives, in society and in organizations. The purpose of this paper is to focus on initiatives related to digital business model innovation. The authors explore how organizational characteristics provide a variety of opportunities for digital responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and discuss the potential consequences for the speed of digital transformation in organizations and society.

In this paper, the authors analyze how organizations attempt to mitigate the negative effects of fighting COVID-19 using digital business model responses. The authors draw on a qualitative study where they have collected data from the retail and service industries. They have analyzed the data in relation to theory to better understand this ongoing phenomenon.

The authors have identified four categories of organizations (crisispreneurs, accelerators, endurers and thrivers). Each category faces different challenges and shows a different intensity in their digital transformation. The authors propose that the rapid turn toward digital business models will have enduring effects, as organizations have gained transformational capabilities that will remain, and that the digital trajectory has, as a result, changed forever.

The findings in this paper point toward new challenges for leaders and policymakers in terms of how to support initiatives and meet the needs of different categories of organizations while simultaneously being conscious of the potential societal effects of this rapid digital shift. The authors hope that this paper can be of value for managing this shock and learning how to adapt for the future taking certain aspects of current business models as the departure point.

This paper aims to contribute to discussion around the need for improved models for change in a rapidly changing world. It also aims to provide insights for further discussion around how a Nordic management approach can relate to the need for new change ideas. Since Lewin proposed that change requires unfreezing, moving and refreezing, several changes in models have been introduced. Many models include similar factors such as the need for a vision, a clear process and to motivate change. These change factors are investigated in this paper and related to a fast-paced, uncertain and volatile environment

Based on a collaborative research approach, engaging with leaders in five organizations, all headquartered in the Nordic countries, this paper examines problems with traditional change models in a contemporary context as well as how these challenges could be handled.

This paper concludes that leaders still find value in traditional models but see that these models need to be adapted to include elements of more recent research. This paper suggests tweaks in traditional change factors and ends with a proposition with a renewed model for change.

The ideas in this paper could be seen as a bridge between traditional and modern models – a bridge that seems to be needed in practice. It draws on action research and close relationships with top management, as they are working with change – potentially giving the study a unique angle on a practical, widespread problem: succeeding with change

In today’s business world, competition is no longer about resources accumulated, but the emphasis is now placed more on the actual accumulation and utilization of knowledge within the organization. Attention has shifted drastically from just acquiring wealth in the organization to an era where knowledge and learning within the organization becomes more critical and important to the organizational survival and continuous growth as put forward by this paper. This paper investigated the effect of organizational learning and effectiveness on operations, employee productivity and management performance. This paper aims to add to scholarly works and knowledge on organizational learning.

Random and stratified sampling techniques were used. Data collection was done with the use of a questionnaire and analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis and hierarchical multiple regression.

The result from the data analyzed shows that there is a positive relationship between organizational learning and effectiveness, operations, employees’ productivity and management performance suggesting that organization learning impact is encompassing because it affects and influences the effectiveness and efficiency of all the staff at every level within the organization.

Organizations should strive and do everything possible to ensure organizational learning because this study is in an era where knowledge and learning within the organization are more critical and important to organizational survival and continuous growth.

The study demonstrates that the only way to fast-track growth in every sphere of the organization is to ensure organizational learning as it influences the effectiveness and efficiency of all the staff at every level within the organization.

The purpose of this paper is to examine pro-poor urban asset adaptation to climate variability and change. It constructs a conceptual framework that explores the appropriate asset adaptation strategies for extreme poor households as well as the process of supporting these households and groups in accumulating these assets.

Qualitative data are obtained from life histories, key informant interviews (KIIs) and focus-group discussions (FGDs). These data are collected, coded and themed.

This research identifies that households among the urban extreme poor do their best to adapt to perceived climate changes; however, in the absence of savings, and access to credit and insurance, they are forced to adopt adverse coping strategies. Individual adaptation practices yield minimal results and are short lived and even harmful because the urban extreme poor are excluded from formal policies and institutions as they lack formal rights and entitlements. For the poorest, the process of facilitating and maintaining patron–client relationships is a central coping strategy. Social policy approaches are found to be effective in facilitating asset adaptation for the urban extreme poor because they contribute to greater resilience to climate change.

This study analyses the empirical evidence through the lens of a pro-poor asset-adaptation framework. It shows that the asset-transfer approach is an effective in building household-adaptation strategies. Equally important is the capacity to participate in and influence the institutions from which these people have previously been excluded.

The purpose of this paper is to revisit the scholarly impact agenda in the context of work-based and workplace research, and to propose new directions for research and practice.

This paper combines a contemporary literature review with case vignettes and reflections from practice to develop more nuanced understandings, and highlights future directions for making sense of impact in the context of work-based learning research approaches.

This paper argues that three dimensions to making sense of impact need to be more nuanced in relation to workplace research: interactional elements of workplace research processes have the potential for discursive pathways to impact, presence (and perhaps non-action) can act as a pathway to impact, and the narrative nature of time means that there is instability in making sense of impact over time.

The paper proposes a number of implications for practitioner-researchers, universities/research organisations, and focusses on three key areas: the amplification of research ethics in workplace research, the need for axiological shifts towards sustainability and the need to explicate axiological orientation in research.

This paper offers a contemporary review of the international impact debate in the specific context of work-based and workplace research approaches.

Drawing on Bandura’s social learning theory (SLT), the purpose of this paper is to investigate, analytically, the impact that after-training skills level (i.e. perceived skill match) has on change self-efficacy. Moreover, this research also aims to identify which specific skills sets (if any) act as a protective factor during organizational change, supporting the change confidence (CC) level of the people involved.

Quantitative research was carried out on a sample of 200 workers in the bank sector.

Findings of this study suggest that skill match has a significant impact on the CC level. Furthermore, this study demonstrates that, even in front-office jobs, a perceived skill match of soft skills does not have a significant impact on staff CC, unlike that suggested by common sense and by literature.

Future research should investigate if and how a training process enables change self-efficacy over time or instead shows its utility only when it is relating to a specific and limited period.

This study suggests that in designing training, top and middle management should pay specific attention to change recipients’ needs by adopting a bottom-up approach. Moreover, to improve training effectiveness, it would be advisable to also train change recipients’ supervisors.

This study has social implications in suggesting how to foster the adaptive capabilities of change recipients in current turbulent times. In doing so, it suggests how to prevent some undesirable change consequences such as anxiety, intention to quit, work-related stress and change cynicism.

This paper shows that, from a methodological point of view, it is necessary to evaluate training effectiveness at the level of a specific skill area and not simply by comparing the trained/not trained people, as typically practiced until now.

This paper aims to focus on research regarding organizational learning (OL) and knowledge management (KM), and to specifically investigate whether OL has been conceptually absorbed by KM.

This study is based on 16,185 articles from the Scopus and ISI Web of Science databases, using VantagePoint 10.0 software. The method used in this study is a systematic literature review covering KM and OL publications from the 1970s, when the OL field started to grow, up to 2016.

Nuclear processes of OL, creation and acquisition of knowledge, have been conceptually absorbed by KM literature in the past years.

Only two databases have been considered, Scopus and ISI Web of Science, because of their academic prestige. However, these databases include a large number of articles on KM and OL. Search terms used could exclude some relevant terms, although all major descriptive terms have been included.

This paper identifies thematic clusters in KM and OL, evolution of both fields, most cited authors and representative journals by topic.

This is the first paper to jointly analyse the evolution of KM and OL. This paper shows a conceptual absorption of OL into KM, which may enrich academic discussion and also provide some clarity to the conceptualization of these two fields.

This study aims to explore the relationship between work–life balance and employee retention by examining the mediating role of psychological empowerment among software firms based in India.

The study collected 283 responses by using a structured questionnaire and interview method. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to validate the hypothesized research model for examining the consistency and sturdiness of the study variables by applying AMOS 20.

The result reveals that psychological empowerment partially mediates the relationship between work–life balance and the retention of professionals. This indicates that a high degree of psychological empowerment strengthens the relations between work–life balance and the retention of professionals.

The research outlined a best-fit model of psychological empowerment as a partial mediator among work–life balance and the retention of professionals. The study presents a set of sensible and practical aspects where work–life balance and retention of professionals can aid in developing and generating commitment to the organization which could offer new insights for software professionals, managers and practitioners.

This study emphasized that psychological empowerment helps in enhancing dedication, loyalty, integrity, allegiance and trustworthiness among employees, thus playing a role between work–life balance and the retention of professionals.

The purpose of this paper is to describe a qualitative observational study of how middle managers in healthcare in the UK on a work-based masters programme in leadership were introduced to foundational aspects of creativity and delivering innovation through an assignment on contemporary architectural design.

The assignment involved individual research of a recent architectural design followed by group poster presentations of findings and structured analysis. No prior knowledge of design was required. An activity theory approach was used to explore common principles of creativity and leading innovation, key features of design processes and tools for facilitating implementation.

A total of 89 managers in seven cohorts completed the assignment. Data from process records and group work, artefacts and follow-up evaluation questionnaires were analysed within an interpretive approach. Analysis of data lent support for the view that exploring architectural design as an activity system helped participants to develop conceptual and applied links between management performance, creative collaboration and delivering innovation in their own, different field of practice. Where participants expressed limited self-efficacy regarding the capacity for fostering creativity, this was usually ascribed to systemic inhibitors.

Exploring architectural design could provide a relatively low-cost, highly stimulating component of management development programmes seeking to harness the contribution of creative industries to foster work-based creativity and innovation.

This study explores a novel use of architectural design within the context of work-applied development programmes for healthcare managers.