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In some organizations action is taken to stimulate creativity and innovation. The right steps may have been taken, such as involving employees in decision making, recruiting and appointing employees who evidence characteristics of creativity, setting standards for work performance and giving regular feedback, yet creativity and innovation are hampered in some way. The culture of an organization may be a factor contributing to the extent to which creativity and innovation occur in an organization (Johnson, 1996; Judge et al., 1997; Pienaar, 1994; Shaughnessy, 1988; Tesluk et al., 1997; Tushman & O’Reilly, 1997 in Martins & Terblanche, 2003). The current organizational culture and the demands of creativity and innovation may lead to a conflict situation.

This study develops the concept of achieved identity and examines its role in employee adjustment during times of organizational change. Specifically we examined the effects of achieved identity in a sample of food service employees at a southern university in the United States whose jobs were outsourced to a new organization. In this initial study, we found that: achieved identity was predictive of employees’ attachment to the pre-change employer; expected transfer of achieved identity was predictive of the transfer of work identities to the post-change environment; the ability to reestablish a positive work identity was important to employee adjustment to change. Using results obtained in this initial study, we develop a revised model of the role of achieved identity in organizational change.

This chapter reports on the “CEO’s-eye-view” of the 1990 financial crisis at Citibank using unique data from CEO John Reed’s private archives. This qualitative analysis sheds light on questions that have perennially plagued executives and intrigued scholars: How do organizations change routines in order to overcome inertia in the face of radical change in the environment? And, specifically, what is the role of the CEO in this process? Inertial behavior in such circumstances has been attributed to ingrained routines that are based on cognitive and motivational truces. Routines are performed because organizational participants find them to cohere to a particular cognitive frame about what should be done (the cognitive dimension) and to resolve conflicts about what gets rewarded or sanctioned (the motivational dimension). The notion of a “truce” explains how routines are “routinely” activated. Routines are inertial because the dissolution of the truce would be inconsistent with frames held by organizational participants and fraught with the risk of unleashing unmanageable conflict among interests in the organization. Thus, the challenge for the CEO in making intended change is both to break the existing truce and to remake a new one. In this study, I uncover how the existing organizational truce led to the crisis at Citibank, why Reed’s initial attempts to respond failed, and how he ultimately found ways to break out of the old truce and establish new routines that helped the bank survive. These findings offer insight into the cognitive and motivational microfoundations of macro theories about organizational response to radical change.

This chapter provides a review and extension of research pertaining to the respective roles of leaders, managers, and human resource management (HRM) practices on employee reactions to organizational change. Particular focus is given to the differential effects of these factors on employee commitment and resistance to change. A review of organizational change research between 2001 and 2011 revealed these outcomes to be two of the most commonly studied and consequential employee reactions to change. The review also demonstrates that research lacks precision in the treatment (conceptualization and measurement) of these constructs. For instance, sometimes the leadership and management of change are clearly differentiated, other times equated, and yet other times blurred. Arguments are presented that encourage researchers to refine theory and tests of leading and managing change, as well as their respective implications for change-related HRM. A specific case is made for the academic and practical utility of theory and practice that explicitly integrates leadership and management roles and responsibilities. Doing so will more closely align with and capture the inherent complexity of organizational change and employees’ experience. The intent is to urge both scholars and practitioners of change to adopt broader, yet more precise and practical, perspectives on how to influence employee reactions and change outcomes. To this end, special attention is paid to roles of leaders, managers, and HRM practices.

Accounting for quality and improved organizational performance has recently received attention in management control research. However, the extent to which process innovation changes have been integrated into management control research is limited. This paper contributes to that integration by drawing from institutional adaptive theory of organizational change and process innovation strategies. The paper utilizes a 2 by 2 contingency table that uses two factors: environmental conditions and organizational change/learning strategies, to build a process innovation framework. A combination of these two factors yields four process innovation strategies: mechanistic, organic, organizational development (OD) and organizational transformation (OT).

The four process innovation typologies are applied to characterize innovations in accounting such as activity based costing (ABC). ABC has been discussed as a multi-phased innovation process that provides an environment where both the initiation and the implementation of accounting change can occur. Technical innovation can be successfully initiated as organic innovation that unfolds in a decentralized organization and requires radical change and double loop learning. Implementation occurs best as a mechanistic innovation in a hierarchical organization and involving incremental change and single loop learning. The paper concludes that if ABC is integrated into an OD or OT intervention strategy, the technical and administrative innovation aspects of ABC can be utilized to manage the organization’s operating activities.

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.

The presence and practice of individual and organizational humility has the power to enable organizational growth and change. Humility drives behaviors associated with learning and the ability to embrace the value of existing mental models while valuing the insights offered by new perspectives and approaches. This paradox-savvy practice, observed in humble individuals and organizations, allows them to appropriately value what is working about the existing system while simultaneously embracing the need for change. Our research finds humble behaviors emerging within psychologically safe environments that foster an attitude of inquiry, kinship, extraordinary collaboration, and professional excellence. Humble behaviors, at every organizational level, appear to enhance both individual and group capabilities that drive long term strategic advantage. Five capabilities were identified in our research: diverse networks, shared values, flexibility and adaptability, judgment and decision-making, and organizational learning. We bring these concepts to life by synthesizing established and emerging research, as well as diving deeply into an empirical case study that leverages humble practices in order to effectively drive organizational change. We argue that humility can impact organizing at all levels (individuals, leaders, followers, teams, executives, and organizations) and in so doing create the conditions in which sustainable organizational change can flourish.

This paper seeks to develop a mid-range theory of how change recipient sensemaking processes affect the realization of strategic flexibility during simultaneous change in professional service firms.

The research presented is based on an exploratory embedded case study adopting a qualitative interpretive methodology, conducted at a professional service organization. A sensemaking lens was adopted in order to study organizational change processes. Data was collected through semi-structured open-ended in-depth interviews, and analyzed using first and second order analysis, inspired by the methodology used by Corley and Gioia (2004).

We identified four determinants of change recipient sensemaking: professional identification, dominant organizational discourse, equivocality of expectations, and cross-understanding between thought worlds. Case findings indicate that cognitive and affective dimensions of change recipient sensemaking are strongly interwoven in their effect on realizing strategic flexibility.

We contribute to the competence-based strategic management literature by introducing the concept of change recipient sensemaking in understanding the realization of strategic flexibility; by identifying four major determinants in a context of simultaneous change in a professional service organization; and by highlighting the interwoven and mutually reinforcing cognitive and affective dimensions of professional’s process of constructing meaning.

Contemporary organizations are facing an operating environment characterized by volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous, and “permanent whitewater.” To sustain high performance in this context, organizations must be able to change and develop as efficiently and effectively as possible. Within organizations, there are actors who catalyze and advance change in this manner; these actors are known as “champions.” Yet the scholar who wishes to conduct research concerning champions of change and organizational development is likely to be met by a highly fragmented literature. Varying notions of champions are scattered throughout extant research, where authors of articles cite different sources when conceptualizing champions; often superficially. Furthermore, many types of highly specific and nuanced non-generalizable champions have proliferated, making it difficult for practitioners and researchers to discover useful findings on how to go about making meaningful changes in their context. The purpose of this study was to address these problems for practitioners and researchers by engendering thoroughness, clarity, and coherence within champion scholarship. This was done by conducting the first comprehensive, critical yet insightful review of the champion literature within the organizational sciences using content analysis to re-conceptualize champions and develop a meaningful typology from which the field can be advanced. The chapter first suggests a return to Schön (1963) as the basis from which to conceptualize champions and, second, offers a typology consisting of 10 meta-champions of organizational change and development – Collaboration, Human Rights, Innovation, Product, Project, Service, Strategic, Sustainability, Technology, and Venture Champions – from which change practice and future research can benefit.

The vast majority of interventions during organizational change tend to focus on individually-held attitudes toward change. However, groups often form collective attitudes that are distinct from those held by its individual members, and organizational change often necessitates collective attitude change within teams, work units, or even the entire organization. We challenge the dominant view that collective attitudes to organizational change merely reflect an aggregation of individual attitudes by considering how and why collectively-held change attitudes are formed and activated. Drawing on social network theory, we propose an alternative approach toward an understanding of change. Acknowledging and detailing attitude formation as a social response to change – a social system of interaction among change recipients – we explain how collective attitudes to organizational change emerge. With this stance, individuals may hold broad and differing attitudes, but as a group can come together to share a collective attitude toward change. Using this approach, we explain how collective attitudes and individual attitudes are linked through top-down or bottom-up processes, or a combination of both. Developing this alternative perspective improves our understanding of how collective attitudes to change develop and evolve and enables both scholars and practitioners to better manage and influence the formation of change-supportive collective attitudes.