Effects of organizational change on creativity in the conceptual phase of engineering design

摘要

Change, organisational and technological, is normally implemented by means of deterministic, systems analytic methods. However, the success rate of such change has been shown to be surprisingly low, at least in the UK. A primary reason for this has been identified as insufficient attention being given to the human issues associated with the change. This paper presents a case study based in a major UK aerospace engineering company which shows the adverse effect of organisational and technological change on the creativity of design engineers. The grounded theory research methods used for the case study represent a development beyond the recent trend towards the use of ethnography as part of systems analysis, and have been effective in obtaining a quantified picture of phenomena revealed using naturalistic techniques.