Creating a Sustainable Approach to Change: Building Organizational Change Capacity

摘要

IntroductionrnA basic reality of the 21st century is that organizations and managements are faced with unrelenting demands for change. Companies in every industry are increasingly challenged to both respond to and anticipate continuously changing competitive, market, technological, economic, and social conditions to the point where change is described as the "new normal" (J0rgensen, Owen, and Neus, 2008). Yet, despite this and a virtual explosion of research and managerial attention devoted to conceptualizing and empirically testing a range of change management practices (cf. Abrahamson, 2000; Armenakis and Harris, 2002, 2009; Beer, Eisenstat and Spector, 1990; de Caluwe and Vermaak, 2002; Higgs and Rowland, 2005; Kerber and Buono, 2005; King and Wright, 2007; Kotter, 1996; Kotter and Cohen, 2002), successful organizational change often remains elusive. A global business study by McKinsey underscores this problem, noting that only one-third of organizational change initiatives were viewed as successful by their leaders (Meaney and Pung, 2008). As a recent IBM white paper study suggests, the "change gap" (i.e., the gap between an organization's expectation of change and its history of successfully managing it) has increased significantly over the past few years (see J0rgensen, et al, 2008).