dc.description.abstract |
Recent decades have seen a sustained growth of interest from academics and
practicing managers in structural change in the contemporary workplace. Some
of this attention has been directed at the implementation of initiatives of
planned organizational change, often involving newer information and
communications technologies, and often conceived and labelled by managers
as projects. Most empirical studies of projects of organizational change have
been concerned with the promotion of universal guides to management success
and, by implication, to organizational prosperity. The bias towards generalized
prescriptions for performance and management ‘best practice’ has been
accompanied by a relative shortage of context-bound studies intended to reveal
the reality of the nature and role of the project concept in relation to
organizational change. The purpose of this study is to contribute to
understanding of what change project management processes are adopted and,
further, how they are determined by the characteristics of an organization.
In pursuit of this broad aim the research takes a grounded, theory-generating
approach. The foundation of the research design is a series of case studies of
projects of change in four UK organizations in contrasting sectors. The main
source of data is unstructured audio-taped interviews with ‘change drivers’ -
those managers responsible for the conception and implementation of the
projects. The constant comparative method of qualitative analysis is used to
compare and contrast instances of expressions of managerial action or intent
which arise from managers’ attention to contextual considerations. Data
reduction is carried out in three stages, each representing a progressively higher
level of theoretical abstraction.
The findings of the research are expressed as an integrated theory and a series
of propositions, generalized within the boundaries of the study, relating
management process to context via a set of intermediate variables representing
the extent to which the change drivers feel in control of the change. The
conclusions may be summarized in three statements. First, drivers of projects
of organizational change apply a general repertoire of six common
management processes, each of which is employed to a greater or lesser extent
at any time. Second, the extent of enaction of each process element may be
considered as an expression of the change drivers’ possession or pursuit of
personal control over the change. Third, feelings of personal control are partly
determined by managers’ attention to selected issues which arise from key
characteristics of the organization and its sector. |
en |