Understanding Organizational Change

This exciting new text fills the gap in the management literature on organizational change. It presents a balanced view, which raises questions about the imperative of change, who’s interests are being served, how change programmes impact on employees and why organizations continually engage in such programmes. It gives readers a comprehensive history of: change management literature types of change techniques over time (i.e. TQM, BPR, Balanced Scorecard, Six Sigma, etc.) the role of management gurus in the rise and fall of management fashions the impact of organizational change on organizational members. The authors provide case vignettes of companies from both sides of the Atlantic, which have undergone some of the better-known change techniques, and explore the reasons for their successes and failures. This is an innovative and important new text for students of organizational behaviour, organizational change, strategy and HRM.

Every leader understands the burning need for change–and every leader knows how risky it is, and how often it fails. To make organizational change work, you need to base it on science, not intuition. Despite hundreds of books on change, failure rates remain sky high. Are there deep flaws in the guidance change leaders are given? While eschewing the pat answers, linear models, and change recipes offered elsewhere, Paul Gibbons offers the first blueprint for change that fully reflects the newest advances in mindfulness, behavioral economics, the psychology of risk-taking, neuroscience, mindfulness, and complexity theory. Change management, ostensibly the craft of making change happen, is rife with myth, pseudoscience, and flawed ideas from pop psychology. In Gibbons’ view, change management should be “euthanized” and replaced with change agile businesses, with change leaders at every level. To achieve that, business education and leadership training in organizations needs to become more accountable for real results, not just participant satisfaction (the “edutainment” culture). Twenty-first century change leaders need to focus less on project results, more on creating agile cultures and businesses full of staff who have “get to” rather than “have to” attitudes. To do that, change leaders will have to leave behind the old paradigm of “carrots and sticks,” both of which destroy engagement. “New analytics” offer more data-driven approaches to decision making, but present a host of people challenges—where petabyte information flows meet traditional decision-making structures. These approaches will have to be complemented with “leading with science”—that is, using evidence-based management to inform strategy and policy decisions. In The Science of Successful Organizational Change , you'll learn: How the VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous) world affects the scale and pace of change in today’s businesses How understanding of flaws in human decision-making can help leaders guide their teams toward wiser strategic decisions when the stakes are largest—including “when to trust your guy and when to trust a model” and “when all of us are smarter than one of us” How new advances in neuroscience have altered best practices in influencing colleagues; negotiating with partners; engaging followers' hearts, minds, and behaviors; and managing resistance How leading organizations are making use of the science of mindfulness to create agile learners and agile cultures How new ideas from analytics, forecasting, and risk are humbling those who thought they knew the future–and how the human side of analytics and the psychology of risk are paradoxically more important in this technologically enabled world What complexity theory means for decision-making in the context of your own business How to create resilient and agile business cultures and anti-fragile, dynamic business structures To link science with your "on-the-ground" reality, Gibbons tells “warts and all” stories from his twenty-plus years consulting to top teams and at the largest businesses in the world. You'll find case studies from well-known companies like IBM and Shell and CEO interviews from Nokia and Barclays Bank.

Eschewing the hyperbole of many current management books Patrick Dawson uses the views and experiences of people from the shop floor to the upper reaches of executive management to further our understanding of complex organizational change processes.

Eschewing the hyperbole of many current management books Patrick Dawson uses the views and experiences of people from the shop floor to the upper reaches of executive management to further our understanding of complex organizational change processes.

One of the major challenges facing organization studies has been for a long time to develop an operational content to the notion of routines . This book offers important advances in this direction, both conceptually and through illuminating case studies. Giovanni Dosi, Sant Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, Italy This book showcases advanced empirical research that applies the concept of organizational routines to understanding organizations and how they change and evolve. The contributions gathered in the book cover qualitative, quantitative, and archival methods for empirical research applying the concept of organizational routines. Specific issues highlighted include the use of event-sequence methods in the analysis of organizational routines, the impact of standard operating procedures on recurrent behaviour patterns, and the stability, resilience, and change of organizational routines. The book thus provides an overview of different empirical methods applied to study organizational routines, and of their prerequisites, analytical power, and contribution. This comprehensive book will be of great interest to scholars and postgraduate students in the fields of organization theory, strategy, and organization behaviour. Researchers in organization, management and economic science, organizational change and evolutionary theories will also find this book invaluable.

Organizations change. They grow, they adapt, they evolve. The effects of organizational change are important, varied and complex and analyzing and understanding them is vital for students, academics and researchers in all business schools. The Routledge Companion to Organizational Change offers a comprehensive and authoritative overview of the field. The volume brings together the very best contributors not only from the field of organizational change, but also from adjacent fields, such as strategy and leadership. These contributors offer fresh and challenging insights to the mainstream themes of this discipline. Surveying the state of the discipline and introducing new, cutting-edge themes, this book is a valuable reference source for students and academics in this area.

In today's complex work world, things no longer get done simply because someone issues an order and someone else follows it.Most of us work in socially intricate organizations where we need the help not only of subordinates but of colleagues, superiors, and outsiders to accomplish our goals. This often leaves us in a "power gap" because we must depend on people over whom we have little or no explicit control.This is a book about how to bridge that gap: how to exercise the power and influence you need to get things done through others when your responsibilities exceed your formal authority.Full of original ideas and expert insights about how organizations—and the people in them—function,Power and Influencegoes further, demonstrating that lower-level personnel also need strong leadership skills and interpersonal know-how to perform well.Kotter shows how you can develop sufficient resources of "unofficial" power and influence to achieve goals, steer clear of conflicts, foster creative team behavior, and gain the cooperation and support you need from subordinates, coworkers, superiors—even people outside your department or organization.He also shows how you can avoid the twin traps of naivete and cynicism when dealing with power relationships, and how to use your power without abusing it.Power and Influenceis essential for top managers who need to overcome the infighting, foot-dragging, and politicking that can destroy both morale and profits; for middle managers who don't want their careers sidetracked by unproductive power struggles; for professionals hindered by bureaucratic obstacles and deadline delays; and for staff workers who have to "manage the boss."This is not a book for those who want to "grab" power for their own ends. But if you'd like to create smooth, responsive working relationships and increase your personal effectiveness on the job, Kotter can show you how—and make the dynamics of power work for you instead of against you.

Applies an invaluable sensemaking framework to organizational change in both a practical and accessible way, to present an instructive and informative view on the implications of change in the business world today.