Improving integration between functional groups: A case in organization change and implications for theory and practice

1971 ◽  
Author(s):  
Warren G. Bennis ◽  
Michael Beer ◽  
Gerald R. Pieters ◽  
Alan T. Hundert ◽  
Samuel H. Marcus ◽  
...  

Organizational change and innovation are central and enduring issues in management theory and practice. The need to understand processes of organization change and innovation has never been greater in order to respond to dramatic changes in population demographics, technology, stakeholder needs, competitive survival, and social, economic, environmental, health, and sustainability concerns. These concerns call for a better understanding of managing organization change and innovation. Why and what organizations change is generally well known; how organizations change is the central focus of this handbook. It focuses on processes of change, or the sequence of events in which organizational characteristics and activities change and develop over time, and the factors that influence these processes, with the organization as the central unit of analysis. Across the diverse and wide-ranging contributions, three central questions evolve: what is the nature of change and process; what are the key concepts and models for understanding organization change and innovation; and how we should study change and innovation. This handbook presents critical evolving scholarship and explores its implications for future research and practice on organizational change and innovation.


Author(s):  
W. Warner Burke

Grounded in open system theory this chapter covers the primary contributions to our understanding of organization change since the early work of Kurt Lewin in the 1930s and 40s. Two areas of interest represented the theory and practice back then and since—what to change and how to change organizations. Most models of organizations covered both. Regarding the what models, the organization’s external environment, its strategy, culture, and structure are examples of what has been included. The how models developed mostly from practice with learning coming from experience about stages of the change process such as gathering data, diagnosis, developing a vision and communicating it, etc. The latter part of the chapter brings organization change thinking up to date with three articles that have reviewed considerable literatures. These reviews provide significant information regarding organization change that is evidence based, the importance of an organization’s history in terms of its relevance to effective change, and how leadership has a direct impact on organization change.


Author(s):  
Mathew J. Klempa

This chapter presents a perspective on web technologies acquisition, utilization, organization change and transformation grounded in Gidden’s theory of structuration, i.e., a contextualist analysis. A contextualist analysis is processually based, emergent, situational, and holistic, marrying both theory and practice. This chapter’s paradigm affords a substantive analytical tool to the practitioner for understanding and managing not only web-based IT acquisition, utilization and organization change, but all IT-based recursive, organization changes and transformations. Organization change associated with IT acquisition and utilization is posited as concomitantly necessary. Organization change is recursive, dynamic, multilevel, and nonlinear, i.e., an “enacted” environment. Ever present organization opposing values are treated dialectically, i.e. as paradox, operating simultaneously. The nature of the resolution of such paradox enabled/inhibits reframing, i.e., organization transformation and change. The paradigm presented defines an organization change continuum, delineating four organization responses to contradiction and paradox. The chapter explicates organization culture and organization learning as systemic, multiplicative metaforce underpinnings of organization change and sociocognitively-based, recursive, structurational processual dynamics. The chapter discusses use of the IT acquisition and utilization paradigm for organization diagnosis as well as customization of organization change interventions. The chapter suggests further typologically-based research venues.


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