Management processes in projects of organizational change: case studies from four industries

Recent decades have seen a sustained growth of interest from academics andpracticing managers in structural change in the contemporary workplace. Someof this attention has been directed at the implementation of initiatives ofplanned organizational change, often involving newer information andcommunications technologies, and often conceived and labelled by managersas projects. Most empirical studies of projects of organizational change havebeen concerned with the promotion of universal guides to management successand, by implication, to organizational prosperity. The bias towards generalizedprescriptions for performance and management ‘best practice’ has beenaccompanied by a relative shortage of context-bound studies intended to revealthe reality of the nature and role of the project concept in relation toorganizational change. The purpose of this study is to contribute tounderstanding 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-generatingapproach. The foundation of the research design is a series of case studies ofprojects of change in four UK organizations in contrasting sectors. The mainsource of data is unstructured audio-taped interviews with ‘change drivers’ -those managers responsible for the conception and implementation of theprojects. The constant comparative method of qualitative analysis is used tocompare and contrast instances of expressions of managerial action or intentwhich arise from managers’ attention to contextual considerations. Datareduction is carried out in three stages, each representing a progressively higherlevel of theoretical abstraction.The findings of the research are expressed as an integrated theory and a seriesof propositions, generalized within the boundaries of the study, relatingmanagement process to context via a set of intermediate variables representingthe extent to which the change drivers feel in control of the change. Theconclusions may be summarized in three statements. First, drivers of projectsof organizational change apply a general repertoire of six commonmanagement processes, each of which is employed to a greater or lesser extentat any time. Second, the extent of enaction of each process element may beconsidered as an expression of the change drivers’ possession or pursuit ofpersonal control over the change. Third, feelings of personal control are partlydetermined by managers’ attention to selected issues which arise from keycharacteristics of the organization and its sector.