Restructuring within GE to Facilitate Strategic Change: A Self‐design Process Approach

Exonomic and competitive pressures have largely caused leaner and more responsive organisations to become the primary objectives of organisational designers over the past decade. Most of these initiatives, though, have been aimed at senior management levels and have yielded mixed results. Self‐design is a strategic restructuring alternative that can potentially overcome many of the liabilities of traditional design approaches and help engender employee commitment to today′s flatter, more decentralised organisation. Though there are many prescriptions evolving from conceptualisations of the self‐designing organisation, there are very few successful examples of self‐design in practice, especially as a strategic change management tool. This case study is intended to help fill this void and intertwine theory with the practice of self‐design.