In organizational change, there is a debate in the literature about the benefits of proactive versus reactive change efforts. Your instructor will

A theoretical framework of organizational change

Gabriele Jacobs Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam,

The Netherlands

Arjen van Witteloostuijn University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium, Tilburg University, Tilburg,

The Netherlands, and Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands, and

Jochen Christe-Zeyse Fachhochschule der Polizei Brandenburg, Brandenburg, Germany

Abstract

Purpose – Organizational change is a risky endeavour. Most change initiatives fall short on their goals and produce high opportunity and process costs, which at times outweigh the content benefits of organizational change. This paper seeks to develop a framework, offering a theoretical toolbox to analyze context-dependent barriers and enablers of organizational change. Starting from an organizational identity perspective, it aims to link contingency-based approaches, such as environmental scan, SWOT and stakeholder analysis, with insights from organizational behaviour research, such as knowledge sharing and leadership.

Design/methodology/approach – The framework is informed by long-lasting field research into organizational change in an international policing environment. The theories in the framework are selected from the perspective of field validity in two ways; they were chosen because the topics covered by these theories emerged as relevant during the field research and therefore it can be expected they have applicability to the field. The authors’ insights and suggestions are summarised in 13 propositions throughout the text.

Findings – The analysis provides a clear warning that organizational change is more risky and multifaceted than change initiators typically assume. It is stressed that the external environment and the internal dynamics of organizations co-determine the meaning of managerial practices. This implies that cure-all recipes to organizational change are bound to fail.

Originality/value – This paper makes an ambitious attempt to cross disciplinary boundaries in the field of organizational change research to contribute to a more comprehensive and holistic understanding of change processes by integrating perspectives that focus on the internal context and the external environment of organizations.

Keywords Organizational change, Contingency analysis, Culture, Leadership, Environmental scan, Police, Public security, Public management, International environment, Costs of change, Policing

Paper type Research paper

Organizational change as a risky strategy Organizational change is omnipresent, being the raison d’être of the consultancy industry (Sorge and van Witteloostuijn, 2004). Modern organization sciences have

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The authors would like to thank the project partners for their contribution to this work. This research is partially funded by the European Commission in the context of the COMPOSITE project (FP7 contract no. 241918).

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Received 3 September 2012 Revised 21 December 2012 Accepted 11 May 2013

Journal of Organizational Change Management Vol. 26 No. 5, 2013 pp. 772-792 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 0953-4814 DOI 10.1108/JOCM-09-2012-0137

produced a large amount of insights into a wide variety of issues related to organizational change. And of course, consultancies successfully launch new organizational change “products” all the time. However, organizational change is still often associated with failure. A case in point is the persistently high number of merger and acquisition deals that fail in the post-integration stage (totalling approximately 70 per cent) or the (circa) 30 per cent that fail before consummation (see, e.g. Dikova et al., 2010; Muehlfeld et al., 2012; Brakman et al., 2013). Most organizational change projects, of course, deal with less impactful issues than mergers and acquisitions, where negative effects may be expected to be less threatening to organizational survival than M&A deals gone awry. Yet, change projects with a smaller scope are also prone to poor planning, disappointing results and unintended consequences that divert resources from operational tasks, disrupt well-established routines, and shatter the trust of employees and business partners alike.

Organizational change theories need to negotiate two hurdles: scholarly quality and practical relevance (Pettigrew et al., 2001). Key questions in research on organizational change are: Why do so many organizational change initiatives fail to deliver? And how can organizational change processes be implemented in a way that assures success? Organizational change is a notoriously complex phenomenon; it is only natural that research on organizational change addressed this complexity from numerous more or less complementary or contradictory, but equally legitimate perspectives. These perspectives stretch across disciplinary boundaries, across methodological camps, and often across contradictory visions of organizations. The result is a debilitating fragmentation of theories of organizational change, with widely different perspectives – sometimes complementary, but sometimes contradictory – blossom side by side in the large organizational change literature. One angle to illustrate this state of fragmentation is that of the level of aggregation: micro (individuals) and, meso (groups and organizations) and macro (organizational environment and populations of organizations).

The fragmented nature of the field of organizational change research Some research focuses on a micro perspective, analyses the psychological aspects of organizational change, focusing on what organizational change does to human beings – typically to change recipients. Examples involve attitudes to change in general (Vakola and Nikolaou, 2005), perceptions of change (Weber and Weber, 2001), strategies coping with uncertainty (DiFonzo and Bordia, 1998), and organizational change induced stress.

Another research tradition takes the meso perspective. This perspective addresses issues relating to the organizational context of organizational change, as well as how organizational change affects and is affected by organizational identification and institutionalisation processes. Examples are research on group processes and social identities (van Leeuwen et al., 2003), and Selznick’s seminal book Leadership in Administration. In this line of research, organization-level taken-for-granted values and default expectations play critical explanatory roles.

A third line of research looks at organizational change from a macro perspective, adopting the lens of sociology’s organizational ecology to study structural reproducibility and organizational inertia, the effects of (early) imprinting and organizational change on the organization’s fitness and competitiveness, and ultimately on the mortality hazard of organizations. The primary focus is on how

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these issues work out in populations of similar organizations. Hannan and Freeman (1984), Hannan et al. (2004) or Hannan and Baron (2002) illustrate this research tradition.

Another angle that reveals the state of fragmentation of the organizational change literature is that of disciplines, as already hinted at previously. The academic disciplines that are typically called on include (but are not at all restricted to) social psychology, sociology and economics. From a more applied perspective, the rich literature on organizational change is typically scattered across organizational behaviour (Oreg et al., 2011) and strategic perspectives on organizational change (Schwarz and Huber, 2008). These different disciplines adopt a rather narrow focus, concentrating on the workplace and individual aspects of organizations, on the one hand (Herscovitch and Meyer, 2002; Jacobs et al., 2008), and the performance-survival aspects of organizations, on the other hand (Barney, 1991; Donaldson, 2001; North, 1990). Since these disciplines themselves are subdivided into many different schools of thought, it is understandable that the “theories” of organizational change offered in these disciplines are fragmented to the extreme.

Even though the field developed clear and useful distinctions, such as the separation of content and process effects of organizational change (Barnett and Carroll, 1995), this welcome clarity resulted in further fragmentation of theories, since the strategy literature primarily focuses on the (allegedly) beneficial, and highly organization and environment-specific content effects, and emphasises the need for flexibility and adaptability, while others are interested in the predominantly negative, and not organization-specific, process effects, assuming that the content effect of the change are, at best, randomly positive or negative.

There is little consensus on how to evaluate organizational change processes: Is it appropriate to focus mainly on perceptions of change recipients, like psychological research does (Oreg et al., 2011)? Should one, like Hannan and Freeman (1984), pay attention to the overall wellbeing, fitness or more precisely mortality hazard of the organization and see how change in general influences these? Or should one primarily be concerned with the effects of change on the talent pool of the organization, such as in Baron et al. (2001)? Would it be more appropriate to look at the speed of the implementation of the change, since the speed drives the opportunity costs of the organizational change, or will a focus on the relationship between change in the employment blueprints and the economic outcomes, such as growth or the time between founding and the initial public offering as in Hannan and Baron (2002), generate more valuable insights?

Many of these studies yielded valuable insights, and the value of these insights is responsible for the temptation researchers are exposed to: Borrow from these theory fragments in order to generate novel explanations and derive valuable predictions. But it is not difficult to see that borrowing from separate theory fragments carries certain risks: The theory fragments briefly described previously are not always consistent with one another, and the complex explanations built on the insights they generate might lack coherence. The current paper attempts to carve out the set of insights that can be fruitfully combined with each other in a consistent manner so that they offer a logical basis for the propositions offered. In so doing, we illustrate how we can enter new ground by integrating arguments from different theory fragments in a way not done before, crossing disciplinary boundaries and developing a multi-level logic.

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Specifically, in this paper, we advocate an integration of organizational behaviour and strategic approaches to develop a single organizational change theory.

Towards an integrated organizational change theory We aim at enlarging our understanding of organizational change, by looking simultaneously through the individual-focused micro lens and the organization-oriented macro lens. Our framework explicitly relates to both the inside and the outside world of organizations, which makes the case for an interdisciplinary and multi-level approach to the study (and practice) of organizational change. In so doing, we link insights from micro-level theories of individual change acceptance to macro-level perspectives on the environment, with input from meso-level theories on leadership and organizational identity, implying that we bridge organizational change theories from psychological, sociological and economic perspectives. We are aware that we can in no way fully live up to our ambitious attempt, and that we need to select some limited theoretical insights from these different disciplines.

Our selection is, next to theoretical considerations, guided by an emergent understanding during our field research, where we identified theories addressing issues raised by practitioners in the field of organizational change. Our unified theory of organizational change is informed by three main observations of the nature of organizational change. First, organizational change is a risky strategy, as it is often related to the violation of an organization’s core cultural values and, potentially, the organization’s identity (Hannan et al., 2007). Therefore, we explicitly focus on the vital role of organizational identity to explain the successes and failures of organizational change. Second, the analysis of organizational change needs an approach that can account for the specifics of the organization in question. Yet, the organizational change industry is dominated by consultancies that offer universal solutions to organization-specific problems (Sorge and van Witteloostuijn, 2004). Scholars have noted that this tendency to rely on universal remedies is counterproductive (Ostrom, 2007). Therefore we incorporate a contingency perspective in our framework of organizational change, suggesting that it is important to identify the external and internal conditions needed to ensure the success of specific organizational change programmes in specific organizations and contexts.

Third, there is still a widespread habit within organizational change research to ignore the major influence of cross-country cultural and institutional differences. This is closely related to our second observation, and it has also been substantiated in organization theory and practice (Sorge, 2005). It boils down to the fact that what works in one organization, culture, or country, may well produce failure in another organization, culture, or country. Or, more subtly, practices that look similar across organizations, cultures, or countries on the surface often turn out to be very different if analysed more carefully. As Pettigrew et al. (2001) note, in a culturally diverse world, scholars of organizational change cannot continue to assume with a quiet heart, that the change patterns in their corner of the world reflect those experienced on a wider, global stage.

This does not imply that the overall logic of the theory we propose here is idiosyncratic, being tailored to each and every specific case – it is not. Rather, we believe that our framework is general, although the details of how things work out in practice are specific to the context. Even though two organizations might appear to be alike to analysts, they might have different audiences and, as a consequence, their

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identities might be very different. Such differences have important implications for the types of organizational change processes that are adopted, as well as the acceptance or resistance of specific change projects in different organizational contexts and among different parties. To bring to life our theoretical arguments, we decided to add propositions and examples. First, we formulate a series of 13 propositions that provide examples of core theoretical insights or insights that we believe are interesting to explore further in future work. This list of 13 propositions is by no means exhaustive, but we hope that it clarifies the kind of follow-up work we envision. Second, to put some real-world flesh to our theoretical argumentation, we illustrate our arguments with examples from police organization in a series of quotes. We do so because our theoretical framework is currently applied in the context of a large EU project on organizational change in police forces in ten European countries. In this paper’s discussion, we will introduce this project in a little more detail and illustrate how we put our theoretical framework into research practice.

Theoretical framework Our macro-lens brings a fundamental observation to the theoretical discussion that is often ignored by micro-level researchers: Organizational change does not emerge and evolve in splendid isolation. Stakeholders inside and outside of the organization tend to be heavily involved before, during and after the change process (Frooman, 1999). Our micro-lens, in turn, draws attention to the role of organizational members in organizational change, an aspect that is often overlooked by macro-level scholars of strategic management. We embed our analysis of internal organizational change processes in a larger cultural and institutional framework, focusing on differences across societies. To organize the arguments, we frame this process in a simple input-throughput-output model, as introduced in Figure 1.

Input relates to the antecedents of change (the period before the change), throughput to the process of change (during), and output to the consequences of change (after). The glue that binds all of these elements of our theoretical framework together is organizational identity and how this may be affected by organizational change. Therefore, before introducing our unified input-throughput-output framework, we first discuss this essential nexus between organizational identity and organizational change.

The effects of organizational change on organizational identity Following Albert and Whetten (1985), the organizational structure and the organizational culture, or architectural and cultural codes (Hannan et al., 2007), provide the answer to the basic question of (internal) organizational identity: “who are we as an organization?” These central, enduring and distinctive elements of an organization constitute the requirements for a shared belief structure, a set of more or less consensual expectations about “how an organization such as ours should behave in a situation like this” that makes consistent and coherent organizational action possible ( Jacobs et al., 2008; Van Rekom and Whetten, 2007).

Shared expectations can successfully influence, sometimes even orient, organizational action, because the formal procedures are typically incomplete and partial, and they cannot deal with all possible contingencies. So, answers to the question “What should we do in a situation like this?” are often derived from the common understanding of who we are as an organization, and default rules on “how an organization like ours should

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behave in a situation like this.” Taken-for-granted behavioural patterns, reflecting the distinction between expected and unexpected acceptable and non-acceptable behaviour, are key components of organizational identities (Ravasi and Schultz, 2006).

Some organizational changes are well aligned with the organizational identity, and do not go beyond a formalisation and refinement of already existing but not yet formalized practice. Others, however, are partially in conflict with organizational identities, while still others, are or can be experienced as fundamental challenges to valued organizational identities (Gioia et al., 2000; Van Knippenberg et al., 2002; Rousseau, 1998).

To the extent that individuals identify with their employing organization, the organizational identity reflects on how people see themselves – organizational membership and organizational identity are merged with the employees’ sense of self (Ashforth and Mael, 1989; Glynn, 2000; Van Knippenberg, 2000). Changes to the organization’s identity are therefore often experienced as threats to members’ individual identities (Dutton et al., 1994; Fiol, 2002; Jacobs et al., 2008).

When internal audiences such as groups of employees observe that the taken-for-granted expectations concerning an organization are not complied with, they often reduce their identification and loyalty to the organization. Hannan et al. refer to this as assigning lower grades of membership to the organization. Consequently, this internal audience will find offers of the organization intrinsically less appealing, contributing to HRM problems like sick leave and the potential inability of the organization to mobilize additional human resources. People value a sense of

Figure 1. A unified framework of

organizational change

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continuity of identity (Ravasi and Schultz, 2006) – a sense that across past, present and projected future they essentially are the same person or collective (i.e. organization) – and therefore often strongly resist organizational changes affecting this sense of continuity. Thus, a key challenge for change process leaders is to act, not only as change agents, but also as agents of continuity – a challenging balancing act indeed (Van Knippenberg et al., 2008).

Organizational identity not only matters for internal audiences such as employees, but also for external audiences. If stakeholders perceive code violations and if they recognise that their expectations are not met, the organization may lose legitimacy in the eyes of key external audiences. This can have serious consequences as some stakeholders may control vital resources. In the case of police forces, politicians may reduce their political support if the police fail to perform according to the expectations of the public, or the media may undermine public trust in the police by focussing on perceived failures or violations in standards.

A quite significant change process in many European police forces was connected to the implementation of management methods from the private sector into police organizations. In times of severe budget restrictions and in times of frequent criticism of supposedly slow and inefficient bureaucratic procedures, pressure grew in some European countries to increase efficiency in police forces by introducing performance measurement and cost accounting systems, management by objectives, benchmarking and other instruments derived from the private sector. Many police officers, however, felt alienated by the attitude of some politicians and consultants that apparently did not seem to distinguish between a police force and a private company. Their identity as police officers implied serving the common good and fighting for security and justice. Being subjected to questions of efficiency was considered by many as an unjustified and inappropriate equalization of the police with a private sector that was, in their eyes, primarily interested in selling goods and making profits (Christe-Zeyse, 2007a).

The need for a cross-national comparison of organizational change We aim at developing a general theory, applicable to all kinds of organizations in all types of environments. The precise nature of the role of organizational identity can only be seen if we can control for the impacts of other cultural differences, such as those deriving from nationality, geography, ethnicity or religion (Pettigrew et al., 2001). More specifically, these local cultures, in combination with the history of these types of organizations in different countries or regions, establish interpretative frames that are used to disambiguate and complete the otherwise partial procedures and regulations of organizations – that is, so to speak, to fill the inevitable gaps in the organizational structure by imposing informal cultural codes.

Cultural difference can refer to something as “soft” as the tone in which an order is given. In some police forces, an order is understood to be something that does not allow for any kind of debate, interpretation, or disambiguity, whereas in other police forces an order can also be understood as a consensual decision after a cooperative and reciprocal process of deliberation and advice.

It is important to recognize that although the same organizational categories, forms or types (with respect to police appraisal and promotion systems, ranks, arms, uniforms, the right to search and arrest, etc.) may be available in all countries, which should provide a good basis for common organizational identities, daily organizational life comes with different interpretative schemata to make sense of codes, practices,

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procedures and values (Sorge, 2005; Magala, 2009). Thus, a seemingly universal template tends to be moulded into local practices, producing idiosyncrasies in the process.

A case in point is the way police officers approach citizens. It makes quite a difference whether a police officer acts in the role of a service provider or as the armed representative of the executive power. The setting may seem similar: A police officer stops a car and asks the driver for his or her driver’s licence and registration. But depending on traditions, cultural norms, self-perceptions, legal requirements etc. the situation may in fact be very different, ranging from a friendly chat to a rather aggressive looking demonstration of dominance and submission (Martin, 1999).

What holds true when comparing organizations from different cultural settings with each other also holds true when looking at the relationship between an organization and other actors from the same cultural setting. Each audience within the organization (i.e. different departments or specialized units), but also outside the organization (i.e. the public, the ministry, the prosecutor) has a different cultural interpretation of expectations or relationships. Ambiguous procedures and regulations are interpreted in numerous different ways and different parties develop different responses in relation to procedural ambiguities. In this sense, idiosyncrasies develop in each specific work relationship and (organizational, national) culture provides a general setting by providing a lens for sensemaking (Magala, 2009; Weick, 1995).

All European police forces have explicit anti-corruption rules, but when it comes to very specific situations in which officers interact with citizens, these rules are sometimes not as unambiguous as they might seem. Being helpful and friendly, exchanging information and returning favours might be part of a cultural tradition in one context and a case of corruption in another. What is acceptable and what is not, may not be entirely determined by formal rules or cultural traditions, but very often needs to be disambiguated with respect to individual audiences and specific situations (Punch, 2000.)

Next to (organizational and national) culture, we explicitly integrate into our framework the more tangible aspects of the environment, which are often ignored in the literature on organizational change (see also Bayerl et al., in this issue), but are nevertheless of high importance. The direct environment of actors influences their sensemaking (i.e. ecological sensemaking; Whiteman and Cooper, 2012) and frames the meaning they give to practices, technologies and forms. Hard facts such as budget cuts, legal constraints, or political instability co-determine organizational identities and are therefore included in our framework of organizational change. This implies that we have to integrate insights from “hard” contingency and strategy theories into our “soft” identity-based theory of organizational change. This is precisely what we do in our unified input-throughput-output framework of organizational change, to which we turn now.

A unified framework of organizational change Figure 1 summarises our theoretical logic in the context of a simple input-throughput-output framework. The framework’s theoretical lens cements these theory fragments together in an overarching framework, illustrating that organizational change may only be understood by systematically analyzing all constitutive elements and the way they interact. In what follows, we will explain these elements of our unified framework of organizational change.

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Triggers of change: the input component. We start with the input component of our framework. As is known from a large contingency literature in the organization sciences (Lawrence and Lorsch, 1967; Parker and van Witteloostuijn, 2010), fit is a key driver of organizational performance. Fit is defined as the alignment of an organization’s internal features with that of its external environment, to enhance performance (Miles and Snow, 1994). Hannan (1998) suggested that, at their founding, organizations are typically aligned with their environment, but as they age, the alignment weakens, requiring serious effort to keep pace with a changing environment. If an organization experiences a misfit, which comes with inferior performance, organizational change is needed to restore fit.

However, to be able to do so, the organization has to develop deep insights into both the environment of the future to which it needs to adapt, as well as into the current internal weaknesses that have to be changed into future internal strengths. This implies that the external antecedents of organizational change are related to the external opportunities and threats in the broader environment. Similarly, internal strengths and weaknesses of the organization can also trigger organizational change. So, the starting point of our unified theory of organizational change is an evaluation of external opportunities (O) and threats (T) in combination with internal strengths (S) and weaknesses (W), which is known as a SWOT analysis in the classic strategic management literature.

When the predominantly stable environment of Western European police in the 1950s and 1960s changed from stable to dynamic (student rebellion, value changes, anti-war protests, terrorism, etc.), police were increasingly under pressure to change the bureaucratic, centralized and mechanistic structures that used to fit so well with the stable environment of the past, into a more flexible and technology-driven structure that seemed to promise a better alignment with the challenges of the 1970s and 1980s. Around the turn of the century, new challenges arose. The end of the cold war, globalization, open borders, and new technologies (internet, social media, et cetera) made existing structures and arrangements seem too slow and bureaucratic to effectively deal with several diverging challenges at the same time. In particular, the police faced a growing need to comply with citizens’ concerns on a local basis, while at the same time dealing with the threats of terrorism, internet crime, organized and international crime on a national, supranational or even global level. Cross border cooperation between police forces, the implementation of new technologies as part of investigative work, international police missions in areas such as Kosovo or Afghanistan, and new surveillance technologies at airports, train stations and public locations may serve as an illustration of the attempts made to restore fit in response to such external changes and threats.

The relevance of the macro-environment for organizational change. The strategic management literature recommends the so-called PESTL approach as an organizing framework to monitor external opportunities and threats ( Johnson and Scholes, 2000; Johnson et al., 2005). This framework combines the analysis of political (P), economic (E), societal (S), technological (T) and legislative (L) issues. Each and every element of the PESTL framework is associated with subsets of tailor-made theories that may guide the environmental scan (van Witteloostuijn, 1996). However, a SWOT analysis is only complete when accompanied by an analysis of the internal strengths and weaknesses. Central concepts in this internal analysis include organizational assets, capabilities, competencies and resources. Existing frameworks offer a series of four criteria to evaluate the strengths (or weaknesses, for that matter) of the k

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