The main purpose of this thesis has been to study the change agent’s role in accelerating sustainability in the construction sector. A case study was conducted in a large construction company (~9000 employees) with an ambitious sustainability profile. The research started by obtaining an understanding of organizational change, the change agents’ role and how change agents can be organized. The research then proceeded by studying whether there are practices among change agents leading to sustainable transition and how. Data was collected in a single case study through semi- structured interviews with four change agents, their director and one receiver of the change efforts.  How do change agents in a construction company, organized in a dual operating system, overcome change resistance in the line organization to accelerate sustainability?  The answers to the research question where that the change agents are the key persons of driving the transformational change effort in the studied company. They operate differently depending on situation and task, with no formal job description, requiring a high grade of personal strive. They have no formal responsibilities and few recourses, resulting in an importance of ability to influence others to take necessary decisions to change towards sustainability. They focus on building and maintaining relations with key persons in the line organization and prefer to be involved early in the projects. They spend time to train and engage in sustainability questions. They use their colleagues and fellow experts in the parallel organization to share competence, expertise and experience.  This study shows that change agents’ working in a dual operating system has been implemented with success in Company X. A successful dual operating system should include a larger unit of agents that gives them support and help from each other in their strive for change in any area of choice. When implementing the dual operating system, it should be considered that if the role definition is wide, creativity is stimulated among the change agents, making them develop new methods for implementing sustainable change. Furthermore, these best practices identified could be used for future change agent role definitions.  Even though change resistance exists in different forms, proactive prevention of resistance as have been done in Company X, seems to facilitate the change effort. As a result, the interviewees did not particularly experience change resistance. For future research, the case study could be expanded to include more respondents to study each area deeper and be able to confirm the best practices and the main challenges. It would be of interest to identify a company in a different sector that has implemented change agents and a dual operating system and perform a similar case study to identify any sector-specific differences. Some interviewees at Company X described there was an ongoing process on the job descriptions of the change agents. After the implementation of the updated job descriptions, it could be of interest to study changes in volunteerism and creativity among the change agents. Another aspect for further studies would be company size. Smaller companies with less management recourses probably must operate different and those differences would be interesting to understand further. Lastly, future research could study outcome of change effort using change agents in a dual operating system compared to change agents in the original organization.

abstract: The alternative project delivery methods (APDMs) today are being increasingly used by owner organizations in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry. Yet the adoption of these methods can be extremely difficult to accomplish and requires significant change management efforts. To facilitate the APDM adoption, this research aimed to better understand how AEC owner organizations have changed from only using the design-bid-build method to also successfully implementing APDMs from an organizational change perspective. This research utilized a literature review, survey and interviews to fulfill the research objectives. The dissertation follows a three paper format. The first paper focuses on identifying organizational change management (OCM) practices that, when effectively executed, lead to increased success rates of adopting APDMs in owner AEC organizations. The results of the first paper indicated that the five OCM practices with the strongest correlations to successful APDM adoption were realistic timeframe, effective change agents, workload adjustments, senior-leadership commitment, and sufficient change-related training. The second paper focuses on investigating AEC employees’ reactions to the adoption of APDMs. The findings of the second paper revealed that employees in AEC organizations react favorably to adopting a change in their project delivery systems. The findings further revealed that increasing the use of OCM practices is related to decreased employee resistance to change. The third paper aimed to provide guidelines detailing on how to lead APDM adoption. The findings of the third paper indicated that there was a general sequence of four implementation phases, which were preparing and planning, pilot project testing, expanding to the intended scale, and sustaining and evaluating. The phases include specific OCM practices that increase the probability of successful APDM adoption. The dissertation results can help in guiding the senior managers of construction organizations and OCM consultants to effectively implement APDMs for the first time in the construction sector. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Construction Management 2020