Research into the phenomenon of change has attracted interest from a range of management disciplines; organizational, management, behavioural and operations. Each discipline brings with it a perspective which informs the theoretical debates and empirical research, resulting in different ideas, meaning and approaches taken in studying the phenomenon of change. Ideas about the meaning of the content of change, why contextual factors might influence the process of change and, how does the process of change unfold over time, are three important aspects to understanding the phenomenon of change. This literature review draws on the three concepts of the content, context and process of change to explore the extant change literature. Evidence based literature reviews have a strong tradition within the medical field and have been shown to be a rigorous method for determining efficacy of clinical trials. This review applies the principles of this method but within a management research context and reviews 52 papers. Variations in the aspects of organizational context and process of change empirically studied confirm that context plays a significant and influential role in processes of change and change outcomes. There is little evidence to support the idea that the content of change influences the process of change activities and this is an area that needs further research. Further research is also needed to develop the idea of the importance of emergent change activities within planned change frameworks.

Community colleges constitute a special type of higher education organization: their complex mission, dynamics, personnel structures, and values require a distinct set of understandings and skills to lead and manage them well. Most of the research on leadership in community colleges focuses on leaders in positions of power (presidents, provosts, etc.) and not on grassroots or bottom-up leadership. Bottom-up leaders are individuals who perpetuate change without having the backing of a formal position of authority to do so. Recent leadership research validates the importance of having change agents at all levels of an organization in order to further the mission of the institution. This dissertation consists of three primary parts: (1) a technical report written by a three-person research team representing a synthesis of the collaborative research findings on the various leadership pathways that exist in the community college and the factors that influence individuals to engage in leadership efforts; (2) an individual research study on the perspectives of grassroots leaders who have engaged in informal change initiatives at a community college; and (3) an extension of the individual research study that discusses institutional attributes, properties, and/or conditions that foster and encourage grassroots organization. Individual, in-depth interviews were conducted in order to identify strategies grassroots leaders used to influence top-down leadership and the major obstacles they faced. The conversational nature of these interviews allowed for two-way interactions that lent themselves to a greater understanding of the subjects’ experiences, thoughts, and motives. This study provides a greater focus on understanding the motivations, tactics, obstacles, and sources of resiliency that grassroots leaders use to affect change. The findings indicate that a variety of personal and professional influences affect a grassroots leader’s decision to engage in leadership efforts, that grassroots leaders tailor their tactics and strategies to fit the situation, and that resiliency is essential to the success of their engagement. Finally, this study makes several recommendations administrators can use to promote grassroots leadership on their campuses.

The world has been challenged by the COVID-19 pandemic since 2020. The pandemic affected all businesses, and the banking sector was no exception. Within this context, efficient change management (CM) is crucial to keep up with the changing business environment. Previous research has extensively covered the planned and emergent approaches to CM. However, the authors found that the perspective of complex organisations and their effect on change was missing. The purpose of the study was to develop a deeper understanding of how the internal processes were challenged during the COVID-19 pandemic, following a Scandinavian bank in their change to open a sister department in Vilnius. To study this, the authors conducted 12 semi-structured interviews with employees of Bank XYZ, from Vilnius and Stockholm. Kotter’s 8-step model and the complexity theory were combined and used as the conceptual framework.  The conclusion shows that the pandemic challenged three different aspects, communication, motivation, and new ways of working. These aspects challenged the traditional view of CM, which is viewed as static. The nonlinearity of CM processes is more present in disruptive changes such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the last decades there has been a growing interest in studying processes in improvement work. A particular interest has been the improvement process that the organisation undergoes and why events evolve in the way they do. By better understanding improvement processes and identifying supporting and hindering forces, the possibilities successfully to plan and implement improvement work in a systematic way increases. The focus of this thesis is organisation processes in schools and the relations that hold between planned and emergent improvement, when using a research-based strategy. The aim of the study is to describe and understand how processes are initiated, developed and completed when using a strategy called ‘Scope for Action Model’(frirumsstrategin). The empirical material of the study was organised and analysed according to Van de Ven’s and Poole’s four ideal types for process studies. Within each type, motors have been identified, which contain generative mechanisms that are a key to how actions, events and activities emerge and are driven forward. The results of the study show that the emergent initiatives are more frequent than the planned ones and that they are more likely to generate an improvement – in the study defined as something new in the organisation. However, on several occasions the planned improvement work inspires emergent initiatives for improvement and in some cases seems to be a fundamental condition for their existence. The different motors, which in the analysis are seen as driving forces, support or challenge each other, making the process develop and produce a result. The study shows that the participants reshape the strategy to make it fit into the organisation of the school. The results also show that teachers and principals have to be well-informed of how to work with a strategy in a practical and constructive way. They have to be able to translate crucial moments in the strategy to stimulate the participants to creative actions. The strategy for school improvement is not shown to be a solution which itself can create improvement, but in combination with the participant’s creative goal settings it can be a contributory factor. / Denna avhandling riktar intresset mot skolförbättring och de processer som uppstår när en planerad förändring genomförs på skolor med stöd av en forskningsbaserad strategi. Syftet med avhandlingen är att beskriva och förstå hur dessa processer - i arbetet med frirumsstrategin - initieras, fortlöper och avslutas. Studien visar att det finns relationer mellan planerade och framväxande processer. De framväxande processerna är mest frekventa och har sin grund i deltagarnas egna målformuleringar. De förmår skapa utveckling i skolverksamheterna, något de planerade processerna inte lyckas med. Det planerade förbättringsarbetet tycks bidra genom att vara en inspirationskälla eller i vissa fall en förutsättning för de framväxande initiativ som tas av deltagare från olika delar av organisationen. Studien pekar på att en strategi kan vara igångsättare av förbättringsarbete och utgöra en grund för skolor att utgå från. Av resultatet framgår att det är viktigt att rektorer och lärare har goda kunskaper om förbättringsarbetets processer för att kunna använda strategin på ett konstruktivt sätt. Genom att ha insikt i vilka mekanismer som påverkar processer kan ett förbättringsarbete ledas medvetet samt tillåtas innehålla både de konflikter och den samstämmighet som kan bidra till att utveckling sker.

ICT development and deployment and supporting policies take place within a fiercely contested globalised political economy. For organisations there is a pervasiveness of change processes, often externally imposed, which are rising with these globalising effects. This not only implies that the context in which organisations are situated is continuously changing, but also that the nature of the organisation itself is subject to change (Van Tonder, 2004). However, the external influences imposed on an organisation are often heterogeneous and make the management of adapting to the external environment extremely complex. This thesis explores such an externally imposed change on an organisation around the implementation of a contentious national policy. This entails not only dealing with the more usual dimensions of change in an organisation, but also the implications of the national debate and contentions around the national policy playing out in the local setting of the organisation. In this thesis the change explored is within a government department from a proprietary Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system to an open source ECM system. An interpretative approach was followed, using a longitudinal case study. Two main aspects of this change process are explored. The first is the impact of the national open source policy on government departments - an externally imposed change of mission, vision and values. The second is how internally the government department changed its internal work processes and information systems to comply with that policy. These two aspects are intertwined. Alignment of the organisation mission, values and objectives, with the proposed technological innovation and change management models emerges as a necessary condition for managing change. However, what emerged as a more challenging issue was whether internal organisational changes can be aligned with contentious national policy imperatives. Three theoretical lenses are used to explore this contentious issue: the HEM model of Du Plooy’s (1998); the improvisational change management model of Orlikowski and Hofman (1997); and institutional theory as it applies to Information Systems. The improvisational change model of Orlikowski and Hofman (1997) in combination with Du Plooy’s (1998) HEM model, was used to understand the change process unfolding in the implementation of an OS ECM system in a Government department in SA. The result of this application is some practical recommendations for government officials on future OS implementations, as well as a theoretical add-on to extend the change management model applied. The researcher found that models can increase our understanding and reveal how one can ‘cultivate’ the human environment within which technology is to be implemented. However, the process of developing an understanding of how national policy was developed and the rationale for it was also found to be important, as is developing an understanding of the rationale of this particular department for choosing to implement the OS ECM system. By adding to, or expanding on Orlikowski and Hoffman’s (1997) model to include a fourth element, indicating the external forces in the environment, such as government regulations; government policy; and the debate on global and national FOSS versus PS, highlights the need for this external alignment as well as prevents the focus on internal alignment only. Institutional theory was consequently applied in an attempt to unpack the organisational and change management dimensions of the change model, aiming at understanding the institutional forces which legitimates or contradicts the technical/rational ideas and actions of the change. The findings were threefold. Firstly, the role played by IS as an institutional process in and of itself and the way in which this could have affected the implementation of the new OS ECM system was discussed, pointing to the possibility that the new system was not necessarily being implemented to streamline the work practices, but rather due to its institutional status of being a ‘rational myth’; something which had to be done as ‘it’s just the right thing to do.” Secondly, OSS and PS were argued to be different ‘types’ of institutions. Using the institutional pillars it was argued that OSS and PS were driven by different institutional forces, with PS leaning towards the regulative pillar and OSS being more in line with the normative pillar. These two institutions were found to mainly differ with regard to their basis of compliance and the logic behind them. The insights offered by this argument revealed that when changing from OSS to PS, it would be very valuable to recognise that OSS and PS are two different ‘types’ of institutions, and to not only understand that the new system could therefore change the organisational processes when it is implemented, but to also acknowledge the change which will take place within the IS/IT institution itself – moving from the regulative to the normative. The change should thus be understood both within the two different IS innovations themselves, and in how these two innovations interact. Lastly, the research in this thesis went beyond the technical/rational actions of the stakeholders, and included an in depth analysis of the institutional forces at play in the broader social context of the Government department. It explained the institutions which were at play on the international, national and organisational levels, pointing out which of these forces worked in favour of or against the technical/rational actions, and in the process contributed to the unexpected outcome of the new OS ECM implementation process. / Thesis (PhD-- University of Pretoria, 2014 / Informatics / unrestricted

Emergent change is a pervasive force in modern organisations. However, the subjective experiences of emergent change for frontline individuals and teams have not been explored in organisational change literature. The integrative field of applied neurosciences offers valuable insights into the underlying neural mechanisms that shape these experiences and drive responses in order to meet basic psychological needs. Using interactive qualitative analysis (IQA), this study involved a focus group and follow-up interviews with nine participants at a South African software development company to explore the experiences of emergent change at work. System dynamics reflected that these experiences are significantly more complex than literature and practice currently account for, and that individuals and teams find their experiences of emergent change to threaten their sense of safety and basic psychological needs. The physiological and emotional experiences were found to be driving elements. Peak performance state and the relational environment were found to be salient outcomes. Findings present the opportunity for the reconceptualisation of emergent change, a shift in focus from change itself to the human experiences thereof and the importance of embracing new possibilities, tools and practices for meeting needs and thriving in an ever-changing world. / Industrial and Organisational Psychology / M. Com. (Industrial and Organisational Psychology)