Study guide: Organizational Change and Change Agency

📋 Course Outline

1. The Six Images of Change
2. Directing and Navigating Change
3. Caretaking and Nurturing Change
4. Coaching and Interpreting Change
5. Choosing a Change Image
6. Change Agency and Organizational Development
7. Leadership and Management Models
8. Consultancy and Team Models
9. Planned Change Models and Practices
10. Evidence-Based Change Principles
11. Readiness and Change Recipients
12. Employee Responses to Change
13. Antecedents, Culture, and Time
14. How Agents Shape Resistance
15. Change Rhythm and Firm Performance
16. Continuity Visions and Change Support

📖 1. The Six Images of Change

★ Must-know

• Palmer and Dunford (2008) classify managing change along two dimensions: the manager’s role and the extent to which change outcomes are intended. - Palmer, I., & Dunford, R., Organizational Change and the Importance of Embedded Assumptions

📌 The controlling view treats managers as determining outcomes through hierarchical direction, whereas the shaping view treats managers as influencing outcomes without fully determining them.

📌 Intended outcomes are planned and achievable through managerial action, partially intended outcomes are altered by power, interests, processes, or context, and unintended outcomes emerge mainly from forces outside managerial control.

Further detail

• Combining controlling or shaping with intended, partially intended, or unintended outcomes yields the images directing, navigating, caretaking, coaching, interpreting, and nurturing.

📖 2. Directing and Navigating Change

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Directing: The image in which a manager believes change can be controlled toward a specific intended outcome.
• Navigating: The image in which managers seek to guide change while accepting that stakeholders, power, competing interests, context, and unexpected events prevent complete control.

📝 Essential Points

• N-step models treat change as a sequence of steps that managers can follow to implement an intended change successfully.

• Contingency theory holds that managers should adapt their change approach to the type and context of change rather than use one identical method for every organization.

• In directing, resistance is treated as an obstacle to overcome, and managers communicate why, what, who, how, and when the change will occur.

• Processual and contextualist theories describe change as a continuous process shaped by context, actors, and events, while managers retain some choice but cannot fully control the final outcome.

• Navigating requires managers to plot and re-plot the change course as new information appears and to use persuasion, negotiation, tell-and-sell communication, critical listening, and stakeholder analysis.

💡 Memory Hook

Directing controls intended outcomes; navigating adapts when outcomes are only partly intended.

📖 3. Caretaking and Nurturing Change

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Caretaking: The image in which managers have very limited ability to control change and external forces largely determine its outcome.

★ Must-know

• Institutional theory identifies three pressures:
  • coercive pressures from laws and regulations
  • mimetic pressures from imitation
  • normative pressures from professional norms, education, shared beliefs, and values

Further detail

• Lifecycle theory describes these organizational stages:

  • birth
  • growth
  • maturity
  • decline or death

• Population ecology describes this sequence:

  • variation
  • selection
  • retention

• In caretaking, managers explain why change is inevitable and help employees cope, while recognizing that external forces may outweigh managerial vision.

💡 Memory Hook

Caretaking accepts external inevitability; nurturing creates conditions for emergence.

📖 4. Coaching and Interpreting Change

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Coaching: The image in which managers seek intended outcomes by developing people’s capabilities rather than primarily controlling them.
• Interpreting: The image in which managers help organizational members understand events and create meaning because they cannot fully control change outcomes.

📝 Essential Points

• Organization Development helps members develop values, skills, and capabilities so they can solve their own problems and improve.

• In coaching, leaders facilitate shared values and positive emotions, while treating resistance as normal when change moves people beyond their comfort zone.

• Sensemaking theory treats employees as interpreters of organizational events and managers as sensegivers who influence, but cannot control, those interpretations.

• In interpreting, conversations, dialogue, and storytelling create meaning, communication can create change as well as explain it, and resistance is strongly influenced by previous change experiences.

• An interpreting vision should reflect the organization’s real identity, values, and beliefs, described as its inner voice.

💡 Memory Hook

Coaching builds capability; interpreting builds shared meaning.

📖 5. Choosing a Change Image

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Nurturing: The image in which managers create favorable conditions for positive change to emerge without predicting or controlling its final outcome.

📝 Essential Points

• Chaos and complexity perspectives hold that small events can have large, unpredictable consequences and that managers can encourage self-organization without controlling the new order.

• In nurturing, visions are continually rewritten, communication prepares people for uncertainty and new possibilities, and the effect of resistance is unpredictable.

• The Confucian and Taoist perspective treats change as emerging through interconnected and opposing forces.

📖 6. Change Agency and Organizational Development

★ Must-know

📌 The appropriate change image depends on change type, context, phase, and simultaneous changes, and managers may need to switch images as circumstances evolve.

Further detail

• Highly uncertain transformational change may require navigating, while employee readiness to participate may make coaching or interpreting appropriate and hostility or competing interests may make navigating more realistic.

• An externally imposed change may initially call for caretaking and later interpreting to help employees understand what it means.

📖 7. Leadership and Management Models

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Change agent: An internal or external individual or team responsible for initiating, sponsoring, directing, managing, or implementing change.

★ Must-know

• Caldwell (2003) identifies leadership, management, consultancy, and team as four models of change agency and rejects a universal model or competency set. - Caldwell, R., Models of Change Agency: A Fourfold Classification

Further detail

• Organizational Development traditionally treats change as planned, incremental or long-term improvement in organizational effectiveness and uses process consultants to support members’ own solutions through listening, feedback, counselling, coaching, and facilitation.

• Caldwell criticizes traditional Organization Development for being overly rational and linear, overemphasizing consensus, and underestimating employees and teams as change agents.

💡 Memory Hook

Leadership sets vision; management adapts strategy and implements it.

📖 8. Consultancy and Team Models

★ Must-know

• The leadership model assigns senior leaders responsibility for strategic vision, initiating major change, aligning employees, and inspiring support.

• The management model assigns middle managers and functional specialists the roles of adapting strategic change, translating strategy into practice, and building support.

Further detail

• The leadership model is associated with transformational, charismatic, visionary, and change leadership, but its heroic-leader emphasis can exaggerate leaders’ power and overlook leadership at other levels.

📌 Middle managers are both objects of change because they experience it and agents of change because they implement it for others.

• Management change agency involves content, control, and process agendas, while backstage politics, negotiation, and trade-offs also shape change.

💡 Memory Hook

Consultancy contributes expertise and coordination; teams distribute change agency collectively.

📖 9. Planned Change Models and Practices

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Tacit knowledge: Knowledge gained through experience that is difficult to explain or share with others.

★ Must-know

• The consultancy model includes internal or external consultants who provide advice and expertise, manage projects, and coordinate change programmes.

📌 Project management focuses on one tactical change project and its objectives, timing, key events, costs, and deliverables, whereas programme management coordinates multiple related projects at a broader strategic level.

• The team model distributes change agency across managers, employees, specialists, and consultants, using groups such as guiding coalitions, transition teams, task groups, quality circles, and pilot groups.

Further detail

📌 Organization Development consultants emphasize people, participation, dialogue, and facilitation, whereas management consultants emphasize expertise, solutions, projects, and performance, although the roles increasingly overlap.

• A change-programme synergist connects projects and coordinates their resources, costs, timeframes, and deliverables, but large programmes can produce complexity and conflicting priorities.

• Teams combine expertise, coordinate interdependent work, and may reduce resistance, while distributed agency can obscure coordination and underplay power, politics, group conflict, and tacit knowledge.

📖 10. Evidence-Based Change Principles

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Planned organizational change: Deliberate activities that move an organization from its current situation to a desired future situation.

★ Must-know

• Stouten, Rousseau, and De Cremer (2018) compare seven practitioner models, identify ten recurring practices, evaluate them against research, and derive ten evidence-based principles for change. - Stouten, J., Rousseau, D. M., & De Cremer, D., Successful organizational change: Integrating the management practice and scholarly literatures

• The ten recurring practitioner practices are diagnosing the opportunity or problem, supporting a guiding coalition, formulating a vision, communicating it, mobilizing energy, empowering others, developing knowledge and ability, identifying short-term wins, monitoring and strengthening change, and institutionalizing it.

Further detail

• The seven practitioner models are:

  • Lewin’s Three-Phase Process
  • Beer’s Six-Step Model
  • Appreciative Inquiry
  • Judson’s Five Steps
  • Kanter, Stein and Jick’s Ten Commandments
  • Kotter’s Eight-Step Model
  • ADKAR

• 🔄 Lewin’s process proceeds through:

  1. unfreezing
  2. transitioning
  3. refreezing

• 🔄 ADKAR proceeds through:

  1. awareness
  2. desire
  3. knowledge
  4. ability
  5. reinforcement

💡 Memory Hook

Diagnose, prepare, intervene, learn, monitor, institutionalize.

📖 11. Readiness and Change Recipients

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Readiness for change: The organization’s and employees’ capacity to deal successfully with change, influenced by past change experiences, stress, trust, support, and leadership capabilities.

★ Must-know

• The evidence-based principles are: diagnose the problem, assess readiness, use evidence-based interventions, develop change leadership throughout the organization, communicate a compelling vision, work with social networks, enable participation and fairness, promote experimentation, monitor outcomes, institutionalize change

Further detail

• Evidence-based change principles are not a rigid sequence because leadership, communication, and experimentation can occur simultaneously and repeatedly.

• Scientific evidence supports careful diagnosis more strongly than creating extreme urgency, which can increase stress and make effective adaptation harder.

• Research provides limited evidence about the composition, functioning, tasks, and effectiveness of guiding coalitions, despite their popularity in practitioner models.

• Institutionalization is strongly supported across practitioner models and research and embeds change in structures, routines, human-resources practices, systems, and culture.

📖 12. Employee Responses to Change

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Change recipients: The people directly affected by organizational change.

★ Must-know

• Resistance can reveal poor diagnosis, low trust, weak communication, unfairness, stress, or flaws in a proposed solution, so it can provide feedback rather than merely obstruct change.

📌 Top-down change has management diagnose and design change for employees to implement, whereas bottom-up change involves employees in diagnosis, solution development, experimentation, implementation, and monitoring.

Further detail

• Recipients are more likely to support change when they understand and accept its rationale, trust management, perceive fairness and support, and feel able to adapt.

• Successful change combines top-down leadership with bottom-up participation and learning and is evidence-based, participative, context-sensitive, and iterative.

💡 Memory Hook

Active versus passive responses cross positive versus negative valence.

📖 13. Antecedents, Culture, and Time

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Change ambivalence: Having both positive and negative reactions to the same change.

★ Must-know

• The tripartite approach distinguishes:

  • affective reactions: feelings
  • cognitive reactions: thoughts
  • behavioral reactions: actions

• The response circumplex crosses positive versus negative valence with active versus passive activation to distinguish proactivity, acceptance, resistance, and disengagement.

📌 Change proactivity is active support, acceptance is passive approval, resistance is active opposition, and disengagement is passive withdrawal.

• Ford, Ford, and D’Amelio (2008) argue that resistance may be labeled by change agents, reinforced by their actions, and useful as feedback rather than being merely an irrational obstacle. - Ford, J., Ford, L., and D’Amelio, A., Resistance to change: The rest of the story

Further detail

📌 The composition approach aggregates individuals’ responses into a team-level response, whereas the compilation approach represents different responses coexisting within a team.

📖 14. How Agents Shape Resistance

★ Must-know

• The five antecedent categories are:

  • recipient characteristics
  • change context
  • change process
  • change content
  • perceived benefit or harm

• Change agents’ expectations of resistance can become self-fulfilling when defensive, controlling behavior or withheld information prompts employees to resist.

📌 Resistance emerges through recipient actions, agent sensemaking that labels those actions, and the agent-recipient relationship; it is not simply an internal psychological reaction.

Further detail

• Perceived benefit or harm is a particularly proximal predictor because employees’ responses depend on what the change means for their work conditions, status, and task difficulty.

• The fit between change context and change process matters because how change is managed should fit the context.

• Influences operate at three levels:

  • micro: individual motivation, fairness perceptions, identification, and openness
  • meso: social ties, relationship quality, and shared goals
  • macro: leadership, trust, change type, and organizational readiness

• Cultural dimensions include:

  • power distance
  • uncertainty avoidance
  • long-term orientation
  • stability-versus-change orientation

• Change responses can evolve over time, but many studies measure them only once, limiting knowledge of their development.

• Research methods include multiple data sources, higher levels of analysis, longitudinal studies, and experiments, but most studies still rely on employee self-reports that may not reflect actual behavior.

• When change fails, a self-serving account may blame employee resistance instead of examining agents’ communication, implementation, or management.

• Broken formal, informal, or psychological agreements can produce injustice and lost trust, leading to cynicism, lower motivation or cooperation, and resistance; a sincere, timely apology and relationship repair can restore trust.

• Failure to legitimize change with convincing reasons can prompt employee counterarguments that become harder to persuade later, an effect described as inoculation.

• Misrepresenting change by overselling benefits or minimizing costs can create perceived deception, injustice, loss of credibility, and resistance when reality contradicts promises.

📌 Understanding a change does not automatically produce action, so agents need conversations that support performance rather than mislabeling inactivity as resistance.

• When agents defensively resist employee questions or feedback, recipient resistance can prompt agent defensiveness and generate further resistance.

• Resistance can keep change under discussion, signal employee engagement and provide feedback, and expose weaknesses through scrutiny, although dysfunctional emotional conflict can be harmful.

💡 Memory Hook

Broken trust, poor justification, and defensiveness can turn agent actions into recipient resistance.

📖 15. Change Rhythm and Firm Performance

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Change frequency: The number of changes occurring within a given period.
• Rhythm of change: The timing and distribution of multiple changes within a given period.

★ Must-know

📌 Organizations need change to adapt and stability to learn, develop routines, transfer knowledge, and evaluate results.

• Excessive fast-paced change risks information overload and time-compression diseconomies, while excessive stability risks organizational inertia and competency traps.

• Klarner and Raisch (2013) found that regular change rhythm was associated with higher long-term firm performance than irregular rhythm, including in dynamic environments, but the association does not prove causality. - Klarner, P., & Raisch, S., Move to the beat—Rhythms of change and firm performance

• The expected inverted U-shaped relationship between change frequency and performance was not supported; higher frequency was generally associated with lower performance.

Further detail

• Regular change alternates change and stability at relatively regular intervals; focused change has long change periods and short stability periods; punctuated change has long stability periods interrupted by short change periods; temporarily switching change irregularly alternates long periods of each.

• The study examined 67 European insurance companies from 1995–2004 using major strategic changes and was limited by its sample, generalizability, age of data, and inability to establish causality.

💡 Memory Hook

Too much change risks overload; too much stability risks inertia.

📖 16. Continuity Visions and Change Support

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Vision of continuity: A change vision in which a leader communicates that the organization’s core identity will remain preserved despite change.
• Perceived collective continuity: Employees’ perception that the organization retains its core identity over time despite change.
• Work uncertainty: Employees’ uncertainty about their work situation or what will happen in the future because of organizational change.

★ Must-know

• Venus, Stam, and Van Knippenberg (2019) propose that a vision of continuity increases support for change through perceived collective continuity, especially when work uncertainty is high. - Venus, M., Stam, D., & Van Knippenberg, D., Visions of change as visions of continuity

Further detail

• In a field study of 209 employees and 74 supervisors, continuity visions increased change support when work uncertainty was high, but their effect was not significant when uncertainty was low; the observational design could not establish causality.

• An experiment with 208 international business students found that continuity visions increased support under high uncertainty but had no significant effect under low uncertainty, with perceived collective continuity supporting the proposed mechanism.

• Continuity may be less effective when the old organizational identity is part of the problem or when a merger requires combining two identities into a new shared identity.

💡 Memory Hook

Leader communicates continuity → employees perceive continuity → support for change.

📊 Synthesis Tables

The six images of managing change

Change response circumplex