Change is a crucial and inescapable process for many organisations. It remains a constant challenge for managers and many change management initiatives fail. Burns and Stalker’s seminal text on managing change, The Management of Innovation, has often been used as a basis for research in mainstream management journals and has been represented as an important theory in popular and long-established management textbooks. The issues raised in that book are still being grappled with by academics and practitioners today. Miriam Green provides a critical analysis of the mainstream construction of knowledge on change management through an examination of representations of that text. The main thesis of her book is that this literature, though valuable, does not provide a full picture. Its objectivist approach ignores the role of other factors raised in the original study. These factors include the effects of power, politics, resistance and employee influence on the outcomes of managerial change strategies and on other organisational processes, with important consequences for the understanding of change initiatives by both academics and practitioners. This is part of an ongoing debate in management studies and more widely in the social sciences about theoretical approaches and research methods. The originality of this book lies in its in-depth comparison of an entire monograph on organisations facing technological and commercial change, with an equally in-depth analysis of the ways this work has been represented and used as a basis for teaching and research. It highlights the limitations of the exclusive use of one approach to explain the complications arising from organisational change. It challenges the scientific justification offered for that approach and supports arguments for more inclusive and sustainable scholarship, of greater relevance to academics, managers and other organisational stakeholders.

Scholarship establishes a new field of study in the organizational sciences. Just as positive psychology focuses on exploring optimal individual psychological states rather than pathological ones, Positive Organizational Scholarship focuses attention on optimal organizational states --- the dynamics in organizations that lead to the development of human strength, foster resiliency in employees, make healing, restoration, and reconciliation possible, and cultivate extraordinary individual and organizational performance. While the concept of positive organizational scholarship encompasses the examination of typical and even dysfunctional patterns of behavior, it emphasizes positive deviance from expected patterns. Positive Organizational Scholarship examines the enablers, motivations, and effects associated with remarkably positive phenomena --- how they are facilitated, why they work, how they can be identified, and how researchers and managers can capitalize on them. The contributors do not adopt one particular theory or framework but draw from the full spectrum of organizational theories to understand, explain, and predict the occurrence, causes, and consequences of positivity. Positive Organizational Scholarship rigorously seeks to understand what represents the best of the human condition based on scholarly research and theory. This book invites organizational scholars to build upon and extend the positive organizational phenomena being examined. It provides the definitional, theoretical, and empirical foundations for what will become a cumulative body of enduring work.

Volume 27 continues the diversity and inclusivity of the Research in Organizational Change and Development series through insightful, thought provoking chapters with new conceptual insights and robust empirical studies. This volume includes contributions from Australia, Canada, France, Ireland, Italy, United Kingdom and United States.

An ideal resource for organizational scholars, students, practitioners, and human resource managers, this handbook covers the full spectrum of organizational theories and outcomes that define, explain, and predict the occurrence, causes, and consequences of positivity.

Although many organizations see the need to transform and to reinvent themselves, for far too many leaders, "change" and "failure" are virtual synonyms. In fact, most organizational change efforts fail. But that needn’t be the case, and help is at hand. Leading Positive Organizational Change, an alternative way to think about organizational change and development, is a strategic, learnable discipline that can re-energize and re-imagine your enterprise, and release the potential for change – delivering a positive, creative future and breakthrough bottom-line results. Written by an award-winning expert in positive organization development and change leadership, this book provides executives, change leaders, and change leadership teams with a step-by-step guide for collaboratively crafting and executing a change strategy that aligns with organizational objectives so as to fuel their future. With a strong science-backed and field-tested "how to" approach, and with a radical focus on organizational positivity, super-flexibility and renewal, collective design thinking and applied imagination, this highly practical book features: A ToolBox of 30 powerful, imaginative (and time-saving!) tools for you to use in practicing leading positive organizational change and carrying through your change program – with example templates and worksheets, concise notes and ideas from numerous complex global projects. Lead-ins to each chapter that are a fundamental feature of the book, representing a springboard to a chapter and serving the purpose of awakening interest in the topic. Dialogic Reflection for Professional Team Development, at the start of each chapter, that enables you (and your team as a whole) to reflect on and discuss some thought-provoking questions, linking to the chapter and helping to contextualize your learning. Industry Snapshots that explore current issues and trends in one of the fastest-growing professions and industries – coaching and consulting. Windows on Practice that demonstrate how issues are applied in real-life business situations, offering a range of interesting topical illustrations of positive change leadership in practice, relating the core concepts of the book to real-world settings. Summary Propositions, at the end of each chapter, that recap and reinforce the key takeaways from the chapter. References to help you take your learning and development further. Tkaczyk’s engaging, reflective, task-based book equips the change leader and leadership teams with the skills needed to navigate chaos and the unexpected, to renew your business and create winning change. This action-based workbook can be used in a variety of business settings, among others, executive leadership team meetings, organization development and change consulting, design-led strategy retreats, human resource development consultancy, executive 1:1 and team coaching, leadership boot camps, design thinking workshops and sprints, innovation labs, and executive education and MBA courses – as a handy additional text in either an organization development and change or human resource management class. It can also be used in a flexible strategic transformation program – with the flow of the change execution process mapped within the context of a specific change initiative.

First Published in 2012. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Despite the popularity of organizational change management, the question arises whether its prescriptions and dominant beliefs and practices are based on solid and convergent evidence. Organizational change management entails interventions intended to influence the task-related behavior and associated results of an individual, team, or entire organization. There is a perception that a lot of change initiatives fail and limited understanding about what works and what does not and why. Drawing on the field of psychology and based on primary research, Reconsidering Change Management identifies 18 popular and relevant commonly held assumptions with regard to change management that are then analyzed and compared to the four specific themes laid out in the book (people, leadership, organization, and change process), resulting in their own set of assumptions. Each assumption will have a brief introduction in which its relevance and popularity is explained. By studying the scientific evidence, in particular meta-analytic evidence, the book provides students and academics in the fields of change management, organizational behavior, and business strategy the best available evidence for the acceptance or dropping of certain (change) management assumptions and their accompanying practices. By exploring the topics people, leadership, organization, and process, and the related assumptions, change management is restructured and reframed in a prudent, positive, and practical way.