Reconsidering Change Management

Applying Evidence-Based Insights in Change Management Practice

Steven ten Have, Wouter ten Have, Anne-Bregje Huijsmans, Maarten Otto

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317293736
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Organisational Development
• Index: Business

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.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315646015-1

Separating the Wheat From the Chaff

Billions of dollars have been spent in the last two decades on management and organizational development activities purportedly designed to change organizations. These include programs to introduce management by objectives (MBO), organization development programs, the managerial grid, leadership training, strategic planning models, and more recently, quality circles. Virtually none of these efforts has any systematic monitoring or evaluation associated with it. This leads to an unfortunate state of affairs where the waxing and waning of organizational improvement remedies are associated with limited understanding of what works and what does not and why.

(Tichy, 1983, p. 363)

In the 1970s, inmates serving life sentences at a prison in New Jersey started a program known as ‘Scared Straight’ to deter at-risk or delinquent children from a future life of crime. The inmates used aggressive presentations depicting the worst of life in adult prisons, including exaggerated stories of rape and murder, to discourage at-risk juveniles visiting the prison facility from committing future criminal offenses. Programs such as this are rooted in deterrence theory. Even though research has indicated that such programs are not effective, jurisdictions across the country continue to use Scared Straight and related programs. Moreover, a recent meta-analysis has revealed that these programs actually increased crime and delinquency. Nevertheless, Scared Straight was recently presented as a successful intervention in a television documentary broadcast in the Netherlands (Petrosino, Turpin-Petrosino, Hollis-Peel, Lavenberg, & Stern, 2004).

In the early 1980s a new drug (Tambocor) was found to be highly successful in suppressing arrhythmias. Not until a randomized control trial was performed did it become clear that although these drugs do indeed suppress arrhythmias, they also increase mortality. The CAST trial revealed excess mortality of 56/1000. By the time the results were published, at least 100,000 patients had been taking this drug (Moore, 1995).

In 1998, teaching methods in the final three years of secondary education in the Netherlands (Grades 9 to 12) were overhauled by the introduction of two major new educational formats—‘Nieuwe Leren’ (New Learning) and ‘Studiehuis’ (Independent Self-Study)—for which no academic basis whatsoever was available. The reform was motivated by the idea that ‘senior’ pupils in secondary education should be given more freedom to choose their own learning methods on the assumption that this would smooth their transition to higher education. In October 2005, the Dutch Education Ministry published a damning assessment of the reform, saying that many first-year students in higher education lacked the required entry-level qualifications for their chosen course. Due to an emphasis on skills and competence building, students simply had not learned enough at secondary school (Busato, 2014).

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) passed Congress amid contentious debate in 1993. Detractors argued that it would produce an exodus of jobs, whereas proponents argued that it would create jobs. The economist Samuelson stated:

What we’re being told is that free trade with Mexico would devastate the U.S. economy. With its low wages, Mexico would unleash a flood of cheap imports into our markets. There would be a mass exodus of U.S. factory jobs, as hordes of American companies fled across the border. “Save Your Job, Save Our Country: Why NAFTA Must Be Stopped—Now” is the book by Ross Perot and Pat Choate that captures the worst fears. Many unions make similar arguments… . The alarmism about jobs is actually an assault on the president’s authority to make foreign policy. The economic logic against NAFTA is weak as is the political logic. Congressional opposition is a wrecking operation.

(Samuelson, 1993)

Claims of influential people like Perot and Choate were suspect; they ignored evidence and economic models (Samuelson, 1993). For example, the available evidence indicated that whereas the employment effects have been small, NAFTA has caused an explosion of trade (Thorbecke & Eigen-Zucchi, 2002). Many studies sought to predict the effects of NAFTA on low-skilled labor. As Burfisher, Robinson, and Thierfelder (2001) discussed, the consensus of these studies was that the negative effects on low-skilled workers would be negligible.

The evidence-based paradigm for practitioners—accounting for a particular course of action by referring to academic data in combination with professional judgment and experience, organizational data, and the concerns and values of stakeholders (Center for Evidence-Based Management, n.d.)—has been gaining ground in recent decades. An attempt has been made to improve the quality of outcomes in a variety of areas, including policy making, education, and clinical health care, to name but a few. Medical practice, for example, relies on scientific research. Clearly, doctors want answers to two questions: What is the available scientific evidence, and how strong is it?

Might the evidence-based paradigm also be applicable in management and more specifically in change management? What would happen if consultants, executives, and managers also base their recommendations and decisions on behavioral research findings that are evidence based? Would this measurably improve organizational performance and reduce reliance on all kinds of popular but poorly founded ideas about effective management and effective change management in particular (what we call the providence-based approach)? Would this paradigm encourage executives and managers to distinguish between evidence-based and providence-based thinking? Would it perhaps help executives and managers to learn to appreciate that some management interventions are made merely on the recommendation of some authority figure or management guru (what we call the eminence-based approach)?

These questions and the conviction that it may be dangerous or unprofessional to apply unproven ideas or concepts—or old ideas or concepts that have been refuted—motivated us to write the book that you now hold in your hands: Reconsidering Change Management—Applying Evidence-Based Insights in Change Management Practice.

In our consulting practice, we frequently come across managers who make unnecessary mistakes, for example, because they cling to management theories that can quite easily be disproved. Frequently, such management theories address symptoms rather than root causes, are downright flawed, or obstruct the search for real solutions.

Over the years, the pseudo-academic nature of many popular management theories has been criticized by authors such as Jeffrey Pfeffer, Robert Sutton, Sumantra Ghoshal, and Phil Rosenzweig. In our prior articles (Barends & Ten Have, 2008; Barends, Janssen, Ten Have, & Ten Have, 2013, 2014) we have also questioned the validity of many popular change management theories. For this book, we brought together a team of 17 academics and practitioners, all trained in evidence-based methodology, to examine the academic basis for the practical application of 18 popular management assumptions—for example, the idea that participation is the key to successful change or that a fair change process is what matters for successful change (see Table 1.1 for a full list of the assumptions discussed in detail in this book). A systematic review (see Chapter 4) served as the methodological basis for the book: Identify all relevant pieces of academic research related to these assumptions, assess their validity, and rank them by strength of evidence. It should be emphasized that behavioral researchers do not set out to ‘prove’ their theories in the way that, for example, mathematicians do; instead, they provide support for their assertions and attach a degree of probability to the random nature, or otherwise, of their findings.

Table 1.1 Full List of the Assumptions

1	Seventy percent of all change initiatives fail.
2	A clear vision is essential for successful change.
3	People will not change if there is no sense of urgency.
4	Trust in the leader is needed for successful change.
5	When managing change, a transformational leadership style is more effective than a transactional one.
6	Organizational change requires leaders with strong emotional intelligence.
7	Supervisory support is critical for the success of change.
8	To realize change in organizations, a powerful guiding coalition is needed.
9	Employees’ capabilities to change determine the organization’s capacity to change.
10	Participation is key to successful change.
11	Resistance to change is detrimental to the success of change.
12	A fair change process is important in achieving successful change.
13	Changing organizational culture is time-consuming and difficult.
14	Organizational culture is related to performance.
15	Goal setting combined with feedback is a powerful tool for change leaders.
16	Commitment to change is an essential component of a successful change initiative.
17	Financial incentives are effective ways to encourage change and improve performance.
18	Self-managing teams perform better in realizing change than traditionally managed teams.

This book provides managers with digestible summaries of relevant scientific evidence related to change (rather like the medical Cochrane reviews, which make current information about effectiveness in health care accessible to doctors by providing systematic overviews of available literature; Higgins & Green, 2006). It thus bridges the gap between research and practice, with a view to bringing about tangible improvements in management, and change management in particular, as well as in organizations. In this way it makes a meaningful contribution to the maturing profession of change management and to responsible change management in practice.

Why This Book?

In Formula 1 racing, for some teams a key criterion for innovation is that it should make the car go faster (Pettit, 2006). But there have been instances where the fastest driver didn’t win the race, for example, because his or her engine blew up. So we need a more inclusive definition of what constitutes successful innovation. This illustrates precisely what evidence-based change management is not, but should be. With a more inclusive definition, you will see that you’re not in the business of owning and operating fast cars but rather in the business of winning races. We want to contribute with evidence-based change management to enable practitioners to win their races. Scientific knowledge can be compared to speed in Formula 1. However, what ultimately wins the race for you is far more complex. Science is not an end in itself but merely a means toward an end. This is not ‘art for art’s sake’ but a new contribution to ‘management technology,’ as Peter Drucker (2010) puts it. It’s a positive development, and its application will contribute to economic growth, our common well-being, and quality of life while preventing unnecessary economic, social and social-emotional damage. In other words, we want to be in the business of providing the right solutions that help improve working practices and, hence, our lives. That’s our guiding principle.

Our central research aim is to understand the key issues in change management. But it’s important to expose the views of gurus and commercial service providers who burden organizations with invalid and irresponsible ideas. We do not level charges against such people but rather showcase validated knowledge and know-how. For our research, we identified the main issues that managers struggle with. Some of the answers they seek can be found in popular management books. Our team has analyzed more than 50 of such books to identify the key concepts and views related to change management. Our research shows that in some cases, messages do indeed stand up to critical assessment. But often the stated claims go way beyond what the available evidence supports. And sometimes, either there’s no supporting evidence whatsoever, or assertions are in conflict with available evidence. In other cases, new hypotheses are presented as the evidence-based answers can easily be found.

About 10 years ago, when one of our former colleagues was a senior manager in a large health care organization, his CEO strongly advised him to read Jim Collins’s book Good to Great (Collins, 2001). In this best seller, Collins reveals the principles behind growth, financial performance, and shareholder value. On closer inspection, however, his claims and assertions turn out to be true in the same way that a horo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Foreword
• List of Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Why Reconsider Change Management?
• 3 Story of Change: 18 Leading Assumptions in Change Practice
• 4 Methodology
• 5 Examining the Story of Change: Part I
• 6 Examining the Story of Change: Part II
• 7 Examining the Story of Change: Part III
• 8 The Story of Change Reconsidered
• Appendix A: Overview of Authors and Researchers
• Appendix B: Allocation of Researchers Per Assumption
• Appendix C: List of Firms Referred to in Chapter 3
• Appendix D: Bibliography
• Index