Chapter 5: Intervention and Organizational Change: Building Organizational Change Capacity¹

A basic reality of the 21^st century is that organizations and their management are faced with unrelenting demands for change. Companies in literally every industry are increasingly being challenged to both respond to and anticipate continuously changing competitive, market, technological, economic, and social conditions to the point where change is described as the “new normal” (Jørgensen, Owen, & Neus, 2008). Yet, despite this reality, and a virtual explosion of research and managerial attention devoted to conceptualizing and empirically testing a range of change management practices (cf. Abrahamson, 2000; Armenakis & Harris, 2002, 2009; Beer, Eisenstat, & Spector, 1990; de Caluwé & Vermaak, 2002; Higgs & Rowland, 2005; Kerber & Buono, 2005; King & Wright, 2007; Kotter, 1996; Kotter & Cohen, 2002), successful organizational change often remains an elusive quest. A global business study by McKinsey underscores this problem, noting that only one-third of organizational change initiatives were viewed as successful by their leaders (Meaney & Pung, 2008). As a recent IBM white paper study suggests, the “change gap” (i.e., the gap between an organization’s expectation of change and its history of successfully managing it) has increased significantly over the past few years (see Jørgensen, et al, 2008).