Chapter 16: Seam, Change, And Organizational Performance: The Importance of Incorporating Quantitative and Qualitative Assessment

Organizations can be conceptualized as organs of change. As biological entities within a constantly evolving environment, organizations are challenged to adapt to their new environment, new employees, new technologies, new laws, new processes, new skills, new resources, new markets, and new opportunities. A quick review of the buzz words and concepts used in current corporate vocabulary—including the need to re-orient, re-organize, re-engineer, re-structure, re-align, and re-allocate—highlights our pervasive focus on constantly reevaluating the ways in which our firms work.

Managing change is a complex challenge and many firms continue to struggle in their attempts to cope with organizational and employee reactions (Tichy, 1983). According to conventional wisdom, two out of every three change efforts fail (e.g. Beer, Eisenstat & Spector, 1990; Beer & Nohria, 2000a, 200b; Kerber & Buono, 2005). Indeed, even as our understanding of the change process increases, firms are still experiencing great difficulties in implementing organizational change. Although there is no shortage of literature on how to implement these initiatives, firms continue to grapple with the application of models and strategies (see Argyris & Schon, 1996)due to a lack of appropriate methodological tools (Moore, 2005). ‘ ‘ ‘