3: Organizational Change

The previous chapter illustrated the growing interest in the organizational change strategy of Chinese State–owned commercial banks in China. This chapter aims to provide a theoretical basis for the conceptual models that are explored. More precisely, the main argument of this chapter is that extant organizational change (OC) strategy research has little emphasized the role of OD developed in organizational change, with too much focus on relevant theory and too little country-specific strategy research.

This chapter begins with an introduction to the nature of OC and theory about organizations in which problems can be described as being a mess or a difficulty. This is followed by a review of several popular theoretical approaches and a critique of their inability and ignorance to transformational change in the process of organizational change formation. Then reviews are made of some theory on transformational change issues of organizational change, and the inadequacy of the current reductionist approach in analyzing approaches to managing change is made. This observation is further confirmed in a subsequent review of the extant research on approaches to managing change. This chapter concludes with a request for taking a holistic view to analyze OC strategy in a country-specific setting from a more OD-centered approach in a mess difficult situation in organization, which has a history that has developed with human resource management.