Sustainable Organizational Change- Can you make the change happen with Large Teams alone?

Abstract: The article presents some insights from ongoing research on sustainable organizational change. It focuses on a concept of improvements actions conducted by teams within manufacturing organization. There are considered two types of approaches, namely bottom-up – example of which are empowered, small, cross-functional teams; and top-down – large teams following rigorous problem solving methodologies. In order to investigate impact of small teams and large teams on the organizational system structure a System Dynamics model was developed. The model investigates the effectiveness of both kinds of approaches from the perspective of sustainable organizational change effort. The analysis of the model and simulation results is supported by example of successful organizational change in Lima Refinery. In the conclusion section the implications for sustainable organizational change efforts are presented