Examining evidence-based change agency practice in anglo and non-anglo countries: implications for professional HRD practitioners

This is an accepted manuscript of a book chapter published by Palgrave Macmillan in The Future of HRD, Volume II Change, Disruption and Action in 2020, available online: https://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9783030524586 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.This chapter begins by drawing attention to the role of professional human resource development (HRD) practitioners as ‘organisational change consultants’ in addition to their role as ‘training consultants’ and ‘learning consultants.’ It then discusses the critical change agency role they can and should play in bringing about effective and beneficial organisational change and development (OCD) in strategic partnership with line managers. This is followed by a compelling rationale for the adoption of evidence-based practice (EBP) approaches for managing and/or facilitating OCD initiatives. The chapter continues by presenting and discussing the research process and results of a multiple cross-case comparative analysis (MCCCA) of: i) various reflective perspectives on EBP in the field of change management in general and OCD in particular; and of ii) 33 reflective case histories of specific evidence-based OCD initiatives conducted within single organisation settings. The purpose of this study, conducted and previously reported elsewhere (see Hamlin, Jones and Ellinger, 2019), was to glean common insights from the critical reflections upon practice of over 70 evidence-based OCD practitioners who had used bodies of best evidence of various strengths to help enhance their change agency capabilities. The findings of the MCCCA study not only offer validation for a set of ‘original’ common insights and learned lessons (CILs) that resulted from a previous study by one of us, but also include 10 emergent ‘new’ CILs together with numerous confirmatory insights from other ‘seasoned’ evidence-based OCD practitioners. The chapter concludes with an expression of these findings in the form of a ‘conceptual process model for facilitating EBOCD’. We anticipate this model will provide relevant and useful insights for managers and professional HRD practitioners to lead and/or help facilitate more effective OCD initiatives in their respective organisations