Organisational change and human resource management

Strategic and operational changes are prevalent features of organisational life, pursued to ensure continued organisational success, and, in some cases, survival. It is therefore concerning that many scholarly contributions on organisational change open with the ominous assertion that approximately 70 per cent of change initiatives fail (Balogun and Hope Hailey, 2004; Worley and Mohrman, 2014). Others recognise that, while on average this may be the case, rates of failure (and success) vary across different types of change (e.g. cultural versus structural change, see Smith, 2002). The lack of consistent positive outcomes may be attributable to debate over the most appropriate way to implement change processes. This stems in part from the overwhelming scale of the literature, illustrated in a 2015 search of MetaLib, which returned 1,057,005 results for ‘organisational change’. Debate also stems from the different perspectives taken by authors. Some adopt an analytical approach, seeking to understand what organisations and individuals actually do. Others adopt more prescriptive approaches, premised on guiding practitioners in implementing change (Burnes, 2009). Together, these factors have contributed to ‘the lack of a valid framework of how to implement and manage organisational change’ (By, 2005: 370). As the scale of the literature on change limits our capacity to comprehensively address all of the issues raised within it, the purpose of this chapter is threefold. First, we introduce the nature of organisational change. Second, we explorethe four cornerstones of change: drivers, processes, agents and recipients (see Figure 15.1). These cornerstones can also be considered as the ‘why’, ‘how’ and ‘who’ of change – with the ‘who’ consisting of those responsible for making change happen, and those affected by it