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Managing Change
7th edition
Chapter 10
Developments in change
management
Emergence challenges
Emergent change as OD
strikes back
Copyright © 2017, 2015, 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Emergent change (1 of 3)
• Open-ended process
• Adjusting to changing external environment
• Bottom-up
• Unpredictable
• Cannot be pre-planned
• Learning process
• No universal rules.
‘The recurring story is one of autonomous
initiatives that bubble up internally; continuous
emergent change; steady learning from both failure
and success; strategy implementation that is
replaced by strategy making; the appearance of
innovations that are unplanned, unforeseen and
unexpected; and small actions that have
surprisingly large consequences’.
(Weick, 2000: 225)
‘In this perspective, organizational transformation is not
portrayed as a drama staged by deliberate directors with
predefined scripts and choreographed moves, or the
inevitable outcome of a technological logic, or a sudden
discontinuity that fundamentally invalidates the status quo.
Rather, organizational transformation is seen here to be an
ongoing improvisation enacted by organizational actors
trying to make sense of and act coherently in the world …
Each shift in practice creates the conditions for further
breakdowns, unanticipated outcomes, and innovations,
which in their turn are responded to with more variations.
And such variations are ongoing; there is no beginning or
end point in this change process’.
(Orlikowski, 1996: 65–6)
Advantages of Emergent change
‘…sensitivity to local contingencies; suitability for
on-line real-time experimentation, learning, and
sensemaking; comprehensibility and manageability;
likelihood of satisfying needs for autonomy, control,
and expression; proneness to swift implementation;
resistance to unravelling; ability to exploit existing
tacit knowledge; and tightened and shortened
feedback loops from results to action’.
(Weick, 2000: 227)
Emergent change
Successful change is less dependent on detailed
plans and projections than on reaching an
understanding of the complexity of the issues
concerned and identifying the range of available
options.
Pettigrew (1997)
Pettigrew’s five guiding principles of
processual research
Source: Pettigrew (1997: 340).
Power and politics
‘In managing these transitions practitioners need to
be aware of: the importance of power politics
within organizations as a determinant of the speed,
direction and character of change; the enabling
and constraining properties of the type and scale
of change being introduced; and the influence of
the internal and external context on the pathways
and outcomes of change on new work
arrangements.…’
(Dawson, 1994: 180–2)
Pugh’s four principles for understanding
change
Source: Pugh (1993: 109–10).
The role of managers (1 of 2)
• Decision-making: this includes intuition and vision, the
ability to gather and utilise information, understanding
the practical and political consequences of decisions, the
ability to overcome resistance, the skill to understand
and synthesise conflicting views and to be able to
empathise with different groups.
• Coalition-building: this comprises the skills necessary
to gain the support and resources necessary to
implement decisions. These include checking the
feasibility of ideas, gaining supporters, bargaining with
other stakeholders and presenting new ideas and
concepts in a way that wins support.
The role of managers (2 of 2)
• Achieving action: this includes handling opposition,
motivating people, providing support and building self-
esteem.
• Maintaining momentum and effort: this involves team-
building, generating ownership, sharing information and
problems, providing feedback, trusting people and
energising staff.
(Carnall, 2003: 125–6)
Figure 10.1
The Stace–Dunphy change matrix
Source: Stace and Dunphy (2001: 107).
Contingency (1 of 2)
‘Context and action are inseparable’.
(Pettigrew, 2000: 243)
‘Leadership [of change] requires action appropriate to its

context’.
(Pettigrew and Whipp, 1991: 165)
‘A system has an identity that sets it apart from its

environment and is capable of preserving that identity
within a given range of environmental scenarios. Systems
exist within a hierarchy of other systems. They contain
subsystems and exist within some wider system. All are
interconnected’.
(Stickland, 1998: 14)
Contingency (2 of 2)
‘While the primary stimulus for change remains those
forces in the external environment, the primary motivator
for how change is accomplished resides with the people
within the organization’.
(Benjamin and Mabey, 1993: 181)
Figure 10.2
The determinants of successful change
Managing the political dynamics of change
Source: Senior (2002).
Table 10.1
Political skills and the management of
change
Source: Carnall (2003: 133).
Pettigrew and Whipp’s five central factors
for managing change
Source: Pettigrew and Whipp (1993).
Ten Commandments for executing change
Source: Kanter et al (1992: 382–3).
Kotter (1996) – Leading Change
Source: Kotter (1996).
The Emergent approach (1 of 3)
Summary
• Change is not a linear process but a continuous,
open-ended and unpredictable process
• It involves experimentation, adaptation and risk
taking.
• Small- and medium-sized changes lead to
wholesale transformation.
• Change is not an analytical–rational process.
Instead, key change decisions evolve over time
and are the outcome of political and cultural
processes in organisations.
Summary
• Managers must foster a climate of learning and
experimentation.
• Managers must create a collective vision for the
organisation.
• The key organisational processes are:
– Information-gathering
– Communication
– Learning.
Criticisms
• ‘One best way’.
• It assumes all organisations are the same.
• It overfocused on power and politics.
• Culture is treated as malleable.
• It ignores managerial resistance.
• It ignores choice.
• It ignores ethical issues.
• It is strong on analysis and weak on practice.
Emergence (1 of 2)
Summary
• Organisations are complex, non-linear systems in which
change emerges through a process of spontaneous self-
organisation, which is underpinned by a set of simple
order-generating rules.
• For proponents of Emergence, the presence of
underlying order-generating rules offers a means of
intentionally influencing the process and outcome of
change by identifying and modifying these rules.
• The term Emergence describes one of the defining
properties of complex physical and social systems.
Emergence (2 of 2)
Summary
• Emergence is the process by which patterns of
behaviour or global-level structures arise from the
interaction of local-level processes and agents
interacting according to their own local order-generating
rules.
• Such behaviours and structures do not arise from
intention or planning, and cannot even be predicted from
the local rules of behaviour.
• Emergence theorists argue that the best-run companies
survive because they operate at the edge of chaos by
relentlessly pursuing a path of continuous innovation
brought about by a process that resembles self-
organisation in nature.
Emergence and OD
• As a concept it is difficult to understand, and in many ways vague.
• In its current state of development, it has much less to offer on the
practical side of the rigour-relevance divide than the Emergent
approach.
• Nevertheless, there is strong evidence that Emergence may be
supplanting Emergent change as the main alternative to Planned
change and OD.
• However, it does have some affinities with OD.
• Its self-organising and participative nature offers the opportunity to
promote the sort of informal structures, leadership and networks
that are seen as suited to the nature of the modern world and which
OD has been advocating for many years.
• Therefore, Emergence and OD may be considered more as
complementary perspective on change rather than competing
approaches.
The renaissance of OD
The 1990s and 2000s saw major developments which supported
OD:
•A new generation of scholars started to take a critical and surprisingly
supportive interest in the work of Kurt Lewin.
•OD did not stand still:
– OD practices were increasingly being incorporated into HRM and HRD.
– The internationalisation of OD continued apace.
– Newer perspectives on change, such as social constructionism and
storytelling, were incorporated into OD.
– Newer variants of OD, such as Appreciative Inquiry, were gaining
prominence.
•Therefore, while the Emergent approach has been losing ground and
Emergence has yet to establish itself as a practical approach to
change, OD has been experiencing something of a renaissance.
A final note
Even a resurgent OD cannot claim to cover the full
extent of the broad spectrum of change events
organisations encounter.

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Managing Change

Source: Pettigrew (1997: 340).

Source: Pugh (1993: 109–10).

Source: Stace and Dunphy (2001: 107).

‘Leadership [of change] requires action appropriate to its

‘A system has an identity that sets it apart from its

(Benjamin and Mabey, 1993: 181)

Source: Senior (2002).

Source: Carnall (2003: 133).

Source: Pettigrew and Whipp (1993).

Source: Kanter et al (1992: 382–3).

Source: Kotter (1996).

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