Preface

Volume 22 of Research in Organization Change and Development marks a transition in the editorial team. Bill Pasmore and Dick Woodman, after 21 volumes, have decided to step into other exciting opportunities in which they are continuing to contribute to the development of our field. Rami joined Dick and Bill six years ago (with volume 17) and Debra joined last year with volume 21. Both have stepped into the big shoes of the founding creators and editors of this series. The contribution that Dick and Bill have made to our field by creating and nurturing this platform for the sharing of work by scholars and practitioners has resulted in some landmark breakthroughs, insights, and the triggering of new directions and streams of research and practice of Organization Development and Change (OD&C) work.

This volume continues the long established tradition of providing a special platform for scholars, practitioners, and scholar-practitioners to share new insightful and thought provoking research-based insights. The chapters in the volume represent a commitment to maintaining the high quality of work that many of you have come to expect from this publication. The volume includes chapters by international diverse colleagues including Gervase R. Bushe, Andreas Hellström, Katherine Heynoski, Tony Huzzard, Angela C. C. Keister, Svante Lifvergren, Robert J. Marshak, Robert E. Quinn, Edgar H. Schein, Katherine A. Schroeder, Gertjan Schuiling, Peter F. Sorensen, Gretchen Spreitzer, James E. Stefanchin, Barry Sugarman, David B. Szabla, Michael Thomas, Laraine S. Warner, and Therese F. Yaeger. The themes and areas covered by these authors are as diverse as their disciplinary and occupational backgrounds.

The drive toward understanding and mastering the process of organizational development and change in a rapidly changing environmental context has continued to be a dynamic force in the development of the field. The role of persuasion in education and learning in the process of organization change and development continues to be vital. The role of leaders continues to draw attention in the exploration of alternative ways to create and lead high performing organizations. We are continuously intrigued and attempt to understand better the role and impact of the OD practitioner mindset on the evolving process of the change and development effort. At the same time, we strive for deeper level understanding of the connection between organization change content and change strategy. The challenge of system wide transformation in the emerging complex business context requires a new set of lenses into the change process. The role and dynamics of sense-making and sense-giving seems to provide some new insights in enhancing and facilitating change.

We continue to search and experiment with new integrative frameworks. New perspectives about different ways to create organization agility, about ways to create responsive business process via a tapestry of learning mechanisms, the development of dynamic capability, and different ways to accelerate global hybrid team effectiveness have been evolving in the field over the past twenty-five years. We have models and principles to follow, and a great deal of research to support what does and doesn’t work. Yet, we are lacking a sure-fire formula for success and it is our belief that due to the inherently human and emotional nature of change in organizational settings that no such formula will ever be found. That said, we are improving the state of the art, as the papers in this volume attest.

Some of the papers in this volume continue the tradition of building on past trajectories and bring new mappings of the evolving nature of the field and emerging conceptualizations that can guide practice and research. Others explore the role that mindsets and preconceived notions about the OD field can play in having an impact on change and development. Others explore the role that learning mechanisms played during a twenty-five-year project on the firm’s ability to respond to an evolving competitive business context. From our editorial perspective, one of the most wonderful things about our work on this series is that it always brings surprises, whether in the form of a new way of thinking about old problems or a different way to think about opportunities we didn’t know existed. The series has been around long enough to substantiate the claim that we have published some true classics in the field of organization development and change. While it’s too early to say whether the papers in Volume 22 contain new classics, there are certainly some interesting and worthwhile pieces to read that have the potential to become classics at some time in the future. In addition, collectively, the volume represents tremendous diversity: multiple generations of authors including a senior founder of the field and the Organization Development and Change Division in the Academy of Management, well-established thought leaders, and colleagues at various stages of career including newly minted Organization Development and Change researchers and practitioners; colleagues from inside and outside the United States; change work conducted in public and private sectors; historical pieces that are foundational and current work that opens up new avenues of inquiry. Together, these papers contribute to a sustainable trajectory of research in the field of Organization Development and Change.

Leading off Volume 22 is a paper by Ed Schein that provides an historical perspective on the role of coercion in the educational process by drawing on his experience as an educator, researcher, and practitioner of organization development and change. Through compelling stories and reflections, Schein invites us to consider the role of coercion in teaching and learning along with the ethical dilemmas that accompany the choices we make when engaged in experiential education. Next, Robert E. Quinn, Katherine Heynoski, Michael Thomas, and Gretchen Spreitzer continue the theme of learning by taking us to the public school classroom and focusing on teachers as transformational leaders. Their research generates hypotheses about how transformational leadership occurs in the classroom and what public school teachers do to achieve high performance. The chapter offers a new perspective on what other sectors can learn from leadership within educational institutions rather than the other way around. Implications for creating and sustaining high performance organizations are offered to leaders as well as to OD&C researchers, practitioners, and educators.

Gervase R. Bushe and Robert J. Marshak also challenge us to consider how we think about organization development and change by furthering their work on Dialogic OD as differentiated from Diagnostic OD. A main thrust of their focus is on the mindset of the OD practitioner and through an analysis of change theorists influenced by the complexity sciences and interpretivist social science, they develop eight premises that shape the Dialogic mindset. They suggest that Dialogic OD will be disruptive to the prevailing OD narrative and provoke new ways to think about OD&C theory and practice and open up new avenues for research. Moving from the mindset of the practitioner to examining how organization change is perceived by change recipients, David B. Szabla, James E. Stefanchin, and Laraine S. Warner explore an under-researched relationship between change strategy and change content by asking research participants to reflect on a recent organization change initiative. Specifically, their inquiry focused on to what extent change recipients perceive the use of theorist recommended strategies when undergoing specific types of organization change. While some results were consistent with previous research, there were also some surprising findings that offer guidance to OD&C practitioners and invite future research on the congruency, or lack thereof, between change strategy and change content.

Continuing with the themes explored in the previous two chapters, Barry Sugarman proposes a new, broad conceptual framework to the quest for understanding dynamic capability in organizations – managing on the edge of chaos. This approach rests on two major ideas: (i) a duality-paradox perspective and (ii) new typologies of organizational learning (OL) and individual action/thinking. A case of radical innovation at Microsoft provides a multi-level stimulus for the further development of the framework. Tony Huzzard, Andreas Hellström, and Svante Lifvergren examine how to intervene to develop a health care system by promoting a bottom-up approach where the stakeholders, the physicians, were invited to redesign their own processes. This approach allowed for a dialogical intervention that opened up spaces for learning, reflection, and participation among senior cancer physicians. While the physician’s participation had a decisive role in the change effort, a unique contribution of the chapter lies in its deep exploration of the role of symbolism, sense-giving, and sense-making in a system-wide change in cancer-care.

We return to the theme of learning mechanisms in Gertjan Schuiling’s chapter, which describes change efforts and action research projects in a Dutch multinational in a period of twenty-five years. The ongoing effort produced in one of their businesses a zigzag path toward collaborative interaction patterns at the horizontal and vertical interfaces. Changing the patterns at the vertical interfaces proved to be the most tricky, complex, and confusing operation. The study shows that organizations need hierarchical interfaces between levels, but are hindered by the hierarchical interaction patterns at these interfaces and that competitive performance requires more than redesigning horizontal interfaces. A business can only move with flexibility and speed when the interaction patterns at agility-critical vertical interfaces are also changed. Angela C. C. Keister’s chapter that follows, focuses on the development of thriving teams as a collective state that contributes to organization agility. The study demonstrates the effects of collective thriving, measured at the work group level, on change agility and that collective thriving predicts change agility and team performance. Last, Katherine A. Schroeder, Peter F. Sorensen, and Therese F. Yaeger revisit the challenges of designing and managing the effectiveness of global hybrid teams. Their field research offers new insights about developmental actions that can be taken to accelerate effective team functioning and global team effectiveness.

The nine manuscripts included in this volume collectively provide an intriguing collection. They capture and provide value to the real work of creating a sustainable field of study and practice – organization change and development – and sustainable organizations. This real work occurs in practice, as members of our community come together to learn from experience and craft new approaches to lead and manage organization change and development. The work that appears in this volume confirms that there is no shortage of ideas, activities, interventions, research-based insights, and energy around organizational change and development. We are continuously making progress in our understanding of change, development and organization development and change; we are continuously asking questions, the answers to which find ways to make a difference, and we are continuously exploring alternative research methodologies and the role that they can play. It is our hope, that as you read through Volume 22, you will consider your own thoughts and practice and possible contributions to the field and contact us to suggest topics for future volumes.

Abraham B. (Rami) Shani

Debra A. Noumair

Editors