Prelims

Research in Organizational Change and Development

ISBN: 978-1-80262-174-7, eISBN: 978-1-80262-173-0

ISSN: 0897-3016

Publication date: 26 November 2021

Citation

(2021), "Prelims", (Rami) Shani, A.B. and Noumair, D.A. (Ed.) Research in Organizational Change and Development (Research in Organizational Change and Development, Vol. 29), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. i-XV. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0897-301620210000029012

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2022 Abraham B. (Rami) Shani and Debra A. Noumair. Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited


Half Title Page

Research in Organizational Change and Development

Series Title Page

Research in Organizational Change and Development

Series Editors: Abraham B. (Rami) Shani

Debra A. Noumair

Previous Volumes:

Volumes 1–28: Research in Organizational Change and Development

Title Page

Research in Organizational Change and Development Volume 29

Research in Organizational Change and Development

Edited by

Abraham B. (Rami) Shani

California Polytechnic State University, USA

And

Debra A. Noumair

Teachers College, Columbia University, USA

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK

First edition 2022

Editorial matter and selection © 2022 Abraham B. (Rami) Shani and Debra A. Noumair. Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited.

Individual chapters © 2022 by Emerald Publishing Limited

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ISBN: 978-1-80262-174-7 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-80262-173-0 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-80262-175-4 (Epub)

ISSN: 0897-3016 (Series)

About the Contributors

Oğuz N. Babüroğlu holds the ARAMA Chair of Action Research at Sabancı University, İstanbul, Turkey, and is the Founding Manager of ARAMA Participatory Management Consulting since 1995. He received his PhD in 1987 at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania in Social Systems Sciences. He specializes in transforming large-scale systems toward new generation models within the action research perspective and has published in the leading journals within this line of inquiry. His publications have appeared in journals such as Journal of Action Research, Human Relations, Systems Practice and Action Research, and Organization Studies, largely on topics within the Emery–Trist perspective. He has worked with organizations over 1,200 action research projects ranging from large corporations to civil society institutions, government agencies, and municipalities; has helped design three universities from ground up; and has set up about 15 corporate academies in Turkey as well as in Europe, United States, Russia, and the Middle East.

Ewa Bogacz-Wojtanowska is Professor of the Jagiellonian University and Dean of the Faculty of Management and Social Communication. She conducts research on management of NGOs and social enterprises, functioning of various organizational forms and structures in a civil society, as well as management in higher education institutions. She is an active quality researcher, using for her research in particular observations, individual and group interviews, as well as the methodology of action research.

W. Warner Burke, with a BA in Psychology from Furman University in 1957, taught a semester of high school before serving 2 years of active duty as a Lieutenant in the US Army. After an MA and PhD from the University of Texas, he was a faculty member at the University of Richmond for 3 years. He joined the National Training Laboratories for 8 years responsible for sensitivity training and OD. Returning to academia at Clark University, he served as Chair, Department of Management and the MBA program, for 3 years before joining Teachers College, Columbia University, in 1979. His scholarly work includes over 20 books and 200 articles. He has received many awards, for example, the initial distinguished scholar-practitioner award from the Academy of Management.

Mateo Cruz, is an Assistant Professor of Management at Bentley University. His primary research focuses on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in workplace contexts using an intersectional lens. His most recent studies examine the different ways women/LGBTQ+ people/BIPOC contend with systemic stereotype threat in occupations where they face chronic underrepresentation. As a scholar-practitioner, Mateo's work is guided by one central goal – to design and deliver evidence-based interventions that advance change leaders at the intersection of identities. He holds 15+ years of experience as an Organization Development (OD) Consultant specializing in inclusive leadership, group & team dynamics, and organization change.

Iben Duvald is an Anthropologist and Assistant Professor at the Department of Management, Aarhus BSS, Aarhus University. In her research, she combines organization design theory and qualitative methods in order to study organization design challenges, collaboration, and social practices within and between organizations within the Danish emergency healthcare system. She is studying organizations at both a macro level (structures) and a micro level (processes and social practices/strategies on an individual level). Since 2014, she has been affiliated with the Emergency Department at Viborg Regional Hospital, Regional Hospital Central Jutland.

Alexis Fink, PhD, has spent more than two decades leading Talent Analytics, Workforce Strategy, Talent Management, and Large-Scale Organizational Change Teams at leading global organizations, including Facebook, Microsoft, and Intel. She has done extensive work in organizational transformation, organizational culture, leadership assessment, and the application of advanced analytical methods to human capital problems. She is an author of a comprehensive book on people analytics, Investing in People: Financial Impact of Human Resource Initiatives, and has coedited the recent book on employee surveys, Employee Surveys and Sensing: Driving Organizational Culture and Performance.

Frank D. Golom, PhD, is Associate Professor of Applied Psychology at Loyola University Maryland and former founding Associate Director of Executive Education Programs in Change and Consultation at Teachers College, Columbia University. His expertise sits at the nexus of workplace diversity, group dynamics, and organization development and change. He has received several awards for his research, including two Best LGBT Research Awards from the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) and a highly commended paper award from Emerald Publishing. He regularly consults to for-profit and not-for-profit organizations on issues of diversity, equity, inclusion, and change, and currently serves as Chair of the Department of Psychology at Loyola.

Anna Góral is Assistant Professor in the Department of Cultural Management, Jagiellonian University. For many years, she has been involved in the work in the nongovernmental and public sectors. She has authored numerous academic publications on issues related to national heritage management, in particular the role of intersectoral cooperation in the development of the heritage. Her special interests include diversity management in organizations, civic activity, and cultural organizations.

Beata Jałocha is Assistant Professor in the Institute of Public Affairs, Jagiellonian University. Her research interests focus mainly on project management and projectification processes, as well as action research. She teaches and conducts research projects involving action research as a methodological approach to solving social and organizational problems.

Piotr Jedynak is Professor of Management. He works at Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Poland, where he holds the positions of Vice President for Personnel Policy and Head of the Management Systems Department. He specializes in risk management, strategic management, and management systems. He is the author of numerous publications and an auditor and consultant to many public and business organizations.

Alec Levenson, PhD, is Senior Research Scientist, Center for Effective Organizations, University of Southern California. His action research and consulting work with companies optimize job and organizational performance and HR systems through applying organization design, job design, human capital analytics, and strategic talent management. Dr Levenson's approach combines the best elements of scientific research and practical, actionable knowledge that companies can use to improve performance. He uses economics, strategy, organization behavior, and industrial–organizational psychology to tackle complex talent and organizational challenges that defy easy solutions. He has trained HR professionals globally in operating model optimization, and the integration of organization development and people analytics.

Michael R. Manning is Research Director and Professor of Leadership, Strategy, and Change at the Center for Values-Driven Leadership, Daniel L. Goodwin College of Business, Benedictine University. He is also a Doctoral Faculty in the School of Leadership Studies at Fielding Graduate University and serves as Associate Editor of The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science. His research focuses on occupational stress, the role of emotions in processes of change, and whole systems change. Dr Manning is past Division Chair of the Organization Development and Change Division of the Academy of Management. He has held faculty appointments at New Mexico State University, Case Western Reserve University, and the State University of New York at Binghamton.

Joe McDonagh is Associate Professor of Business (Strategy and Change) at Trinity Business School, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. His research, teaching, and advisory work focus on the process of leading large-scale strategic, organizational, and technological change programs in civil and public service organizations. He has extensive experience working with government organizations in Ireland, the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland, the European Commission, the Commonwealth of Independent States, and the United Nations.

Grażyna Prawelska-Skrzypek is Professor of Humanities in the field of Management Sciences and Head of the Public Management Department at the Institute of Public Affairs of the Jagiellonian University. She deals with the science of public management and public policy in a humanistic context. Grażyna Prawelska-Skrzypek participated in a social project of action research and conducted classes for doctoral students developing competence in consulting based on action research.

Mathis Schulte's current research focuses on understanding the creation of social networks within organizations, and their effects on employee satisfaction, customer service, and financial performance. His research appeared in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, the Journal of Applied Psychology, and Organization Science. Prior to joining HEC in 2009, Mathis was a senior fellow at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and lectured on Negotiations and Conflict Resolution. Mathis holds an MS in Psychology from the University of Hamburg and a PhD in Social–Organizational Psychology from Columbia University, New York.

Brenda A. Barker Scott is an Organizational Consultant and Educator dedicated to the design and cultivation of impactful, healthy, and collaborative workplaces. As a consultant, she has led ambitious transformation efforts with governments, agencies, and private firms. As an educator, Brenda is an Instructor of OD for the Queen's University Industrial Relations Centre and has taught at the graduate level in the Schools of Industrial Relations and Public Administration. Brenda is coauthor of Building Smart Teams: A Roadmap to High Performance and is a frequent contributor to the IRC press. Brenda holds a PhD in Human and Organizational Systems from Fielding Graduate University.

John W. Selsky is a Consulting Fellow at the Institute for Washington's Future, a public-policy center in Seattle, Washington. He studied under the late Eric Trist in the Social Systems Sciences Department at Wharton and has held academic positions in New Zealand, Australia, Turkey, and the United States. He has published in major and minor organization studies journals on systems theory, strategy making in turbulent environments, cross-sector partnerships, and natural resource management. He is retired from university-based educational labor, having managed to evade the worst excesses of the digital academic workplace.

Baruch Shimoni is a Professor of Sociology and Organization Development at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. In his most recent research project, Professor Shimoni links the Bourdieuan concept of habitus to the field of ROCD in order to incorporate the individual and the social in the field. Professor Shimoni published his theoretical and practical ideas in leading journals such as The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, Organizational Dynamics, and Academy of Management Perspectives, and in a book Organization Development and Society: Theory and Practice of Organization Development Consulting (Routledge, 2019).

Maura Stevenson, PhD, joined MedVet as Chief Human Resources Officer in 2017. Maura oversees all aspects of the Employee Experience, including talent management, compensation and benefits, leadership and employee development, and organizational development. Prior to joining MedVet, Maura served as Vice President of Talent Management at The Wendy's Company, Vice President of Human Resources at Starbucks, and held positions of increasing complexity with Merrill Lynch and The Hartford. She holds a BA from Amherst College, and an MA and PhD from The Ohio State University in Organizational Psychology.

Marc Thompson, BA (Hons), MA (Oxon), MSc (Econ), DSc, is a Governing Body Fellow at Green Templeton College, Oxford, and Coacademic Director of the HEC-Oxford's joint program on Change Leadership. Marc’s research interests have focused on workplace and organizational change. He recently coedited The Oxford University Handbook on Meaningful Work and has published in the Journal of Management Studies, Human Resource Management, and the International Journal of Human Resource Management, among others. He teaches in a range of degree, open and custom programs at Oxford.

Preface

The foreword for ROCD 28, which was written in early February 2020, ended with the invitation to consider contributions to ROCD 29 that reflect new insights and practice stemming from the global COVID-19 pandemic. As we were writing the foreword, no one anticipated the magnitude and unprecedented devastation of the pandemic and its impact on humanity, society, continents, regions, communities, organizations, and families. One of the discoveries across all spheres of life was the phenomenon of individual and system resilience and agility. Becoming agile became a necessity in most aspects of life, work life and organizational life.

Most of the published academic and practitioner work during the past year and in increasing pace during the last few months seems to capture the monumental shifts in mindsets, mental models, nature of work, essence of management, the meaning of participating in emerging change, as well as designing and managing change and development. Some of the road maps of change and planned change that we have had seem to have worked while others did not. Some of the theories and models of change and development that we have had were found to be relevant while others were not. Similar experience can be found around the essence and practice of research and discovery orientations and practice.

This volume, while not addressing head on the pandemic and its impact, includes 10 contributions from colleagues around the globe with powerful insights and potentially relevant impact for researching and practicing organization change and development during and post the pandemic. The emerging people analytics subfield and organization development perspectives are brought together to present an integrated framework that can guide future theoretical development and practice. Bourdieu's concept of social position in the form of “habitus-oriented approach” is advanced to advocate for a new theory that focuses on habitus and social position in order to expand our understanding of human behavior. Kurt Lewin's original view of political labs is advanced to examine the emerging phenomenon of labs as mechanisms for organization change and development. The alignment challenges of strategy and digital technology in government organizations are examined via the use of collaborative inquiry. The essence and context of collaboration in teams is investigated in the emerging new workplace. The current state of organizational DEI practice, including the mixed and limited effectiveness of many individual-level DEI interventions and the lack of clear guidance on how to frame DEI issues from a systems perspective, is examined, and the context-level culture (CLC) framework for diagnosing and addressing diversity-related challenges in the workplace is introduced. While focusing on digital transformation, a new class of sociotechnical system, called the Platform STS (P-STS), with new guiding design principle is advanced. The establishment of a small-scale collaborative community and utilization of an action research process generated new insights into the challenges faced by healthcare organizations. The role of action research orientation as a tool that supports new cooperation and partnership between universities and external organizations is examined. Last, in the new ROCD section “Reflection,” the author compares organization development (OD) and change management (CM) across eight concepts that are relevant to both OD and CM. The argument is made that OD stresses development of people and change regarding the organization, whereas CM emphasizes facilitation and expanding their business with the client organization. A concluding statement for the comparison of OD and CM is that OD has a rich underpinning of theory and a clear set of values that provide guidelines for the work with clients, and CM has neither.

These contributions represent a commitment to the future of organization development and change viability and continuous impact on organizational agility. The field continues to evolve, and as the manuscripts in this volume demonstrate, so is the ability to generate a new level of understanding of the emerging complex nature of organizations. If some of the recent views of the emerging work systems that advocate that due to the impact of the pandemic, future workplaces are likely to be hybrid-based, with more hybrid ways of organizing, hybrid ways of managing, hybrid ways of engaging organizational members, hybrid ways of communication, hybrid ways of manufacturing, and hybrid ways of interfacing with suppliers and customers, the field of OD is in a position to be an important player in this transformation.

As can be seen, this volume includes chapters from colleagues across nine countries that explore organization change and development themes in Canada, Denmark, France, Ireland, Israel, Poland, Turkey, United Kingdom, and United States. Collectively, the volume represents rich diversity: multiple generations of authors including senior scholars and practitioners, one of the field's founders, well-established thought leaders and colleagues at various stages of career including newly minted OCD researchers and practitioners, wide variety of topics, ranging from a contribution that is an extension of Kurt Lewin's work to a new conceptual framework that is based on Bourdieu's concept of social position, to the exploration of a new design principle for sociotechnical system theory that meets the reality of digital transformation, to the exploration of “labs” as the engine or learning mechanism for OCD efforts, to the utilization and advancement of our thinking and practice about action research initiatives, to deep level of exploration of collaboration in team development to a new framework for consulting to DEI in organizations from a systems perspective to attempting to differentiate between the field of organization development and change management. Collectively, these chapters and the collaborative inquiry they represent contribute to a sustainable trajectory of research and practice that will enhance our ability to be a relevant player as the world is moving through the pandemic and to deepen the role that the field can play globally.

This volume also introduces a new component to the series. As the field continues to evolve, we felt that asking a member of the community to reflect on an issue or a theme or trace the evolutionary trajectory of a key concept or theory based on their work and bring it to our current digital context for the future would be of added value, as we are approaching volume 30 of ROCD. In this volume, ROCD 29, we are introducing this idea with a manuscript by W. Warner Burke that examines the evolution of OD and CM and draws some distinct boundaries that can be helpful for both future inquiry and practice.

From our editorial perspective, one of the best parts of our work on this series is that our collaboration with the authors always brings new learning, whether in the form of making history accessible and relevant, challenging assumptions, extending the theoretical pillars of our theory in creative ways, or integrating perspectives that heretofore have remained separate. The series has been around long enough to substantiate the claim that we have published some true classics in the field of organization change and development. We have provided scholar-practitioners across career stage, sector, and geography with a platform to share their work and for colleagues to learn from each other in order to inform future collaborations. Moreover, the ROCD series has provided reliable sources for contributing to the ongoing development of organization change and development theory, research, and practice. It is our hope, that as you read through the volume, you will consider your own thoughts and practice and possible contributions to the field and the community and you will contact us to suggest topics or themes for future volumes.

Abraham B. (Rami) Shani

Debra A. Noumair

Editors