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Research in Organizational Change and Development

Series Title Page

Research in Organizational Change and Development

Series Editors: Abraham B. (Rami) Shani

Debra A. Noumair

Danielle P. Zandee

Previous Volumes:

Title Page

Research in Organizational Change and Development Volume 30

Research in Organizational Change and Development

Edited by

Debra A. Noumair

Teachers College, Columbia University, USA

Abraham B. (Rami) Shani

California Polytechnic State University, USA

Danielle P. Zandee

Nyenrode Business University, The Netherlands

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 2023

Editorial matter and selection © 2023 Debra A. Noumair, Abraham B. (Rami) Shani and Danielle P. Zandee.

Individual chapters © 2023 The authors.

Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited.

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ISBN: 978-1-80455-094-6 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-80455-093-9 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-80455-095-3 (Epub)

ISSN: 0897-3016 (Series)

About the Contributors

Jean M. Bartunek, Boston College, USA, holds the Robert A., and Evelyn J. Ferris chair and is Professor of Management and Organization at Boston College. She is a past president of the Academy of Management, from which she won the career distinguished service award. She is also a past Dean of the Fellows of the Academy of management, as well as a Fellow of the British Academy of Management and the Center for Evidence-Based Management. She has served as an Associate Editor of the Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Learning and Education, and the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science. Her primary interests center on academic–practitioner relationships and organizational change. Her most recent edited book is entitled Social Scientists Confronting Global Crises (Routledge; 2022).

Michael Beer (Mike) is the Cahners-Rabb Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus at the Harvard Business School, and cofounder of and Director of TruePoint Partners, a management consultancy, and cofounder and member of the Board of Higher Ambition Leadership Alliance, a not-for-profit whose members are purpose-driven CEOs and their companies. His research and writing are about organization effectiveness and change as well as human resource management. He has extensive teaching, consulting, and speaking experience in those fields. He began his career at Corning Inc. where he founded and led their Organizational Research and Development Department between 1966 and 1975 when he joined the faculty at HBS. He is the author or coauthor of 12 books among them Managing Human Assets, a founding book in HRM, the award-winning The Critical Path to Corporate Renewal, High Commitment, High Performance, and Higher Ambition. His most recent (2020) is Fit to Compete.

David Coghlan is a Professor Emeritus and Fellow Emeritus at the Trinity Business School, University of Dublin Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. He is author of over 250 articles and book chapters. Recent books include: Collaborative Inquiry in Organization Development and Change (with A.B. Shani, Edward Elgar, 2021), Doing Action Research in Your Own Organization (5th ed. Sage 2019); Conducting Action Research for Business and Management Students (with A.B. Shani, Sage 2018), Inside Organizations (Sage, 2016) and he is coeditor of The Sage Encyclopedia of Action Research (2014) and the four volume set, Action Research in Business and Management (A.B. Shani, Sage, 2016). He serves on the editorial advisory boards of several journals.

Paul Coughlan is Codirector of Faculty, Director of Accreditation and Quality and Professor in Operations Management at Trinity Business School, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. His research explores collaborative strategic improvement of operations through network action learning. His fellow researchers are in different domains and in practice, both nationally and internationally. He has contributed actively to EU-funded research projects exploring environmental sustainability of water distribution, manufacturing improvement, and innovation in food. He is author of over 150 articles and book chapters. With David Coghlan, he has coauthored Collaborative Strategic Improvement Through Network Action Learning (Edward Elgar, 2011).

Thomas G. Cummings is Professor of Management and Organization at the Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California. He has authored over 80 articles and 25 books including the critically acclaimed: Self-Designing Organizations: Learning How to Create High Performance (with Susan Mohrman) and Organization Development and Change (with Christopher Worley). Dr Cummings was President of the Western Academy of Management, Chair of the Organization Development and Change Division of the Academy of Management, and Founding Editor of the Journal of Management Inquiry. He was the 61st President of the Academy of Management, the largest professional association of management scholars in the world with a total membership of over 20,000 from 120+ countries. He is listed in American Men and Women of Science and Who's Who in America.

Yuan Li is an Associate Professor at Saint Mary's College of California, USA. She obtained her PhD in Management from the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. Prior to Saint Mary's, she was an Assistant Professor of Strategy at McGill University. Her research concerns the cultural and symbolic processes of organizational and institutional change. She studies how leaders and change agents use rhetorical tropes, arguments, and stories to make meaning and shape reality. Her work has explored managerial innovations such as the Total Quality Management, the role of the government, elites, and entrepreneurs in China's economic transformation, and conceptual models of institutionalization processes. Her current projects involve topics of grand societal challenges, including organizational stigmatization and workplace inequality. She is also interested in integrating Western and Eastern philosophies to produce practical managerial insights.

Philip Mirvis is an Organizational Psychologist whose studies and private practice concern large-scale organizational change, the workforce and workplace, and business leadership in society. An advisor to companies and NGOs on five continents, he has authored or edited 16 books including The Cynical Americans (social trends), Building the Competitive Workforce (human capital investments), Joining Forces (human dynamics of mergers), To the Desert and Back (business transformation), and Beyond Good Company (social responsibility). His latest are How to Do Relevant Research: From the Ivory Tower to the Real World and Sustainability to Social Change: Lead Your Company from Managing Risks to Creating Social Value. Mirvis is a fellow of the Academy of Management where he received a career achievement award as “Distinguished Scholar-Practitioner.” This is his fourth contribution to the series Research in Organization Development and Change.

Susan Albers Mohrman, University of Southern California, USA, has spent her career as a Senior Research Scientist at the Center for Effective Organizations (CEO) in the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. She founded and directed the CEO's Program in Organization Design. Dr Mohrman's research interests include organization design and change, and sustainable effectiveness. Recently she has studied design frameworks to embed advanced digital technologies to address the needs of multiple stakeholders. She has been an editor and author in the Emerald Press series Design for Sustainability. With E. Lawler and J. O'Toole, she has edited Corporate Stewardship: Organizing for Sustainable Effectiveness (Greenleaf Press, 2015). Her most recent book, with Phil Mirvis and Chris Worley, is How to Do Relevant Research: The Journey from the Ivory Tower to the Real World (Edward-Elgar, 2021).

Cliff Oswick is Professor of Organization Theory at Bayes Business School (formerly Cass), City, University of London, UK. His research interests focus on the application of aspects of discourse, dramaturgy, tropes, narrative, and rhetoric to organizing processes and nontraditional approaches to organizational change. He has published over 150 academic articles and contributions to edited volumes. He is an Associate Editor for Journal of Change Management, a member of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, an Associate Editor for Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, an elected member of the National Training Laboratory, former chair of the board of trustees for the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations (2014–2020), and previously served as chair of the Organization Development and Change Division of the Academy of Management (2015–2020). Cliff has also undertaken a variety of executive education and consultancy assignments for private and public sector organizations.

Abraham B. (Rami) Shani is a Professor Emeritus at the Orfalea College of Business, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, CA, USA. For the past four decades he worked with a wide variety of organizations around the globe in addressing challenges and opportunities of development and change. He is the author, coauthor, or coeditor of many books, articles, and book chapters. Some of his published books and research volumes include IDeaLs – Innovation and Design as Leadership: Transformation in the Digital Era (Emerald, 2021 with J. Press et al.); Collaborative Inquiry for Organization Development and Change (Elgar, 2021 with D. Coghlan); he is coeditor of the four volume set, Action Research in Business and Management (Sage, 2016 with D. Coghlan); Research in Organization Change and Development, Volumes 16–30 (Emerald, 2008–present – with D. Noumair); The Handbook of Collaborative Management Research (SAGE, 2008, CoEdited). He was Chair of the Organization Development & Change Division of the Academy of Management (1996–2001).

Christopher G. Worley is the Research Professor of Management at Pepperdine University's Graziadio Business School. Prior to that, he was a Senior Research Scientist at USC's Center for Effective Organizations and Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at the NEOMA Business School in France. Dr Worley is coauthor of The Agility Factor, Becoming Agile, Management Reset, Built to Change, Integrated Strategic Change, and Organization Development and Change, the leading textbook in the field. He received the 2012 Douglas McGregor “Best Paper” award from the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science and the 2011 “Outstanding Author Contribution Award” from the Emerald LiteratiNetwork. He was Chair of the Academy of Management's Organization Development and Change Division between 2001 and 2004. He and his wife, Debbie, live in Truckee, CA, where they watch the lives of their three children with keen interest.

Preface

Volume 30 of Research in Organizational Change and Development is unique in several ways, not the least of which is that we are celebrating the 30th volume and ushering the enlargement of our editorial team. Danielle P. Zandee from Nyenrode Business University has joined us as we are moving into the fourth decade of ROCD. Danielle's addition to the editorial team represents a commitment to maintaining the high quality of work that many of you have come to expect from this publication platform.

As this Preface is written, humanity is confronting the ongoing crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic, devastating war in Europe, and social and environmental sustainability challenges. Coupled together, we are experiencing forceful waves (that some view as tsunami waves) that are challenging the sustainable future of the globe and humanity. Framing and reframing the state of the field of organization development and change (OD&C) within the continuously evolving world context has been a key tenet of the field and the ROCD series.

As proposals for possible contributions to this volume arrived at our desks a year ago, we picked up some common themes of reflections and insights. As developmental editors and staying true to our mission of nurturing meaningful and rigorous research, we noticed that many of the contributions were driven by either personal or conceptual reflections on the state of the field, the evolving knowledge creation paradigm, and the role that engaged scholarship can play in expanding the field's impact. How to move forward with the OD&C field during this volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) period? Precisely now while many people around the world are focusing on their mere survival, we urgently need to ask the question how to “create a better world together?” This timely, well-chosen theme for the upcoming Academy of Management Annual Conference (Seattle, 2022) raises the bar for the OD&C field which is so firmly grounded on humanistic, democratic, emancipatory, and participatory values.

Creating a better world together raises the bar for the ROCD series as well. The authors of this volume heeded this call of our time in writing their thoughtful, collaborative, reflective, and future-forming chapters. Taken together they address some key questions for our field: Who do we need to be as OD&C to help create a better world and under what relational conditions can we do such work? What research and theorizing do we have available, and what thought-action repertoires need further development? What robust OD&C methods do we have, and which new methods are needed to be truly helpful in the creation of a better world together? The chapters for this volume are written by senior scholars in the field of OD&C who share their insights from a long-lived, continuous engagement with both theory and practice. This shows in their expansive time horizon when reflecting on the field and how they personally navigated through it. Their seniority also shows in their commitment to help bring the field forward while trusting that others may appreciate and continue their legacy. Most of all, and especially endearing in current times, the authors show the joy and strength of collaboration with kindred spirits in inquiry, learning, and writing.

Before introducing each chapter, we note that throughout this volume, authors refer to organization development (OD), organization development change (ODC), and organization development and change (OD&C). While the choice of referent is in the purview of authorship, as editors we view these terms as falling within the domain of organization change and development, the high-level focus of the series and hence, the title.

Our first chapter by Sue Mohrman and Jean Bartunek combines two different perspectives, experience of four decades, and expertise to identify questions that must be and are starting to be addressed by the field of ODC. They consider some of the tensions and key issues for ODC and ask the pivotal question how to build a sustainable future for both the world at large and our field. They argue that ODC needs to recontextualize its frameworks and methodologies to be helpful in handling the urgent challenges that humanity is facing. What, for instance, does sustainable development mean in the contextual complexity of such challenges with conflicting interests and aspirations?

Phil Mirvis reflects on the knowledge creation process in the field, based on his four decades of work, as an integral part of the philosophy of science and addresses foundational questions such as: Is it better to use methods that focus on phenomena that are empirically manifest or to get inside phenomena to grasp their existential meaning? Am I researching a determined or indeterminate world? Should my own impressions, interpretations, insights, and reflections be considered “data”? And is practitioner knowledge and language relevant to the scientific study of organizations and change?

David Coghlan and Rami Shani, while focusing on their collaboration during two decades, argue that collaborative partnership is a capability that develops over time. Its quality is an outcome of the collaborative context, the alignment of purpose, the development of work and learning processes, and the development of shared language and success stories. The authors engage in a metalogue where their shared reflection on the formation and development of their collaborative scholarship in the field of organization development and change is itself an instance of a process of shared scholarship. By adopting the format of a metalogue, they intertwine the voices of their individual thinking and their reflective conversation in order to offer an expression of the process of theorizing to scholars who wish to embark upon or study shared scholarship.

Tom Cummings and Chris Worley bring to the forefront the role and insights from the field of management and organization theory to the study of change. The authors argue that understanding organization change is a stable subject in management and organization scholarship, and the singular focus of change management and organization development practice. The authors explore how management and organization theory informs organization change practice and suggest ways in which theory can be more helpful to practice and how practice can better inform theory.

Mike Beer, based on five decades of working at the boundaries between practice and theory, presents a grounded and actionable theory of a sustainable (adaptive) organizational system of organizing, managing, and leading which managers and consultants can use to plan and carry out organization development and change. Focusing on the top leaders' role of change, he argues that successful leaders are the ones that lead honest, collective, and public conversations about the system's efficacy in achieving its direction and then, based on what they learn, lead systemic change. These leaders have the courage and the skills to advocate a new direction and to inquire in order to learn the whole truth about their organization's current system.

Cliff Oswick and Yuan Li explore how discourse, as a process concerned with the production and consumption of talk and text, has been embraced within the field of organizational change and development (OCD). The authors present six ways of thinking about the role of discourse in OCD, namely as component, process, analysis, method, mindset, and style. Although the advent of dialogic OD has raised awareness of discourse, the authors demonstrate that it remains a marginal and underutilized area of interest. A more expansive role for discursive modes of analysis and engagement within OCD are advanced.

This volume concludes with a contribution by David Coghlan and Paul Coughlan. Reflecting on 25 years of collaborating in action learning research initiatives in interorganizational settings, the authors share three key theoretical contributions: (1) the development of a formula for action learning in networks, (2) the notion of action learning research, and (3) the application of action learning research in networks. The authors provide insights into the process of theorizing by showing how these insights emerged through inquiry into experience and how they were consolidated through collaborative action as practice-based research, research as practice, and practice as research toward designed-in impact.

All authors of this volume show how, in their own ways, they embrace the value of engagement and collaboration. Indeed, unlike other academic disciplines, engagement and collaboration have been key tenants of the field's identity, discovery process, and action from its origin until today. Taking the liberty to slightly modify the classic statement by March (2003, p. 206), we capture the current state of the OD&C field as: “a place where learning, collaboration, action and scholarship are revered, not only for what they contribute to personal or social wellbeing but also for the vision of humanity that they symbolize, sustain, and pass on.”

In their editorial statement to the first ROCD volume published in 1987, Bill Pasmore and Dick Woodman stated that the purpose of the series was to help produce a shift in thinking about the field in service of expanding the scope of the then current approaches to organization development (Pasmore & Woodman, 1987). Thirty-five years later, this volume is true to the initial vision of the series. Collectively, the chapters are a call to arms to stem multiple, simultaneous global crises. Authors look back and think forward to ensure that current approaches to organization development leverage foundational knowledge while also leading change to address grand global challenges.

Our role as academics, researchers, practitioners, insider researchers, and engaged scholars offer hope for making a difference in creating a better world together. The reflections captured in many of the chapters about the state of the field, the knowledge that it generated during the past five decades about change, about changing, about development, about developing, and about impact suggest that the field can serve as a leader and a major asset in enhancing a more sustainable future. From our editorial perspective, it is our hope that as you read through this celebratory, timely, and stimulating volume you will consider your own thoughts and practice and possible contribution to the field and the community, and you will contact us to suggest topics or themes for future volumes.

Debra A. Noumair

Abraham B. (Rami) Shani

Danielle P. Zandee