To engage students’ interest in managing change as the necessary complement to leading change and achieving organizational change that is sustainable.

• Distinguish between leading change and managing change and relate them to each other in explaining effective organizational change
• Explain why change initiatives so often fail or fall short because of poor management
• Explain what is meant by ‘strategies for change’
• Produce a model of change management
• Explain the competencies required for managers to carry out change initiatives successfully
• Appreciate the ethical and moral issues that arise in change initiatives and how they may be resolved
• Use learning opportunities to manage change effectively according to best practice
• Use the information and ideas in this chapter to manage organizational changes effectively or to contribute to the effective management of change initiatives and programmes in an organization

• Change management is universally seen by managers as important to the success of their organizations. It is complementary to the leadership of change and, together with leadership, necessary for effective and sustainable change. However, its perceived importance is not matched by its actual success, often because of poor management. The chapter describes how change is often poorly managed in many ways and the ghosts of past failures return to haunt us.
• The chapter discusses the role of managers in the change process and the competencies required of them in managing change.
• Several aspects of managing change are discussed, including the purposes of change management, managerial responses to the ability and willingness of people to adapt, theories of change management, structural and process aspects of managing change, and political considerations.
• Managing change requires action that translates vision, purpose, values and strategies into reality through action plans, accountabilities, objectives, key performance measures, tasks, action and, ultimately, outputs and outcomes.
• Organizational capabilities and strategies for managing change are discussed and examples are provided.
• Ethically and socially responsible change is a necessary ingredient in managing for sustainable change in terms of the intentions, methods, results and consequences of the change process. Employee social responsibility is part and parcel of corporate social responsibility on managing change.
• Strategies and methods for developing change-management competencies are discussed. Organizational change is often the purpose of large-scale leadership and management development programmes, focusing on a few critical attributes and behaviours for managing change.
• Change is inextricably associated with risk and uncertainty and hence the possibility, indeed likelihood, of mistakes, errors and failures, as we discussed in relation to leading change. It is argued further that these are golden opportunities for learning, improvement and development towards a dynamic learning culture and ultimately sustainable organizational success and competitiveness.

Universities in the UK today are facing increasing leadership and management challenges. They must continue to be the places of scholarship and learning that they have traditionally been. At the same time, however, they must now re-create themselves as self-sustaining businesses capable of generating sufficient funding to ensure their own continuity. They must plan for growth and at the same time do more with less. They must be global in orientation, but they must at the same time serve the needs of their local communities. ‘New’ universities (previously polytechnics) have one further problem. They must compete with the ‘old’ universities to find their own niches, identities and competitive edge.

In this case study we discuss our experience of developing an organizational development (OD) intervention for a new university in the UK. We highlight some of the challenges we faced, how we worked together, and how we set about measuring its short-term and long-term impact.

The University’s far-sighted objectives were to bring about a cultural change compatible with its strategic objectives and business plan. The University wanted to ensure that it would be able to compete in the increasingly unpredictable higher-education (HE) market of the future, and it believed that the most effective way to bring about the identified structural changes it was seeking was through a sustained leadership and management development programme.

The aim of this programme was to support the restructuring process as part of the implementation of the University’s strategic plan. Its specific objectives, stated in the University’s tender document (2003), were:

• To ‘refocus and reposition itself for growth’
• To develop the skills of its leaders and managers across all academic disciplines and professional areas ‘to lead staff through the change process and beyond’
• To enable them ‘to transform the University and achieve cultural change’ to accommodate the uniqueness of individual faculties
• To achieve development goals at three levels: individual, business unit and university.

The University commissioned the Leadership Trust to design and run a programme to support these aims. At the same time we initiated a research programme to undertake an organizational diagnostic study into the leadership-related issues in the University. The purpose of this was to understand the context, as well as the feelings, beliefs and values of the top 150 leaders and managers for whom the programme would be designed.

Across the developed world, as in the UK, governments are now stepping back from the steering and funding of HE. Under pressure as a result of these changing funding arrangements and an increasingly global marketplace, a number of universities have introduced leadership and management development programmes to facilitate the cultural changes they desire. This is seen in some parts as a crisis in HE that will inevitably precipitate change. In the UK, we have been slower to recognize the importance of leadership, and this university is one of the first universities to address this issue in a large-scale, strategic way.

In designing our intervention, we drew on previous research into the leadership of higher education, mainly conducted outside the UK. This existing research has highlighted a number of apparently inevitable tensions. The need to balance academic values and standards with market-focus in order to generate additional income is perceived as one of the most pressing issues. Universities must now become ‘hybrid organizations’ (Mouwen, 2000).^[17] Given the changing landscape of HE, a ‘serious friction’ between the traditional academic cultures and the modern market culture is viewed as inevitable and unavoidable. The big challenge, however, is to create the conditions for a harmonious coexistence of the two cultures by creating a better equilibrium between the task and market activities of the traditional university (Mouwen, 2000).^[18]

Social and political observers have criticized universities for their predominant focus on ‘knowing what’ instead of focusing on teaching ‘knowing how’ (Greenwood and Levin, 1998).^[19] There are calls for a fundamental rethink about the nature and purpose of HE today: for example, Lewis Elton says that ‘outside pressures, largely governmental, have increasingly forced universities… to change, in line with social changes in the environment in which they are embedded’ (Collins and Holton, 2004: 207).^[20]

Many have pointed to a lack of leadership capability as being one of the most significant elements to be addressed in universities today, says Elton (Collins and Holton, 2004: 207).^[21] And although by the mid-2000s there had been very little research reported that specifically related to the impact of leadership development on organizational performance in HE (Collins and Holton, 2004)^[22], leadership is believed by many to be increasingly important for ensuring the successful future of HE in general and for protecting the interests of individual institutions.

Not only has attention now focused on the need for leadership in HE to be strengthened, these market changes have also led to a call for a fundamental shift in how universities and other higher education institutions are led (Brown, 2001; Davies et al., 2001; Froeschle and Donahue, 1998; Kulati, 2003),^[23] with some commentators suggesting that universities should learn from the private sector with a view to moving towards a more entrepreneurial outlook. More emphasis on transformational, visionary leadership^[24] in universities has been suggested, as opposed to the more traditional managerial, systems-oriented, transactional approach. One American study of a higher educational institution, for example, found that transformational leadership behaviours led directly to an increase in the academics’ satisfaction with their departmental heads as well as in perceptions of increased organizational effectiveness and a greater willingness to expend extra effort (Brown and Moshavi, 2002).^[25]

The evidence is building to suggest that university leaders today need to make use of a much wider range of leadership behaviours than they did previously, and that drawing on aspects of both transformational and transactional leadership will help them to perform more effectively (Pounder, 2001).^[26] Furthermore, emphasis on a transformational leadership approach that is distributed throughout the organization and does not just reside at the top will make an even more marked difference. This view is supported by Brown (2001), who suggests that:

This new (university) organizational environment requires leaders who thrive on the challenge of change; who foster environments of innovation; who encourage trust and learning; and who can lead themselves, their constituents, and their units, departments, and universities successfully into the future.^[27]

Bass and colleagues (1987) found that the degree of transformational leadership behaviour observed at one level of management tends also to be seen at the next lower level of management.^[28] With example being set right at the top, it has a greater chance of cascading to lower levels. Bringing about this type of change in leadership style and behaviour, however, is not straightforward and requires long-term commitment and careful design. There are many reasons why such organizational change programmes fail, and organizations should not give up at the first setback. Various explanations for failure have been proposed.

One study, for example, set out to find an explanation for why a multi-college HE institution not only failed in its transformation effort but also became paralysed by this failure (Greaves and Sorrenson, 1999).^[29] Its findings were significant – that the key inhibitors of change in this organization were organizational trust, empowerment and identity. This is not unusual. The culture was divisive and blame-oriented; the level of authority to make decisions was confusing and disempowering, and there was considerable inter-group conflict. The study also found three contributory leadership problems: leaders not displaying the desired new behaviours, leaders unclear about their objectives for the programme, and the danger of a dependency relationship developing with the consultants as the leaders looked to them to intervene and save the organization from itself.

Leadership in universities presents unique challenges. These challenges centre on balancing the demands between administrative control and academic autonomy (Bennett, 1998; Birnbaum, 1992; Brown and Moshavi, 2002)^[30] and applying leadership in a range of very different settings: across administrative departments, academic departments and in student and faculty organizations (Lewis and Smith, 1994; Rowley and Sherman, 2003).^[31]

A study of an OD intervention in higher education in Sweden which identified leadership development as being a key requirement in order to bring about organizational change, found that a departmental head in today’s university plays many conflicting, ambiguous and contradictory roles (Norback, 2000).^[32] Leadership and management development in this study was impeded by ambiguous decision-making structures, ambiguous loyalties, and blurred boundaries between academic and managerial decision-making.

A parallel study of organizational change in higher education in South Africa suggests that the nature of higher education today means that the coexistence of ambiguous and multiple goals is inevitable:

The leadership challenge for strategic managerialists is to get the institution to think and act more strategically, and to convince the academics that ‘being managed’, and working in an institution that is run on sound management principles, does not constitute a threat to the traditional values of academe, such as academic freedom.^[33] (Kulati, 2003)

With this highly complex scenario in mind, we set ourselves the challenge of designing a leadership and management development programme for the University that would meet all of these needs and would begin to create the harmonious co-existence of academic values and business imperatives. Prior to designing the detailed programme, we conducted 23 semi-structured interviews and two focus groups comprising a further 15 leaders in academic disciplines and professional areas across the University. We focused firstly on understanding the views, opinions and feelings about the University’s organizational change agenda. We then went on to explore these leaders’ hopes and concerns about the University’s future. Finally, we asked questions that explored their opinions about the forthcoming leadership and management development intervention itself.

Once the programme had been designed and launched we continued to record our observations of the process throughout its duration and in particular during the courses held at the Leadership Trust. Our notes focused particularly on the relationships within the group, the values they expressed during the projects we set them, the conflicts that arose, their responses to the tasks set, and in particular how they related their learning to the university context and their own leadership roles.

Our diagnosis pointed to two key areas of tension that we would need to address in the design of the programme: culture and leadership. This supports many of the other studies discussed above. On reflection, however, having identified the cultural and leadership tensions in the OD process, we recognized that these were completely interconnected, and that any artificial separation of cultural and leadership issues would dilute the impact of the programme. As Edgar Schein (1992: 1) has suggested, ‘leadership and culture are two sides of the same coin’.^[34]

The language of business and the market was found to dominate the agenda of many of the participants, and it was sometimes heard more loudly than the more traditional language of academic freedoms and learning. In discussing the new university structure, for example, one participant mused: ‘The four faculties will be meeting different markets and different needs…’ Another remarked: ‘I see the university as a business; the university has been a business for a number of years’.

Such comments were made as frequently by academic leaders and managers as by those in professional areas. Although we do not know how far down the hierarchy this view was held, there was repeated evidence that the traditional language of academic values was being suppressed in some areas by the language of business.

The desire for the co-existence of freedom and structure was found to be a fundamental aspect of academic and professional managerial identity in the University, as other studies in universities have shown.^[35] This is illustrated in the quotations from participants below. One of the professional participants explained:

Academics are a bit like self-employed people: they work individually or in groups for themselves whereas for admin colleagues there is a much more rigorously imposed structure of what happens, and in the degree of freedom as to what they can do within their jobs.

Another, in discussing how to lead academics, observed:

They are managing people who don’t want to be line managed- I’ve come into education so that I don’t have to be line managed – that is how they see it.

Most of the participants felt that this cultural divide between academics and support functions was a fundamental issue that would block change and cause the leadership and management development programme to fail if not addressed. One participant mused:

I call it a cultural hills thing and you can look across the valley if you like, and they don’t like what they see and it’s about having some kind of bridge across it – filling that gap – not changing each hill but...

It was clear that this cultural gap was long-standing. It was a significant issue for the leadership and management development programme, since the day-to-day experience of the so-called non-academics was perceived as being so contradictory to the University’s unifying talk of integration and the symbolic common leadership framework. The common use of the term ‘non-academic’ as a collective descriptor was an irritant: ‘We are fed up with being defined by what we are not.’ This tension between academic and administrative subcultures was frequently mentioned as the most crucial issue for the programme to address:

I think there will always be challenges… the classic ones between academics and people with administrative roles… different cultures which are absolutely valid for how we operate and the kind of things we do, but they’re not the same and the biggest challenge to leadership is to address this.

Many subscribed to the need within the University for a single vision, mission and set of values. This challenge for leadership within the organization, and the desire to break down the fiefdoms, was illustrated by one participant:

What I see are lots of people within the group who are leaders vying for position, which isn’t helping the organization, all it is doing is helping their own individual ends. I joined the University. I happen to be working in a department but I joined the University.

Changes to the psychological contract were seen to be an inevitable element of the change programme. One participant summarized this issue as follows:

It is very hard for some people. They joined an organization with one set of values – it was about education for all and equality of opportunity and we are now in a business, in a marketplace… that for some people goes against their core values, and so you get a person who sits very uncomfortably… We’ve got to help people with the transition as humanely as we possibly can.

Many participants spoke of the difficulties of leading and managing within the matrix structure that the University had become:

Working in a matrix management you have got a lot of hierarchical line management and then you get people floating in from the outside having quite a broad role and responsibility… so you are floating in from the side, you haven’t got line management but you are wanting tasks done so you have to cajole people in order that they will help you.

A key challenge for leadership and management was to define roles and responsibilities within this new structure. A second challenge was to ensure effective downward and upward channels of communication. Many felt that upward communication in particular needed to improve. Others perceived a blockage in communications between those leaders at the top of the organization and those leading in the middle:

They are in a different world – they literally are – the organization in their minds is different from the one that is in my mind and different from the minds of the ones with which we are actually engaged.

It was recognized that this was not the result of a deliberate attempt to exclude or to be separate. It stemmed as much from history, physical separation created by the building, and a lack of priority being given to the issue.

The leaders and managers in the University were often fatalistic about the impact of these changes on themselves and their job roles. They lacked confidence about their ability to make a difference and felt a lack of empowerment. The leadership role was found to be under-developed and often misunderstood. Many of these leaders equated leadership with control or a transactional approach and found that, when encouraged to consider the adoption of transformational models of leadership, even within the safe confines of the Leadership Trust course, they felt uncomfortable.

Many of the leaders also appeared to be more comfortable abdicating their responsibility for leadership of the University. For example, when asked ‘What kind of leadership is required to meet the current challenges to the University?’ many cited the need for those at the very highest levels to adopt transformational, strategic, charismatic and visionary leadership. However, when asked ‘What does leadership mean in the context of your job?’ most found difficulty in perceiving themselves as leaders or described their managerial roles in transactional language. Transformational leadership behaviours were rarely described.

This raised challenges for our leadership development intervention. We wanted to change mindsets and behaviours from the view that transformational leadership is an approach that is solely relevant to top leaders to the acceptance that transformational leadership is effective at all organizational levels, a proposition that was embedded in the design of our programme.

The leadership and management challenges for this programme were many and inevitably overlapping. They can be summarized as being about addressing the tensions between:

• Administrative and faculty leadership
• The desire for transformational leadership and the preference for no leadership
• Managerialism and collegiality
• Organizational leadership and departmental or faculty leadership
• Business needs and academic freedoms
• Faculty autonomy and administrative control
• The past and the present
• Pragmatism and ideology

In addition there was a clear tension between the belief that leadership should reside at the top of the organization and the acceptance that leadership responsibility should be distributed throughout the organization. The tensions derived primarily from cultural norms within and across the University and from within HE as a whole. We also recognized that they were also a complex reflection of societal, political and economic trends.

Soon after the diagnostic phase had been completed, the Leadership and Management Development Programme, aimed at the top 150 leaders throughout the University and lasting six months, was launched.

Module 1 is an experiential intervention with a focus on understanding the self and the emotional aspects of leadership and followership within teams.

Module 2 is a participative workshop that focuses on theories of power, culture and change within the university context.

Module 3 is a one-day conference-style event that includes use of open-space technology enabling the delegates to control the afternoon’s agenda and to pursue issues which have been raised during Modules 1 and 2.

Action learning sets facilitated by members of the University OD team link the modules and enable the learning to become embedded in practice (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Programme design

The aim of the programme was to create a momentum for change, to enable new leadership behaviours to be understood, accepted and practised so that the desired cultural change process could be properly supported.

Following the launch of this programme, a series of teambuilding events for the University Executive Group was launched in parallel in order for the top team to build on and maintain the momentum of the programme. Workshops were also run for the Executive Assistants to the Executive Group and for the HR and OD Advisors, whose role was to support the leadership development process as part of a wider HR strategy as well as to facilitate the action learning process.

At the time of writing, over 50 participants have completed all three modules, and a full evaluation of the learning is underway. 

It was clear early on in our thinking that an evaluation process would be needed in order to reflect the complexities identified at the diagnostic stage of the process. The post-course questionnaires were positive and helpful in terms of module design, but they were unable to tell us enough about the way that the learning was becoming embedded in the organization or the impact of the learning on the individuals, their teams, their departments, faculties and the wider organization. We therefore wanted to design a process to capture these changes, using a deep qualitative methodology.

A return on investment in development is important for any organization, but when developing leadership it cannot be measured through a single measure, nor even through a selection of carefully chosen metrics. Even a ‘balanced scorecard’ approach would not have been able to distinguish direct causal effects from other influencing factors. We believed, therefore, that the most rigorous approach would be to return to the views and accounts of the 150 participants and to capture their stories as they put the learning from the programme into everyday use. We wanted to discover the impact on their thinking and actions and why. What has worked and was has not? What outcomes do they attribute to changes in their thinking and actions and why? What about the impact on their teams, departments, faculties and the wider organization? What needs to happen now?

This approach to evaluation does not simply ask what is happening: it also asks why it is happening. It takes into account the very specific context, culture and history of this unique organization while considering also the socio-political and economic context within which this organization finds itself having to compete. Many evaluation approaches ignore context. Our aim was to evaluate the programme’s impact and outcomes from the perspectives of multiple stakeholders at a number of organizational levels and over the short, medium and longer term. We are therefore taking a longitudinal approach.

A considerable amount of learning has already emerged from the programme to date, and the following is a summary of our observations and reflections:

• An acceptance of the principles of dispersed leadership is starting to build momentum in the University. Responsibility is being taken for the leadership of the University across the 150 leaders and managers.
• An enthusiasm for developing transformational leadership behaviours is building momentum. Inappropriate behaviours are now being challenged.
• Leaders and managers are reporting increased self-confidence in dealing with challenging situations.
• Leaders and managers are reporting a stronger sense of ‘one university’, shared goals and shared vision, and a more collaborative ethos across support and academic functions is building momentum.
• Participation in the programme by senior academics was slow at first. However, their participation has gathered momentum and most of those invited have now participated. This has begun the process of building a critical mass in order to change behaviours within the faculties as well as across the wider University. Pressure to participate has begun to come from peers as much as from the top
• The cultural differences between the academics and support professionals appeared much less extreme during the programme than had been reported in the focus groups. Indeed much common ground has been discovered, to everyone’s surprise, particularly during Module 2.
• The ongoing support and facilitation of the Action Learning Sets will be a crucial element of sustaining the messages of the programme. This has been patchy thus far, and the HR team is now taking steps to re-strengthen the facilitation and support available to the learning sets.
• The importance of the top-team involvement in the OD process alongside developing its own transformational leadership abilities cannot be over-emphasized. This alone will have a huge effect on developing a culture of distributed transformational leadership across the organization.

Our project suggests that leadership does indeed lie at the heart of the OD process. Further research is now needed to investigate the impact of increasingly effective leadership in the University on organizational performance and the subsequent success of the OD process. So far, the initial evaluation of the programme suggests a considerable motivation for change. However, the participants have identified a number of historically rooted systems, procedures and processes that are still inhibiting change. The determination of the delegates to dismantle these disabling processes has been impressive. Time will be needed for some of their more ambitious plans to take place.

The university context has been shown to be ridden with complexity. The tensions created by the shifts in the context of HE, the changing political values, the assaults on the psychological context, and a revised understanding of leadership has produced a challenging organizational context within which to undertake such an OD project. While there appear to be similarities with other studies, we take the view that every organization is unique. 

Bass, B.M. (1985) Leadership and Performance Beyond Expectations. New York: The Free Press.

Eriksson, C. Akademiskt Ledarskap. Uppsala: Uppsala Universitet, cited in L.N. Norback (2000) ‘New modes of internal governance of higher education institutions: the case of Goteborg University’, Tertiary Education and Management, 6: 57–75.

Kirkby, P.C., Paradise, L.V. and King, M.I. (1992) ‘Extraordinary leaders in education: Understanding transformational leadership’, Journal of Educational Research, 85(5): 303–11.

Neumann, Y. and Neumann, E.F. (1999) ‘The president and the college bottom line: The role of strategic leadership styles’, The International Journal of Educational Management, 13(2): 73–9.

Martin. J. (1992) Cultures in Organizations: Three Perspectives. New York, Oxford University Press.

Plante, P.R. (1991) ‘The role of faculty in campus governance’, in J.H. Schuster and L.H. Miller (Editors), Governing Tomorrow’s Campus. New York: Macmillan.

Ramsden, P. (1998) Learning to Lead in Higher Education. New York, NY: Routledge.

• Summarize the main issues concerning cultural change in this case.

There are two key areas of tension: culture and leadership. Issues include managerialism v. collegiality (e.g. the use of business language v. academic language, and business needs v. academic freedom), administrative leadership v. faculty leadership, desire for transformational leadership but a preference for no leadership at all, pragmatism v. ideology, and desire for empowerment v. fatalism.

• How well do you think the programme was designed?

This programme was one of the first such programmes in a university in the UK to focus on using leadership and management development to facilitate desired cultural change. The programme comprised experiential learning about oneself (self-awareness, emotion and leadership); theories concerning power, culture, leadership and change; open-space technology in a conference context for participants to determine and pursue their own agenda, and action learning sets. Additional teambuilding events were used for top management and support workshops used for programme facilitating staff. All of these are well-founded methodologies.

• What were the favourable outcomes of the programme?

These outcomes include progress towards dispersed and transformational leadership; an increased sense of empowerment (self-confidence) in dealing with challenging issues; a stronger sense of unity in having shared vision and goals and more collaboration across the university; increasing participation in the programme by senior academics; and a perceived stronger motivation for change.

• What were disappointing outcomes?

Action learning sets were disappointing in the support for them and their facilitation, which therefore needed attention. Personal participation of the university’s top-level leaders in the programme was also disappointing and illustrated how important such leadership is in the change process. Issues still inhibiting change include historically-rooted systems, procedures and processes, though determination among staff to dismantle these is positive.

• What is your opinion of the evaluation process adopted in assessing the outcomes and impact of the programme?

Post-course evaluation questionnaires were useful but inadequate. Quantitative or qualitative approaches, or a combination of both, can be adopted. Each approach has its benefits and drawbacks, and a combination of them can be very fruitful. In this case a qualitative approach was adopted, which can yield rich information but does not easily lend itself to statistical analysis and conclusions based on objective probability.

• What are the key lessons from this case?

Preparing leaders and managers for organizational change is a complex process, with no single best method. Learning methodologies (e.g. action learning) in change programmes must be carefully monitored and corrective action taken when shortcomings are identified. Entrenched practices need to be addressed in change programmes because they create or entail habits that are difficult to erase and replace. A combination of qualitative and quantitative programme evaluation methodologies is likely to be superior in evaluating change programmes than using either one alone. And top-level leaders must be personally and actively involved in organization-wide change programmes. Unless this happens, such programmes are doomed to failure – or at least sub-optimal results.

Gail Longbotham and Roger Longbotham (2006) describe how the powerful methodologies of process improvement and experimental design, commonly used in determining what needs to be changed, were applied to deciding how to change in a company with 150 stores throughout the USA. They claim that this approach provided an objective basis for decision making about change. The change that was needed in the company was replacement of the commission-based pay scheme that was discovered to be dysfunctional with a salary-based scheme to minimize employee attrition and increase sales revenue. The experimental design chosen for identifying how to change was a fractional factorial design with replication. Seven factors were identified that were thought to be helpful in minimizing resistance to change and maximize buy-in (+ and - indicate opposites or options, with + anticipated to be preferred):

A.                Top management presentation of the change in person (+) or via video (-)

B.                Implementation of change in stages (+) or simultaneously (-)

C.               Lead time for initiating change after announcement of one week (+) or three to four weeks (-)

D.               Context for making announcing the change: meeting plus celebration (+) or meeting only (-)

E.                Focus of corporate announcement: future health of company (+) or long-term benefit to employee                      (-)

F.                Involvement of middle management with each sales associate: one-to-one meeting (+) or no                                   meeting (-)

G.               Minimizing attrition: incentive (+) or no incentive (-)

Two performance measures were used: employee attrition and sales. Using combinations of these seven factors and two treatment conditions and computations for sales and attrition, the effects of the factors on attrition and sales and their statistical significance were calculated. Based on this analysis a plan for implementing the change was drawn up, shown in Table 1.[36]

Table 1. Actions used in implementing change

According to Longbotham and Longbotham (2006):

Organizations have used rigorous methodologies to identify improvements necessary to remain viable and competitive in today’s turbulent business environment. However, they have rarely used the same level of rigor in the implementation of the identified improvements. Using the same level of rigor as an approach to implementation is appropriate when successful implementation is uncertain, potential gain is high, and implementation is done at a large enough scale to warrant a test on a smaller scale.

• What are the benefits and drawbacks of using the Longbothams’ approach to deciding how to change?

This approach provides a potentially objective and rational – and consequently valid and useful – approach to deciding how to change. However, in the original article by the Longbothams there is no indication of how those factors thought to helpful in minimizing resistance to change and those thought to maximize buy-in to change were identified by management. Perhaps there were other factors at play. This process needs to be reliable and valid.

Why were attrition and sales used as performance measures? Again, the original article does not explain this. Indeed, are these the only two performance measures of importance? Students can be asked to suggest other measures. However, the effects of the factors on attrition and sales were calculated, and this is explained in the article.

• What is your overall conclusion about its rationale and usefulness?

One might question the particular factors, treatment conditions and performance measures used in this study and perhaps develop them, replace some of them or add more, based on a more rigorous process for identifying them. As an example of a rational basis for change management, this methodology, provided it is developed further, is worthy of consideration. Students can be asked to what extent they agree with the Longbothams’ comment (quoted at the end of the case study).

• ‘The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order’ (Alfred North Whitehead, 1929). To what extent do you think that the art of progress is the effective management of change? Why, or why not? If not, what else is it?
• ‘Management and change are synonymous’ (Robert Paton and James McCalman, 2008). Do you agree? Why, or why not?