Navigating Organizational Change: An Explorative Case Study in Acceptance and Success When Changing Operational Change

Sammanfattning

Background: Change is something all organizations experience, and in the fast-paced business-world that is today, the ability to change needs to be higher than ever. The problem is, individuals hate change, it is in our genes to resist it, which complicates how organizations can navigate the change-landscape. To solve this, new ways to work with change arise every day and the latest trend: change management. Words like complex, resistant, and successful is imprinted in change work, but how are they connected? And what happens with the individuals and their connectedness to the organization as an entity when organizations start changing change? This thesis question this in relation to change ability and acceptance, for large, product-focused organizations. Purpose: This thesis’ purpose is to analyze the situation of an organization’s changed way-of-working in regard to change, identify factors affecting the approach, and address the extent of which relevant factors affect acceptance and success within change, as well as, proposing how these can be strengthened by strategic adjustments in the future. Research Questions: RQ1: How is the current approach for executing change initiatives structured and supported within an organization? RQ2: In what ways do an organization’s structural and cultural networks influence employees’ acceptance of their operative change ability? RQ3: How, and to what extent, does acceptance affect change initiatives’ success within an organization’s operative change ability? RQ4: How can the change initiatives’ approach be modified to further accommodate structural and cultural networks within an organization? Delimitations: This thesis regards a case study of a large organization, recently changing how they work with change. In studying this case, it addresses the entire organization, however limited to individuals having connections to the change work. It is further limited to the Swedish operations, providing a perspective of all level projects and change for different reasons. Lastly, it is limited to contributing success factors of change specifically related to having recently changed operations on change-work. Methodology: This thesis conducts a multi-strategy research approach, explorative case study that triangulates its findings from three distinct empirical collection methods: Archival document study, qualitative interview period, and quantitative questionnaire period. Results: Results include The Company feel dissatisfaction with how the current change-work is within the organization. Areas in need of improvement is marketing change, including follow-up of the change initiative, and going all the way with implementing changes. The Net Promoter Score of the approach is -15.3 overall, however, with significant differences in target groups and divisions. Finally, twelve critical success factors were statistically determined as most important and combined into the Pillars of Success- framework. Conclusion: The approach is clearly defined, with less support of the change work as a whole. Structural and cultural networks do highly affect acceptance through several mediums such as memory, marketing, relations, and specifically CSFs. Not only does acceptance highly influence success, but success does also highly influence acceptance. From this, the Hain-Fransson Pillars of Success framework is developed. Clear recommendations are given to strengthen the approach and way-of-working with change, accommodating structural and cultural networks focusing on adding a follow-up step to the approach and support activities surrounding the approach. The thesis fulfills its purpose to a high quality of research, proven by the validation of empirical findings. It further contributes largely to practical and theoretical situations, through the findings of RQ4 to The Company and development of new theory to academia. Suggestions on future research include testing and validating all developed findings.