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Organizational change as a risky strategy
Organizational change is omnipresent, being the raison d'être of the consultancy industry ([71] Sorge and van Witteloostuijn, 2004). Modern organization sciences have produced a large amount of insights into a wide variety of issues related to organizational change. And of course, consultancies successfully launch new organizational change "products" all the time. However, organizational change is still often associated with failure. A case in point is the persistently high number of merger and acquisition deals that fail in the post-integration stage (totalling approximately 70 per cent) or the (circa) 30 per cent that fail before consummation (see, e.g. [19] Dikova et al. , 2010; [54] Muehlfeld et al. , 2012; [11] Brakman et al. , 2013). Most organizational change projects, of course, deal with less impactful issues than mergers and acquisitions, where negative effects may be expected to be less threatening to organizational survival than M&A deals gone awry. Yet, change projects with a smaller scope are also prone to poor planning, disappointing results and unintended consequences that divert resources from operational tasks, disrupt well-established routines, and shatter the trust of employees and business partners alike.
Organizational change theories need to negotiate two hurdles: scholarly quality and practical relevance ([60] Pettigrew et al. , 2001). Key questions in research on organizational change are: Why do so many organizational change initiatives fail to deliver? And how can organizational change processes be implemented in a way that assures success? Organizational change is a notoriously complex phenomenon; it is only natural that research on organizational change addressed this complexity from numerous more or less complementary or contradictory, but equally legitimate perspectives. These perspectives stretch across disciplinary boundaries, across methodological camps, and often across contradictory visions of organizations. The result is a debilitating fragmentation of theories of organizational change, with widely different perspectives - sometimes complementary, but sometimes contradictory - blossom side by side in the large organizational change literature. One angle to illustrate this state of fragmentation is that of the level of aggregation: micro (individuals) and, meso (groups and organizations) and macro (organizational environment and populations of organizations).
The fragmented nature of the field of organizational change research
Some research focuses on a micro perspective, analyses the psychological aspects of organizational...