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To provide a model of organizational performance and change, at least two lines of theoritizing need to be explored--organizational functioning and organizational change. The authors go beyond desciption and suggest causal linkages that hypothesize how performance is affected and how effective change occurs. Change is depicted in terms of both process and content, with particular emphasis on tranformational as compared with transactional factors. Tranformational change occurs as a response to the external environment and directly affects organizational mission and strategy, the organization's leadership, and culture. In turn, the transactional factors are affected--structure, systems, management practices, and climate. These tranformational and transactional factors together affect motivation, which, in turn, affects performance.
In support of the model's potential validity, theory and research as well as practice
Organization change is a kind of chaos (Gleick, 1987). The number of variables changing at the same time, the magnitude of environmental change, and the frequent resistance of human systems create a whole confluence of processes that are extremely difficult to predict and almost impossible to control. Nevertheless, there are consistent patterns that exist--linkages among classes of events that have been demonstrated repeatedly in the research literature and can be seen in actual organizations. The enormous and pervasive impact of culture and beliefs--to the point where it causes organizations to do fundamentally unsound things from a business point of view--would be such an observed phenomenon.
To build a most likely model describing the causes of organizational performance and change, we must explore two important lines of thinking. First, we must understand more thoroughly how organizations function (i.e., what leads to what). Second, given our model of causation, we must understand how organizations might be deliberately changed. The purpose of this article is to explain our understanding so far. More specifically, we present our framework for standing--a causal model of organizational performance and change. But, first, a bit of background.
In our organizational consulting work, we try very hard to link the practice to sound theory and research. The linkage typically is in the direction of theory and research to practice: that is, to ground our consultation in what is known, what is theoretically and empirically sound. Creation of the model to be presented in this article was not quite in that...