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1. Introduction
We are living today in a constantly growing global business environment, where change has become the norm for organizations to sustain their success and existence. Industrial and governmental organizations are constantly striving to align their operations with a changing environment (Ackoff, 2006; Burnes, 2004a; By, 2005; Hailey and Balogun, 2002; Kotter, 1996; Mintzberg, 1979; Moran and Brightman, 2001). Organizations and their leaders are also changing as a natural response to the shift in strategic importance, from effectively managing mass markets and tangible properties to innovation, knowledge management and human resources (Dess and Picken, 2000). Many approaches and methods have been suggested to manage change, yet organizations undergoing change vary significantly in their structure, systems, strategies and human resources.
Organizations need an integrated approach to drive systematic, constructive change and minimize the destructive barriers to change, as well as addressing the consequences of making the change. In implementing change, different definitions and methods have been proposed to manage change; however, organizations still report a high failure rate of their change initiatives. The literature provides many cases on organizational change; yet, the success rate of change initiatives is <30 percent (Balogun and Hope Hailey, 2004; Beer and Nohria, 2000; Grover, 1999). And more recent articles note the fact that this rate is not getting any better (Jacobs et al., 2013; Jansson, 2013; Michel et al., 2013; Rouse, 2011). Those failure rates indicate a sustained need for investigating and finding what factors increase the probability of successful organizational change and debatably imply a lack of a valid framework for organizational change (By, 2005; Rafferty et al., 2013). Reasons behind organizational change failure have attracted only limited attention (Buchanan et al., 2005). Dunphy and Stace (1993) argued that “managers and consultants need a method of change that is essentially a “situational” or “contingency” method, one that indicated how to vary change strategies to achieve “optimum fit” with the changing environment” (p. 905). When reviewing relevance and validity in the available methods, the literature shows a considerable disagreement regarding the most appropriate method to changing organizations (Bamford and Forrester, 2003). With the high variation between organizations undergoing change, a directive change approach or method would not be suitable for all situations as change methods...