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Introduction
A basic reality of the 21st century is that organizations and managements are faced with unrelenting demands for change. Companies in every industry are increasingly challenged to both respond to and anticipate continuously changing competitive, market, technological, economic, and social conditions to the point where change is described as the "new normal" (J0rgensen, Owen, and Neus, 2008). Yet, despite this and a virtual explosion of research and managerial attention devoted to conceptualizing and empirically testing a range of change management practices (cf. Abrahamson, 2000; Armenakis and Harris, 2002, 2009; Beer, Eisenstat and Spector, 1990; de Caluwé and Vermaak, 2002; Higgs and Rowland, 2005; Kerber and Buono, 2005; King and Wright, 2007; Kotter, 1996; Kotter and Cohen, 2002), successful organizational change often remains elusive. A global business study by McKinsey underscores this problem, noting that only one-third of organizational change initiatives were viewed as successful by their leaders (Meaney and Pung, 2008). As a recent IBM white paper study suggests, the "change gap" (i.e., the gap between an organization's expectation of change and its history of successfully managing it) has increased significantly over the past few years (see J0rgensen, et al, 2008).
On a general level, managers have grown increasingly comfortable with planned change, as organizational leaders rather than external specialists have taken increasingly active roles in bringing it about (cf. Aiken and Keller, 2007; Kotter and Cohen, 2002; Nadler, 1988). Indeed, more and more managers have become skilled at reacting to external forces, conceptualizing a preferred future state, and implementing the subsequent plan for achieving that well-defined end. In this context, however, change is largely viewed as linear and mechanistic, as a series of discrete and, at times, traumatic events that should be controlled to enable the organization to achieve its goals. Given the onslaught of changes that many organizations now face this carefully planned, change-specific approach is quickly becoming inadequate. Success in rapidly changing environments often demands experimentation, improvisation, and the ability to cope with unanticipated occurrences and unintended repercussions (see, for example, Gersick, 1991; Meyer and Stensaker, 2006; Wheatley, 1992). In essence, companies increasingly face the challenge of sustaining continuous movement - sometimes fast, sometimes slow, sometimes with brief periods of constancy (e.g., Leana and Barry, 2000) - toward a largely unknown,...