Reactions to organizational identity threats in times of change: Illustrations from the German police.

Change projects can affect core features of an organization's identity, because changes made to the managerial practices of an organization can result in misalignments with existing organizational culture. Such misalignments produce threats to organizational identity generating uncertainty and evoking distrust among members of the organization. Faced with projects that introduce changes to managerial practices, people engage in search-and-adjustment processes in order to confirm that organizational identity is intact, producing second-order changes, the pathways of which cannot be predicted and might also undermine the intentions of change leaders. Using case-study evidence, we show how change projects in the German police force produced violations of cultural norms that were central to the continuity and stability of the police. We argue that the change enthusiasm of organizations be tempered given the potentially negative outcomes for individual employees faced with excessive change, and also because of the threats to organizational identity that can result from inherently unpredictable change processes

Policing opportunities and threats in Europe.

Purpose ¿ This paper aims to take stock and to increase understanding of the opportunities and threats for policing in ten European countries in the Political, Economic, Social, Technological and Legal (PESTL) environment. Design/methodology/approach ¿ This study is part of the large EU-funded COMPOSITE project into organisational change. A PESTL analysis was executed to produce the environmental scan that will serve as a platform for further research into change management within the police. The findings are based on structured interviews with police officers of 17 different police forces and knowledgeable externals in ten European countries. The sampling strategy was optimized for representativeness under the binding capacity constraints defined by the COMPOSITE research budget. Findings ¿ European police forces face a long list of environmental changes that can be grouped in the five PESTL clusters with a common denominator. There is also quite some overlap as to both the importance and nature of the key PESTL trends across the ten countries, suggesting convergence in Europe. Originality/value ¿ A study of this magnitude has not been seen before in Europe, which brings new insights to the target population of police forces across Europe. Moreover, policing is an interesting field to study from the perspective of organisational change, featuring a high incidence of change in combination with a wide variety of change challenges, such as those related to identity and leadership