An empirical test of the causes and consequences of organizational change

This study is an inquiry into the nature of frequently-occurring changes in organizations viz. "continuous" changes. Organization theorists have little theoretical understanding of "continuous change" since they are overly concerned with large systemic changes. The present study redresses this imbalance. The example of continuous change used here is change in functional resource allocations (e.g. changes in advertising allocations, working capital allocations etc.).The basic theoretical framework is the familiar adaptation/inertia argument, but is expanded to include both the cause and consequence of change. The expanded framework is based on two questions: (1) To what extent is change occasioned by performance decline as against internal and external constraints? (2) To what extent does change affect or fail to affect future performance? This leads to a four-fold typology of rational change, indeterminate change, entrepreneurial change and inertial change, which is empirically tested in a sample of declining organizations. Declining organizations are chosen since issues of inertia and adaptation can only be satisfactorily examined in conditions of financial downturn, not growth.The results suggest that organizations are part-adaptive and part-inertial in making continuous changes. For instance, they are adaptive in relation to change in working capital, but inertia-ridden in changing fixed-capital allocations. A continuum of "entrenchment" is suggested, which differs for different types of change depending on their degree of resource-intensiveness, external sourcing and planning horizon. On the whole, organizations seem to make the easier changes more than the difficult changes. However, organizational leaders may have less discretion in dealing with "entrenchment" due to a variety of environmental factors.U of I OnlyETDs are only available to UIUC Users without author permissio

Enhancing organizational health literacy in a rural Missouri clinic: a qualitative case study

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to evaluate a collaborative effort between a health care organization and academic institution to strengthen organizational health literacy. Design/methodology/approach: The intervention took place at a rural, federally qualified health clinic in Missouri between May 2009 and April 2011. Qualitative interviews of key informants were conducted before (n=35) and after (n=23) the intervention to examine program implementation and success in effecting organizational change. Findings: Intervention activities helped establish a comprehensive understanding of health literacy. The project achieved moderate, fundamental and sustainable organizational change. The program successfully integrated health literacy practices into clinic systems and garnered leadership and organizational commitment, helped the workforce improve interpersonal communication and embedded practices making health education materials more accessible. Originality/value: The study points to programmatic, conceptual and methodological challenges that must be addressed for organizations to improve health literacy practices, and suggests change management strategies to advance organizational health literacy

Prediction of Sodium Hazard of Irrigation Purpose using Artificial Neural Network Modelling

The present study was carried out using artificial neural network (ANN) model for predicting the sodium hazardness, i.e., sodium adsorption ratio (SAR), percent sodium (%Na) residual, Kelly’s ratio (KR), and residual sodium carbonate (RSC) in the groundwater of the Pratapgarh district of Southern Rajasthan, India. This study focuses on verifying the suitability of water for irrigational purpose, wherein more groundwater decline coupled with water quality problems compared to the other areas are observed. The southern part of the Rajasthan State is more populated as compared to the rest of the parts. The southern part of the Rajasthan is more populated as compared to the rest of the Rajasthan, which leads to the industrialization, urbanization, and evolutionary changes in the agricultural production in the southern region. Therefore, it is necessary to propose innovative methods for analyzing and predicting the water quality (WQ) for agricultural use. The study aims to develop an optimized artificial neural network (ANN) model to predict the sodium hazardness of groundwater for irrigation purposes. The ANN model was developed using ‘nntool’ in MATLAB software. The ANN model was trained and validated for ten years (2010–2020) of water quality data. An L-M 3-layer back propagation technique was adopted in ANN architecture to develop a reliable and accurate model for predicting the suitability of groundwater for irrigation. Furthermore, statistical performance indicators, such as RMSE, IA, R, and MBE, were used to check the consistency of ANN prediction results. The developed ANN model, i.e., ANN4 (3-12-1), ANN4 (4-15-1), ANN1 (4-5-1), and ANN4 (3-12-1), were found best suited for SAR, %Na, RSC, and KR water quality indicators for the Pratapgarh district. The performance analysis of the developed model (3-12-1) led to a correlation coefficient = 1, IA = 1, RMS = 0.14, and MBE = 0.0050. Hence, the proposed model provides a satisfactory match to the empirically generated datasets in the observed wells. This development of water quality modeling using an ANN model may help to useful for the planning of sustainable management and groundwater resources with crop suitability plans as per water quality