Discursive positioning and planned change in organizations

This study uses discursive positioning theory to explore how planned change messages influence organizational members’ identity and the way they experienced organizational change. Based on an in-depth case study of a home healthcare and hospice organization that engaged in a multiyear planned change process, our analysis suggests that workers experienced salient change messages as constituting unfavorable identities, which were associated with the experiences of violation, recitation, habituation, or reservation. Our study also explores the way discursive and material contexts enabled and constrained the governing board’s change messages as they responded to external and internal audiences. We highlight the importance of viewing messaging as a process of information transfer as well as discursive construction, which has important implications for the way change agents approach issues of sense making, emotionality, resistance, and materiality during planned change processes.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

Explaining the willingness of public professionals to implement new policies: A policy alienation framework

Nowadays, many public policies focus on economic values, such as efficiency and client choice. Public professionals often show resistance to implementing such policies. We analyse this problem using an interdisciplinary approach. From public administration, we draw on the policy alienation concept, which consists of five dimensions: strategic powerlessness, tactical powerlessness, operational powerlessness, societal meaninglessness and client meaninglessness. These are considered as factors that influence the willingness of professionals to implement policies (change willingness - a concept drawn from the change management literature). We test this model in a survey among 478 Dutch healthcare professionals implementing a new reimbursement policy. The first finding was that perceived autonomy (operational powerlessness) significantly influenced change willingness, whereas strategic and tactical powerlessness were not found to be significant. Second, both the meaninglessness dimensions proved highly significant. We conclude that clarifying the value of a policy is important in getting professionals to willingly implement a policy, whereas their participation on the strategic or tactical levels seems less of a motivational factor. These insights help in understanding why public professionals embrace or resist the implementation of particular policies. Points for practitioners Policymakers develop public policies which, nowadays, tend to focus strongly on economic values, such as increasing efficiency or offering citizens the opportunity to choose among suppliers of public services. Public professionals, who have to implement these policies, are often reluctant to do so. This study shows that the causes of this resistance are unlikely to be found in the lack of influence these professionals have in the shaping of the policy at the national or organizational level. Rather, professionals might resist implementing policies because they do not see them as meaningful for society, or for their own clients. Therefore, policymakers should focus on this perceived meaninglessness and adopt ways to counter this, for example by intensively communicating the value associated with a policy

Productive resistance within the public sector: exploring organisational culture

The article examines how South Korean civil servants responded to the introduction of pay for performance. Drawing upon 31 in-depth interviews with career civil servants, it identifies what became known as 1/n, a form of ‘discreet resistance’ that emerged and evolved. The analytical framework allows productive resistance to be seen as ebbing and flowing during organisational change that sees institutionalisation, deinstitutionalisation and re-institutionalisation. In understanding the cultural context of organisational resistance the contribution is three-fold. First, a nuanced definition and understanding of productive resistance. Second, it argues that productive resistance must be seen as part of a process that does not simply reflect ‘offer and counter-offer’ within the change management process. Thirdly, it identifies differences within groups and sub-cultures concerning commitment towards resistance and how these fissures contribute towards change as new interpretive schemes and justifications are presented in light of policy reformulations

Strategic ambiguity as a rhetorical resource for enabling multiple interests

The literature on ambiguity reflects contradictory views on its value as a resource or a problem for organizational action. In this longitudinal empirical study of ambiguity about a strategic goal,we examined how strategic ambiguity is used as a discursive resource by different organizational constituents and how that is associated with collective action around the strategic goal.We found four rhetorical positions, each of which drew upon strategic ambiguity to construct the strategic goal differently according to whether the various constituents were asserting their own interests or accommodating wider organizational interests. However, we also found that the different constituents maintained these four rhetorical positions simultaneously over time enabling them to shift between their own and other's interests rather than converging upon a common interest. These findings are used to develop a conceptual framework that explains how strategic ambiguity might serve as a resource for different organizational constituents to assert their own interests whilst also enabling collective organizational action, at least of a temporary nature

Women's perceptions of the outcome of weight loss diets: a Signal detection approach

Objective: Evolutionary psychology suggests that body shape is as important as body size and that, in women, certain body shapes are considered more attractive, specifically a waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) of about 0.70. Research has shown that the WHR does not change as a result of weight loss diets although it may be that women who diet do not appreciate this. We hypothesized that women would report diet outcomes that included shape change. This was investigated using a signal detection paradigm. Method: Two groups of female participants (high and low WHRs) were presented with images with high and low WHRs and were asked to choose images they could resemble through dieting. Results: Both groups of women selected low WHR images as the outcome of their diets, supporting theories of evolutionary psychology. Discussion: We conclude that women in the high WHR group may find adherence to diets problematic because the desired change in shape does not occur

Too busy to change: High job demands reduce the beneficial effects of information and participation on employee support

<u><b><a href="http://rdcu.be/vHtW">Online access to this article has been shared by the author(s) via Springer Nature SharedIt.</a></b></u>\ud \ud <b>Purpose</b>\ud \ud Despite the abundant literature on organizational change management, the success of change initiatives in organizations remains low. In this study, we investigate employee support for change in the context of two change management practices (information and participation). We use the <i>Theory of Planned Behavior</i> (TPB) to examine why these change management practices foster employee support, and the extent to which the efficacy of these practices depends on current job demands.\ud \ud <b>Design/Methodology/Approach</b>\ud \ud Participants were 106 employees undergoing a building relocation at their place of employment who responded to an initial questionnaire at Time 1 (pre-occupancy) and a follow-up questionnaire two months later (post-occupancy). \ud \ud <b>Findings</b>\ud \ud We found that the TPB variables mediated the effects of information and participation on employee support (both intentions at Time 1 and self-reported behaviors at Time 2). The indirect relationships from information and participation to employee support were significant at low and medium, but not at high, levels of job demands.\ud \ud <b>Implications</b>\ud \ud The positive effects of information and participation on employee support can be largely attributed to employee attitudes and subjective norms. Thus, consultants should target employee attitudes and norms when garnering employee support, but also be aware of the limitations of these practices when employees are preoccupied with their work.\ud \ud <b>Originality/Value</b>\ud \ud This study demonstrates that the TPB can account for the beneficial effects of change management practices on employee support. It also reports the novel finding that change management practices are less effective at high levels of job demands