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

Gender and Management: new directions in research and continuing patterns in practice

This is the author’s version of the following article. The definitive version is available at www.interscience.wiley.com:Adelina Broadbridge and Jeff Hearn, Gender and management: New directions in research and continuing patterns in practice, 2008, British Journal of Management, (19), s1, 38-49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8551.2008.00570.xCopyright: British Academy of Management, Blackwell Publishing Ltdhttp://www.blackwellpublishing.com

Understanding Project Champions’ Ability to Gain Intra-Organizational Commitment for Environmental Projects

A key enabler of environmental projects is the ability of the project champion to gain commitment to the project from other stakeholders in his or her organization. This paper develops a model of commitment-gaining success that is based on intra-organizational influence theory. The model also includes the project payback, customer pressure, government regulation, top management support and the project champion’s position in the organizational hierarchy. The model was tested using survey data from 241 environmental professionals describing their attempts to gain the buy-in of purchasing managers, operations managers, industrial engineers and others for environmental projects. The results (obtained from hierarchical regression analysis) show that intra-organizational commitment is positively associated with the project champion’s influence behavior—in particular, the champion’s use of three influence tactics (inspirational appeals, consultation and rational persuasion) and avoidance of a fourth tactic (ingratiation). Commitment is also positively associated with project payback and with top management support for the environment and negatively associated with environmental regulation. The paper contributes to the OM knowledge base of environmental project implementation by bringing new theory to bear on the topic, by focusing on individual-level, rather than organization-level, variables and by taking a confirmatory, large sample approach which complements extant exploratory research. In addition, the paper contributes to the OM field by evaluating various antecedents to cross-functional integration. The results also provide specific guidance to those who champion environmental projects within their companies

Will a Good Citizen Actively Support Organizational Change? Investigation of Psychological Processes Underlying Active Change Support

The present study investigated motivational factors of employees active change support (ACS). It also investigated good citizens response to the change by highlighting convergence and divergence of motivational factors between ACS and traditional extra-role behavior. The findings based on 166 staff responses and 346 supervisor assessments in a hospital that recently implemented a sharedgovernance structure suggest that active change support is a result of an active thinking process that involves perception of potential benefit from change but not necessarily the consequence of conventional predictors of extra-role behaviors (i.e., positive attitudes). The findings also suggest that good citizens are not necessarily the supporters of organizational change and that in actuality they confront motivational dilemma especially when they hold high quality relationship with their employer because they are reluctant to challenge the status quo

Deficiency of Porphobilinogen Synthase Associated with Acute Crisis. Diagnosis of the First Two Cases in Chile by Laboratory Methods

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