Boundary activities and readiness for ... - Projekti-Instituutti

Discussion
program also has an effect on the program’s external relations and on how
they should be handled.
Choi (2002) proposes that teams that deal with complex tasks and involve
external dependencies have a greater need for external activities. The
current study provides support for these propositions, indicating that high
program complexity increases the need for boundary activities. Complex
large-scale programs that aim at wide changes in the parent organization
and include a large number of projects to deliver those changes tend to have
numerous linkages and interdependencies with the parent organization.
The need to manage these relations with different intra-organizational
stakeholders may contribute to the large amount of boundary activity that
is needed to achieve the required level of readiness for change program
implementation. This proposition is supported by the findings in case
Chain where the case program was highly complex and aimed at large scale
changes, and where both the most active boundary management and the
highest readiness for change program implementation were observed. In
Center’s case, the highly complex change program showed fairly passive
boundary management, and the program failed to demonstrate the
required readiness to proceed to implementation. Bureau’s change program
appeared as less complex, which might indicate that even a somewhat
smaller amount of boundary activities than in case Chain was enough to
create the required readiness for change program implementation.
The initial maturity of the parent organization in terms of initiating and
implementing large-scale change was recognized as the third relevant
factor behind the findings. Previous research has suggested that some
organizations are more receptive to change than others. The overall change
capacity of an organization has been defined as its ability to develop and
implement appropriate organizational changes, which consists of several
aspects, such as the availability of human capabilities and the
characteristics of organizational structure, processes, systems, and culture
(Judge & Douglas, 2009; Klarner et al., 2008).
The current study has assessed readiness for change program
implementation in three case organizations at the end of the program
initiation and planning stage. The observations indicate that the starting
level, in terms of the overall change capacity or the initial readiness for
change, differed between the cases. Even though none of the three case
organizations could be described as experienced or mature in terms of large
change programs, there were still recognizable differences. In case Center,
the organizational maturity in terms of change projects, let alone change
programs, appeared poor and the conditions for initiating a change
program seemed unfavorable, suggesting that maybe the challenge of
193