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

Discussion
realize the planned changes. As another element of autonomy, the program
needs to appear legitimate. Legitimacy may be defined as the perception or
assumption that the actions of an organization are desirable, proper, or
appropriate in the given social system (Suchman, 1995). Although the
change as such may aim at sustaining or improving the parent
organization’s legitimacy (e.g. DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Erakovic & Powell,
2006), the program that is established to achieve the change also needs to
be legitimated within the parent organization. Both the change itself and
the program as a vehicle to deliver it should appear desirable and justified.
Whereas Lundin and Söderholm (1995) proposed that the task legitimates
the temporary organization, the current findings indicate that active efforts
are required on the part of the key actors to make the temporary
organization legitimate during its emergence, at least in the case of change
programs that aim at organizational transformation. Further complicating
the issue, the change program’s task may not be perceived as legitimate by
all the members of the organization. Change programs typically aim at
increasing organizational efficiency and regularly involve staff reduction, as
well as restructuring or relocating work processes. Thus, active legitimating
efforts may be required to justify the need for change.
The authority that comes with the decision to establish a program may
help legitimize the change effort. The program management approach
provides a systematic methodology for organizing change, and makes the
effort formal and visible. However, the findings of the study show how the
concept of programs may be unfamiliar and unclear to the organizational
members, especially in organizations with low maturity in terms of
organizational change. For top managers it may be difficult to commit
resources for a program whose goals and contents are not yet totally clear,
and for the people appointed in the program it may be difficult to start the
work if the vision of the future state of the organization is not fully clear.
The current study proposes that if a program is established in such an
environment, the concepts of programs and program management and also
the related work approaches need to be clarified and legitimated through
active communicating and selling efforts.
The findings of the current study demonstrate how the key advocates of
an emerging change program may engage in different kinds of legitimating
and committing activities to make the change appear acceptable and
desirable and to commit the stakeholders to the effort. Literature on change
management traditionally highlights how the need for change must be
communicated and how the need should be accompanied with a sense of
urgency. To justify the change, environmental threats that endanger the
survival of the organization may be described and the evolving environment
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