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

Theoretical background
organization between two points of time (Barnett & Carroll, 1995), and it is
both a process and an outcome (Ginsberg & Abrahamson, 1991). In today’s
world, the ability to manage change is considered an increasingly important
managerial skill, which is reflected in the vast practitioner-oriented
literature on organizational change (e.g. Beer, Eisenstat, & Spector, 1990;
Beer & Nohria, 2000; Duck, 1993; Kanter, Stein, & Jick, 1992; Kotter, 1995;
Kotter & Schlesinger, 1979; Roberto & Levesque, 2005; Sirkin, Keenan, &
Jackson, 2005). Organizational change has also attracted considerable
attention by academic scholars. The extensive literature on change and its
management has focused on topics such as the nature of organizational
change, reasons behind it, and the way that the change occurs (cf. Barnett &
Carroll, 1995; Dibella, 2007).
Although researchers commonly agree that change has become a central
feature of organizational life, academic literature on organizational change
and development is highly fragmented and no universal theory can be
found (Bamford, 2006; Dunphy, 1996; Woodman, 1989). Scholars on
organizational change have been drawing on varying disciplines, such as
population ecology (Hannan & Freeman, 1984), psychology (Kahn, 1995;
Smollan, 2006), institutional theory (Greenwood & Hinings, 1996),
complexity theory (Beeson & Davis, 2000), learning theory (Hendry, 1996),
and strategy (Boeker 1989; Golden & Zajac, 2001). Despite several attempts
to categorize the theoretical perspectives (e.g. Fernandez & Rainey, 2006;
Siegal et al., 1996; Van de Ven & Poole, 1995), there is still a lack of
consensus within the field. The multiplicity of the perspectives to
organizational change may be interpreted as a reflection of the complexity
and diversity of the phenomenon itself (Buhanist, 2000).
One of the most common ways to categorize the discussion on
organizational change is the division into planned change and emergent
(unplanned) change (e.g. Bamford, 2006; Coram & Burnes, 2001; Glueck,
1969). The focus of the current study directs attention to planned change,
which involves a deliberate decision to engage in a guided change initiative
(Levy, 1986). More specifically, the study focuses on the management of
planned, large-scale organizational change. Large-scale organizational
change can be defined as a transition between organizational states that
differ significantly in key organizational parameters (Wischnevsky &
Damanpour, 2006). Such large-scale change is deep and pervasive (Ledford
& Mohrman, 1993), as it involves simultaneous changes in multiple
organizational dimensions, and often radical shifts in each or some of the
dimensions (Barnett & Carroll, 1995). Covin and Kilmann (1990) note how
large-scale organizational change initiatives involve multiple goals, utilize
multiple methods to achieve them, and typically require an implementation
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