Page 80 - Managing Change in Organizations

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4 Theories of change:

traditional models

Introduction

Much of the change management literature positions leadership as the key
source of ‘energy for change’. From a pragmatic viewpoint this is a natural
enough starting point but doing so does involve begging a number of questions.
Which leaders, positioned where in the organization concerned, and doing
what exactly in order that change be put in place? In any large, multi-sited
organization (and note that even a hospital employing say 4000 people may
operate over 10 or more sites) we can hardly propose that leadership for change
only comes from the top. Clearly there is a need for leadership at various levels
of the organization and for varying leadership ‘roles’ to be undertaken with
regard to any significant change.
Before we explore these and other related questions more fully we should note
that the purpose of arguing for any particular organizational change should be
that its implementation will give rise to the achievement of certain desired out-
comes. Of course we can immediately ask which outcomes, desired by which
stakeholders, how defined and agreed, and not least, how measured? Leaving
those questions to one side for the moment it is clear enough that this view of

change comprises a nexus between ‘knowing’ and ‘doing’. It is assumed that it is
possible to identify ways and means of resolving problems in an organization,
thereby enabling those involved to define changes which, if implemented suc-
cessfully, will lead to improvement. Here we see a belief in the idea of continu-
ous improvement and of the possibility of progress viewed as a linear process.
Albeit, as we shall see, researchers and practitioners will readily accept that with
any particular change there may be ‘unintended consequences’ arising out of the
implementation of changes, viewed as emerging from the use of too narrow a
model of the organization involved.
So at the outset it should be stated that there is a growing body of change the-
ory which adopts a more pessimistic line. This theory tends to challenge the lin-
earity of the traditional models, arguing either that real world change is either
much more complex than traditional models allow for, or that there are funda-
mental differences relating to the nature, role, constitution and governance
of organizations in modern society to the extent that the idea of ‘progress’ is

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