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case study I 101
Changes should include examination and adaptation of job conditions (such as work

hours, salary).
Changes should occur in combination with effective training measures.

Changes should establish effective job prospective and career paths for the employees.

Management and employees should reach agreement on such principles early in the
change process. Management should be able to guarantee its obligation to apply the
principles to the entire change process (see Schein, 1980).
Criteria for the quality of the change process itself can be defined from different
perspectives. From the perspective of employees, there are various criteria of decisive
importance:

faith in the real results of change

readiness for change

ownership of the change process

appropriate pace of change

visible improvements during the change process

belief in personal benefits through the change.

There are subjective and objective indications for these criteria. The important aspect is
the way in which the employees’ attitudes, concrete behavior, and personal commitment
evolve during the process of change with regard to the criteria described (Argyris &
Sch¨on, 1978).
In sum, the transition from a traditional work and organizational design to an innova-
tive design founded in work and organizational psychology requires professional change
processes and change management that are based on thorough reflection upon the orga-
nizational and management structures, work processes, and individual work activities.
Only these will fulfill the prerequisites for a new design that will support sustainable per-
formance increases at the individual level and, in consequence, at the level of the entire
enterprise. In addition, however, it is crucial to ensure that such processes are not dictated
from above by experts; rather, the goal of employee-oriented and performance-fostering
work design can be achieved through an employee-oriented design and change process.
The following case studies illustrate the possibilities for such change processes and
the resulting effects.

CASE STUDY I

ORGANIZATION DEVELOPMENT IN A COMPANY
IN THE MACHINE-BUILDING INDUSTRY
The pre-change situation
To improve its own position on the world market, a medium-sized company in the machine-
building industry with 160 employees undertook a fundamental and proactive change
project. We supported this project as consultants. The most important human-oriented and
enterprise-oriented goals of the change are shown in Table 5.1.
The company had been organized according to classic principles (see Figure 5.5). This
had led to familiar problem areas, such as department-restricted thinking, diffusion of