Inger Stensaker

NHH Norwegian School of Economics | NHH · Department of Strategy and Management

The strategic change literature underscores the risk of loss of trust during change but does not address how trust can be restored once compromised. We conduct an inductive longitudinal study of an organization undergoing post-merger integration and examine how management worked to restore employee trust after a conflictual change process. We intro...

Phenomenon-driven research (PDR) is problem-oriented research that focuses on capturing, documenting, and conceptualizing an observed phenomenon of interest in order to facilitate knowledge creation and advancement. As an ideas-led and interpretive way of researching, and with an emphasis on exploring issues and challenges that bother those experie...

Hvordan kan en organisasjon som har hatt stor suksess over lang tid med en desentralisert organisasjonsmodell bevege seg i retning av en mer integrert modell og dermed ta ut skalafordeler? En slik omstilling vil ikke bare utfordre etablerte styrings- og maktstrukturer, men også organisasjonens identitet. Vi har fulgt Telenor over tre år og kartlagt...

This paper explores the role of Global Leadership Development (GLD) programmes for developing the social capital of multinational enterprises and ultimately the enhancement of knowledge sharing across corporate divisions and national borders. Drawing on both qualitative interview and survey data, we find that GLD programmes can promote cross-border...

In this symposium, we debate three key tensions within current and emerging organizational change scholarship and practice: engagement, energy, and emotion. The first debate considers the dialectic between readiness and resistance to deepen our understanding of organizational and individual engagement in change. The second debate focuses on how the...

Recently, at an Academy of Management meeting workshop, reflecting on the field, Warner Burke asked “where are the new models and theories of change?” This provocative question has been pondered within organization studies and specifically on organization theory for several decades. And yet it persists. Borrowing this debate, in this essay we rever...

This paper explores how middle managers develop a capacity to implement a transformation strategy consisting of series of changes originating both from corporate-level management and from their own division. Through a qualitative case study we observed how a foreign subsidiary in a Multinational Enterprise (MNE) within the telecommunications indust...

This symposium examines the linkages between “who we are” (identity) and the strategic actions and decisions of organizational members (strategizing). Three empirical papers illustrate various linkages among strategizing, change and identity. The first paper develops the concept of organizational identity work and uses this to examine a firm's stru...

This paper examines how trust between employees and management is restored after being compromised during change. We apply the psychological contract perspective to show how the loss of trust can be understood as a psychological contract breach, and explore how a renegotiated psychological contract can restore trust. We conducted a longitudinal qua...

In this paper, we examine skill‐related uncertainties among middle managers during organizational change. The question emerged from a qualitative study of two planned organizational change initiatives in the public sector where a group of middle managers were required to learn new skills because of changes in their work tasks and managerial roles....

The aim of this article is to identify those aspects of global leadership development (GLD) programs that promote social capital and knowledge sharing in multinational enterprises (MNEs). The analysis is conducted within the context of two Scandinavian MNEs. Both MNEs had aimed at the development of inter-unit social networks and knowledge sharing....

This chapter presents trailing research (TR) as an approach for studying organization change in real time. I argue that TR can contribute in bridging the practitioner-scholar divide as well as generating methodologically rigorous, theoretically strong, and practically relevant research. I contrast the method with more traditional ways of researchin...

This chapter argues that orthodox career thinking-which focuses on vertical progression to higher-level managerial positions-is suffering from three shortcomings. First, it is insufficient to explain career dynamics in modern knowledge organizations. Second, it does not see strategic organizational change as a catalyst for career and disregards the...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore how experience with organizational change influences employees' reactions to change. While exposure to an increasingly frequent organizational change can lead to change fatigue and cynicism, it can also generate more positive reactions to change. The authors identify experience-based change capabili...

This article explores literature on middle managers and the competing roles they play during implementation of change, and presents theory of negotiated order as a framework for further understanding these challenges. Theory of negotiated order highlights social order as emerging from the process of negotiation regarding how work is organized on a...

This article explores literature on middle managers and the competing roles they play during implementation of change, and presents theory of negotiated order as a framework for further understanding these challenges. Theory of negotiated order highlights social order as emerging from the process of negotiation regarding how work is organized on a...

This paper draws on a comparative case study of the implementation of a planned change initiative across three different divisions of a multidivisional oil company to investigate the influences guiding division-level change agents in their choice of a change management approach and the impact of different approaches on change outcomes. While the co...

Budgets have long been the dominant instrument for management control. In recent years however, alternative approaches to management control such as the Balanced Scorecard have been launched. It has even been suggested that organizations should drop the budget and move 'Beyond Budgeting' (Hope and Fraser, Strategic Finance, 82(4), pp. 30-35, 2000)....

The purpose of this paper is to explore how political leaders can gain acceptance for radical reforms through selective inclusion and exclusion of stakeholders. We had inside access to the formulation of a radical reform in the Scandinavian context and found that radical change was not secured through extensive participation, but rather through sel...

Corporate change initiatives trigger a series of activities aimed at implementing change. It is often assumed that successful implementation requires consistent action based on a shared understanding of the changes among employees. This article examines how implementation activities affect individual and organizational sensemaking processes and the...

Organizations can respond to change in a number of ways such as by transforming the organization, by making symbolic changes, by customizing the change to better fit the context, or by corrupting the change and actually reinforcing status quo. In this article we compare how three business units respond to the same corporate change initiative.We tra...

In this conceptual paper we examine how organizations can develop capacity for change, which we define as the allocation and development of change and operational capabilities that sustains long term performance. Making change happen without destroying well-functioning aspects in an organization and harming subsequent changes requires both capabili...

In this article we explore future business models for the mobile service industry. Using industry expert information, we develop four scenarios that illustrate possible different future conditions in the industry. Drawing on strategy literature, we discuss strategic challenges based on technological development and social identity and propose busin...

“Change or perish” has become a corporate mantra (Abrahamson, 2000). What happens when change becomes excessive? We define excessive change as when organizations pursue several seemingly unrelated and perhaps conflicting changes simultaneously, or when organizations introduce new changes before previous changes have been completed. When change is p...

Planned change processes can be viewed as continuous negotiations and renegotiations between change agents and change recipients. While change agents typically aim to minimize renegotiations of their proposed changes, we view renegotiations as an integral and often unavoidable part of implementing large-scale change. We argue that rather than focus...

The article reveals the consequences of excessive corporate change. The ubiquity of change has given fertile ground for understanding how change is motivated, formulated and implemented. Investigation of unsuccessful change processes has led to an awareness of the many barriers to change, including resistance to change. The impression one is left w...

This paper aims to clarify how a country image is established, and how it can be developed. The authors argue that the marketer seeks to activate specific associations from a country image, and to match these with important characteristics in the target market through the design of all the components of the marketing mix. If all these components su...

In this paper we ask when strategic change may become excessive and explore the consequences of excessive change. Past literature on strategic change has ignored the organizational consequences of introducing too much change. Our identification of excessive change arises from two separate research projects. In a grounded theory manner, we use empir...

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This report is one of a series of papers and reports on telecommunication economics published by the Institute for Research in Economics and Business Administration (SNF) as part of its telecommunication economics program. The main focus of the research program is to study the deregulation process of the telecommunication industry, and the economic...