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How Organizations Achieve Longevity: The Role of Change Management in Building Their Sustainability
Abstract
Problem Statement: This article addresses the question and role of organizational change and change management in building long term organizational sustainability. Organizations need to recognize the need for different types of organizational changes that help them to achieve congruence with their environment. Business practice has shown that successful adaptation to changing environment can be considered as one of the major source of sustainable competitive advantage and a source of longevity. Method: Based on the existing literature on change management and organizational long term sustainability we have presented review of studies done among USA and Europe’s long living companies. The goal was to determine which elements can be recognized as key ones for long term longevity and how important is change management in building sustainable competitive advantage and overall organizational behavior. Findings: Understanding how organizations grow, develop and decline, that is how they change over time, becomes crucial in building competitive advantage and enabling long term development and growth. This article has presented and analyzed results of different research among long living and successful organizations. Results show that successful adaptations to changing environment and successful change management can be seen as one of the major sources of sustainable competitive advantage and a source of longevity. Implications: Long living companies differ from companies whose life expectancy was very short by having successfully recognized needs of their organizations to change in order to avoid different declines and crisis in their life cycle. The capability to adapt to the environment, but at the same time to maintain stability necessary for daily activities, becomes a critical issue. Organizations need to have a built in mechanism for recognizing different
needs for change and developed mechanism for successful change management. Originality: The paper has showed, based on previous research, that change management can be considered as an important determinant of organizational longevity. The review reveals different sets of assumptions that can be considered as set of guidelines and principles organizations should follow to ensure long term sustainability and competitiveness.
... A refers to the core necessity for organisation sustainability. The sustainability of the organisation is contextualised not as the longevity (Aleksic, 2013) and profitability (Nouira, 2016) of the organisation but rather the organisation's contribution to a sustainable future. In the context of 'sustainability', OA is positioned as the organisation's ability to adapt to new or changing circumstances. ...
This study, ‘Adaptive-Intelligence Learning Architecture: Utilising an African aphorism to increase organisational adaptive quotient’, investigated the challenges organisations face within an exponentially disrupted business environment. The research problem studied is the possible incapacity of the organisation’s current learning systems to rapidly increase an organisation’s adaptive quotient. The problem encases the growing possibility of the dehumanisation of organisations through vast technological disruptions. Therefore, the study aims to describe a novel learning architecture utilising an African humanness aphorism that could increase organisational adaptive quotient when re-settling into any ‘new normal’.
The qualitative abductive approach to the research is based on post-positivism and metamodernism within conceptual relativism and a social constructivism philosophy. A blended research methodology, using hermeneutic phenomenology and grounded theory, was utilised to distil the phenomenon’s essence, telling the story of the life experience of the research participants in their current and foreseen future world of work. The study, which took place between 01 October 2019, and 30 November 2021, followed a multi-step design that collected multi forms of research data from 15 participants who were interviewed individually, three focus group discussions and, 14 teams with 120 participants in total were observed.
The study delivered a complexity of findings, which centre on the five themes identified during selective coding. In broad terms, the study found that most current learning efforts lack an intentional focus on Organisational Adaptive Quotient. Most Organisational Learning Systems (OLS) show low connectedness and collectiveness, indicative of a slow reaction to problem ecologies. There is a general ignorance of the Coherence-Correlation-Dynamics required within learning efforts. Most OLSs do not actively promote the Adaptive Intelligence of their people system. Finally, the study’s key findings further indicated Requirements for a new learning architecture that can oscillate between enabling the OLS and energising the OLS.
The study’s results present an Adaptive-Intelligence Learning Architecture (AiLA) framework. The AiLA framework advocates for an organisational learning system that weaves adaptive intelligence into its learning efforts focused on competency improvement. Through its focus on organisational adaptive quotient, the AiLA places African Humanness as the core energy of the learning system to provide the energy to the architecture in combating system entropy.
Key Words: Adaptive-Intelligence, Organisation Adaptive Quotient, AiLA Framework, African Humanness, ‘Being levels’ of existence, Learning Architecture, Organisational Learning System, Spiral Dynamics, Metamodernism, Integral, African Aphorism
Some organizations and leaders struggle with balancing decisions regarding financial, societal, and environmental contributions, the three traditional components of sustainability. For example, an organization’s financial difficulties can result in unfavorable impacts on its two other sustainability components: societal and environment. In The Infinite Game, Sinek emphasized the importance of these three sustainability components and added a fourth dimension—the longevity of the organization. While some leaders pursue “the infinite game,” many focus primarily on the near-term by necessity. This chapter explores the relationships among an organization’s leadership, its pursuit of excellence, the balance of traditional sustainability components, and ultimately its longevity. Then, it reexamines those relationships through the lens of the COVID-19 Pandemic, a global existential threat that has affected both organizations and individuals in unequal ways. Insights from both failed and surviving organizations may provide lessons for future organizational resiliency.
As change becomes a constant in organizational life, middle managers charged with interpreting, communicating, and implementing change often struggle for meaning. To explore change and managerial sensemaking, we conducted action research at the Danish Lego Company. Although largely absent from mainstream journals, action research offers exceptional access to and support of organizational sensemaking. Through collaborative intervention and reflection, we sought to help managers make sense of issues surfaced by a major restructuring. Results transform paradox from a label to a lens, contributing a process for working through paradox and explicating three organizational change aspects-paradoxes of performing, belonging, and organizing.
'This volume represents a most welcome and important contribution to the emergent and fast-growing dynamic capabilities view (DCV) of the firm and sustainable competitive advantage. It simultaneously helps to assess critically, integrate with a wide range of other perspectives, broaden the scope, and deepen the conceptual foundations of the DCV. In addition and importantly, it links DCV to, and contrasts it with, managerial practice. The authors' dispassionate approach is a further plus. The editors have done an excellent job and should be congratulated for this work that should be a must-read.' © Stuart Wall, Carsten Zimmermann, Ronald Klingebiel and Dieter Lange 2010. All rights reserved.
Nowadays, change is necessary and undeniable affair and one of the most effective factors in successful management. So that organizations become more complex, it is more likelihood managers confront with increaser chances, threats, also stronger competitive forces and fewer time for reaction. Critical status is not desirable for any managers but a powerful management can turn crisis into chances, by use of knowledge, proficiency and proper encounter with them. Organizations and their stuff must have positive attitude about change process, to safeguard their competitive potential in nowadays turbulence markets. This article teaches to managers how to be one step ahead for competition and survival of their organization recognize change process, react positively in distrust circumstances, evaluating weak and strong points of their organization according to environmental changes and study them realistically and manage a change project as a one of the most important change agents efficiently. This article proceed to change subject and change management (nature, process, cycle, different kinds of changes and etc.) design in keys point and suggests to managers, so they could perform them besides precise study.
Organizational change capacity is an organization’s ability to successfully navigate an array of changes in response to and in anticipation of continuously shifting market conditions, customer demands, competitive pressures, technologies, and societal conditions. Building organizational change capacity requires influencing three primary dimensions reflecting change-related processes. At the individual level, change capacity involves understanding the nature of change and the various ways it can be implemented, with the goal of enhancing the willingness and ability of organizational members to change. At the structural level, change capacity involves building a change-supportive organizational infrastructure, along with providing appropriate ongoing resources to support change. And at the cultural level, change capacity involves creating an organizational culture that embraces fluidity, openness, and learning, as well as making strategizing an ongoing, dynamic activity that strings together a series of momentary competitive advantages. Specific actions are used to clarify each of the three dimensions, and an Organizational Change Capacity Questionnaire is provided to assess change capacity. In essence, it is argued that building organizational change capacity involves a conscious and systemic approach to developing an organization in ways that tap into peoples’ natural capacity to change by supporting change and making it a basic part of organizational life.