Change management competencies for creating collaborative organizations

This conceptual chapter addresses identification, development, and application of change management competencies directed at creating more collaborative work systems through transformation of existing businesses. The chapter draws on, and assesses, selected key ideas and works in the available literatures on change management and collaboration (applied both internally and externally), including reported cases of revealing successful and failed change efforts. Improved collaboration is posited to be desirable and feasible, in certain circumstances. Change management and organizational transformation are big and broad topics, with large conceptual and empirical literatures, as is the topic of collaborative work systems. There is here a deliberate narrowing of focus on how to obtain more collaboration in and between existing organizations, where desirable but not occurring naturally. Attention is explicitly directed to transformation of existing businesses as distinct from the relative managerial freedom afforded in startup situations and the almost natural change processes inherent in successful innovation firms. Any shift from conventional to collaborative work approaches is a transformational problem drawing on change management competencies. A fundamental difficulty is the absence of empirically verified theories immediately relevant to management practice. Useful knowledge on these important matters has been built up piecemeal and experientially.