Co-evolution of process and content in organizational change : explaining the dynamics of start and fizzle

Essay One: Explaining the Start and Fizzle of Organizational Change: Co-evolving Process and Content The theme that sustaining efforts to change is difficult appears in many guises throughout the organizations. The tendency for change processes to run out of energy and momentum is widely recognized. In this essay, I offer an inductive study of the dynamics of organizational change that describes situated human interactions to explain the observed trajectory of organizational behavior. As a window through which to view change, I study a manufacturer adopting production practices based on concepts of lean manufacturing and the so-called Toyota Production System (TPS). I develop a grounded theory based on extensive fieldwork observing a change effort that began with temporary improvement but subsequently entered a phase of decline, the characteristic start and fizzle of change. I examine how the actions of various groups interact with each other and with characteristics of the workplace. I then induce a model that characterizes the dynamics of participatory change. The model draws on a close examination of how people do the work of process improvement to identify a set of mechanisms through which process and content interact to constitute the patterns of organizing that result. I find that front-line participation led workers to generate ideas, but the work of implementing those ideas placed demands on key support personnel such as manufacturing engineers. The support personnel quickly become overwhelmed, facing a growing backlog of ideas to implement. As the support personnel modified their work practices to address the mounting workload, the change process evolved and so did the content of the changes it produced.