Unspectacular Organizational Change in Normal Times: Rule Change as a Routine Activity

In this paper we argue that incremental organizational change, that we conceptualize predominantly as rule change, has been severely neglected in research on organizational change. A longitudinal study of rule changes in a German bank produced among others the following results: (1) The processes of rule changes and rule suspensions follow different time-patterns, which are complementary: a decreasing rate of rule change increases the need to suspend that rule. (2) Changes and suspensions of rules do not only depend on the organizational members' experience in dealing with them, but also on the organizational experience with institutionalized processes of rule creation. (3) There are indications of a multiplication of the inertial forces displayed by a growing boardsize and younger version cohorts. These results underline the relevance of incremental change processes.