Change Happens

This study investigated the strategies that change management practitioners use to promote organizational change. Organizations implement change management plans to avoid losses in productivity and employee motivation (Bakari et al., 2017). Although there is an abundance of literature suggesting how change managers should implement a successful organizational change, practitioners and theorists approach change management differently (Saka, 2003). Practitioners may ignore the popular change literature (Bamford & Forrester, 2003) by relating their implementations to the context of the change instead of a prescribed model. There is a lack of empirical evidence in change management research that supports the theories mentioned in publications (Bakari et al., 2017; Bamford & Forrester, 2003; Brown, 2014; By, 2005; Cinite et al., 2009). The popular literature commonly states that 70% of organizational change fails (Balogun & Hope Hailey, 2008; Beer & Nohria, 2000; Burnes, 2015; Cinite et al., 2009; Washington & Hacker, 2005), but does not describe why the change fails (Decker et al., 2012). Although popular literature identifies numerous models and strategies to promote change, the field lacks empirical evidence that explains what strategies practitioners use and how they determine that their change was successful. The purpose of this research was to examine the choices that change managers make and how change managers promote organizational change. I collected survey data through questionnaires (n = 49) and interviews (n = 20) to answer the following four research questions: 1. What strategies do change managers use to facilitate organizational change? 2. How do change managers implement change management strategies to promote organizational change? 3. How do change managers measure the effectiveness of their change implementations? 4. How has the current global pandemic impacted the strategies used by change management professionals? The questionnaire results identified how frequently participants used the strategies found in six popular change management models. I used the interviews to determine how the change managers used the strategies in their implementations, how they measured their change implementations, and how the COVID-19 pandemic affected the strategies that they used. By triangulating the data from the questionnaire and interviews, I identified ten strategies that change managers often used when they implemented a successful organizational change. The strategies were (1) communicate with the employees about the change, (2) receive open support and commitment from administration, (3) focus on organizational culture, (4) use managers and supervisors as change agents, (5) include employees in change decisions, (6) listen to the employees' concerns about the change, (7) reward new behavior, (8) use training to prepare employees and leaders for change, (9) help clients relate the organization's vision to the change, and (10) build trust to increase buy-in. Most strategies contained sub-strategies that described how the participants implemented the change. Findings revealed that change managers used the strategies contextually based on the individual needs of the organization. This suggested that a linear prescriptive change model did not align with every change implementation. Communicating with members of the organization expanded across numerous strategies and promoting the change through leadership was an essential component of the change instead of an individual strategy. The participants measured the effectiveness of the change with both formal and informal feedback. They based the success of their change implementations on pre-defined goals set by the organization's administrators. Open support and commitment from administration was essential to promote a successful organizational change. The participants created short-term, mid-term, and long-term goals to show that the change was on-task, and they used informal assessment such as water cooler talks to determine how the employees viewed the change. Although the participants had not completed a change implementation during the COVID-19 pandemic, they discussed the effects of promoting organizational change in an online environment. The change managers were unable to use informal assessment through water cooler talks or observe non-verbal cues about how participants perceived the change. The pandemic also required change managers to adapt employees to online work before the change manager could implement the pre-determined change.