Successful Organizational Change: Integrating the Management Practice and Scholarly Literatures

Abstract

Contemporary organizations often struggle to create meaningful, sustainable changes. At the same time, relevant organizational research lacks an easily accessible consensus on basic change management processes and principles. One consequence is practitioner reliance on popular change models that more often cite expert opinion as their foundation rather than scientific evidence. This article reviews both key tenets of widely used practitioner-oriented change models and findings from scholarly research on organizational change processes to develop an integrative summary of the available evidence of what is known, contested, untested, and underused in change management. It identifies ten evidence-based steps in managing planned organizational change along with implications for research and practice.