Wieteke Dupain

Current position:
Business Graduate Trainee at Thomson Reuters

Thesis title:
Managing Change in the 21st Century: The Journey Towards a New Worlds of Work

Description:
To address the gaps in literature, this study aimed to identify the (new) roles and actions, at the level of top management, middle management, and knowledge worker, that influence mental models during the creation of a new organizaitonal context (physical, virutal and mental) and adoption of new ways of working throughout the organization.

The empirical research took place between February 2007 and July 2008 at the Dutch subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation. During this period this kind of change appeared to be very complex, as many of the mental models held within the organization were challenged at the same time. The change of mental models to adopt new ways of working was supported by a change in the physical space (a new building) and the virtual space (new IT-tools, IT-training and availability of scenarios with best practices). In an organization that was used to top-down communicated change, management and employees were asked to participate in the change, to organically co-create the environment: a change of the mental/social space. This meant employees had to cope with changing their mental models concerning how the change would affect their daily work, but as well about what their own roles and actions would be during the change.

Beyond evidence from literature, this study shows that middle management and knowledge workers indeed increasingly co-create the organizational context and new ways of working. And that old mental models of both management and knowledge workers, if not taken into account, have the potential to slow down this process considerably. In addition, this study subscribes literature that indicates a decreasing importance for top management and middle management to direct and 11 control and an increasing importance to facilitate and inspire, for example through role modeling. This latter role has remained largely unidentified in most strategizing, organizing and change studies until date, and if researched, has been mostly done in sociological and psychological studies, but appeared highly influential in co-creating the organizational context and adoption of new ways of working at Microsoft the Netherlands and therefore offers valuable insights on this particular role for management.

By comparing practice with theory and including the lessons learned from this research a theoretical and conceptual framework about roles and actions from top management, middle management and knowledge workers and their interaction is proposed, particularly directed to mental model change when creating a new organizational context and new ways of working. Three new and/ or changed roles receive particular attention: role modeling, intermediating and coordinating. Eight roles, previously described in literature are confirmed: recognizing, championing, synthesizing, ratifying, facilitating, implementing, experimenting and adjusting. In addition, suggestions are formulated, based upon the lessons learned from the case study, to improve future organizational change efforts of this kind and successful continuation of the change effort in the case study organization. These suggestions mainly focus on how to support and inspire the interaction between horizontal and vertical layers throughout the organization (which is defined at the end of this study as the Organizational Loop of Interaction) in a way that positively influences the speed and quality at which mental models change. And, in this perspective, the findings and recommendations of this study show how organizations can attain ‘fitness’ – the capacity to learn and change to fit new circumstances” – that enables optimal alignment between organization and the surrounding world and thus highest gains for productivity by realigning the roles and actions of its people.

For the complete thesis, please click here.