ABSTRACT
Prescriptions defining how individual managers should manage change are informed by myths or widely-shared, but not necessarily well-substantiated, understandings. Decentralized structures, devolution of power, teams, and ‘loose-tight’ cultural properties are some of the ingredients, as are leaders who model change-embracing values and provide power tools to innovators. Managers must not only accommodate rapid change themselves, they must shoulder the strategic responsibility of steering their organizations through turbulence. A small but growing body of research which attends to individual responses, does so in particular circumstances of organizational change such as closure or death. Change, and particularly radical change, such as crises or disasters, tends to produce high levels of anxiety and stress which in turn ‘elicits behavioural responses of withdrawal reductions in critical information processing and constriction in behavioural responses’. The Stockmarket Adjustment of October 1987 was portrayed at the time as a sudden and dramatic change in world financial markets.
