ABSTRACT
The vexed issue of the sustainability of a change programme, or in other words, of making change ‘stick’, is receiving increased attention in both scholarly and practitioner literature (Buchanan et al., 2005; Dunphy et al 2007; Doppelt, 2008; Benn and Baker, 2009; Burnes, 2004; 2009). Under pressure from imperatives such as
globalization and technological innovation, managers face the knowledge that maintaining change over time is difficult (Beer and Nohria, 2000; Smith, 2002; Knodel, 2004; Burnes, 2004; 2009) and that many such changes decay over time. Maintaining new ways of working and applying them to address the requirements of a rapidly evolving and increasingly complex business context is the real challenge of sustainability (Bateman and David, 2002). For while there is an increased pressure on organizations to shift from traditional bureaucratic structures to more flexible and adaptive forms of organization, these new, more flexible organization structures should not necessarily be seen as replacements to the traditional organizational form. Rather, as Graetz and Smith (2009) point out, they can be viewed as complementary and fulfilling different needs. One example of a ‘new’ form for organizing is the Toyota-inspired management
concept of Lean Production (Womack et al., 1991; Hines et al., 2004; Pettersen, 2009), increasingly influential in the manufacturing industry (Bo¨rnfelt, 2006; Johansson and Abrahamsson, 2009). While Lean can take on many forms, continuous improvement is often argued to be a key aspect of the concept (Pettersen, 2009). The success of Lean rests on the organization continuously changing itself through smaller and larger changes, and thus, the means to facilitate these changes is needed. Using Weick and Quinn’s (1999) terminology, and based on this interpretation of Lean, the concept can be characterized as advocating continuous rather than episodic change. However, introduction of the Lean concept itself could be viewed as a form of episodic change, leading to continuous change when the concept is assimilated into the organization. In using Lean as an example of continuous change, one shoud be mindful that it has been criticized on the grounds that it does not progress wider organizational learning, is perhaps only relevant to the high volume and routinized workplace such as the automobile industry and does not necessarily address the concerns of other organizational stakeholders (Hines et al., 2004). This article seeks to develop a model for the evaluation of continuous change which would assist in overcoming these limitations. The specific evaluation of such a continuous change programme creates impor-
tant challenges. The reason for this is that organizational change is often evaluated after the change programme has been completed, that is, it is evaluated as an episodic change. This raises the question of how to evaluate the sustainability of a change programme, such as Lean, intended on initiating an organizational state which is characterized by continuous change and thus lacks an end-state. This article contributes to the theory and practice of change management by
proposing a multifactorial model for evaluating the sustainability of an organization’s continuous change processes. In doing so, an attempt is made to clarify the semantic confusion around ‘sustainable change’.
