Doug Stace

The Strategic Management of Corporate Change

To investigate the controversy between universal and contingent approaches to corporate change, a study was undertaken of 13 service sector organizations. The study used the Dunphy/Stace contingency model of organizational change strategies, developing measures to place the organizations within the model. Results indicate that universal models of change management are inadequate to describe the diversity of approaches actually used by these organizations. In particular, the traditional Organizational Development model is unrepresentative of how change in many contemporary organizations is actually made. The traditional OD model prescribes incremental change combined with a participative management style but most organizations in the study made rapid transformative change using a directive leadership style. The OD model is also inadequate as a prescriptive model because very different change strategies, some dramatically different from OD, resulted in successful financial performance. Four case studies are presented to illustrate how each of the major contingencies in the model can operate to create effective organizational performance.

Discussion Note: Strategies for Planned Change. An Exchange of Views Between Dunford, Dunphy and Stace

Dexter Dunphy and Doug Stace have presented a critique of the Organization Development (OD) approach (Dunphy and Stace 1988). OD they portray as being based on both ’an ideology of gradualism’ whereby effective change results from small incremental adjustments, and a belief in the necessity of change being essentially a participative process whereby consensus and support for the change is generated. This approach, they argue, is inconsistent with the rapid and coercive approach to change that is taken in many organizations. Rather than dismissing the latter as aberrations doomed to failure, Dunphy and Stace imply that it is important

The Value-Added Organisation: Trends in Human Resource Management

Western societaes have been facing the challenge of new ways in which to sustain and create wealth for almost two decades. has not occurred as a result of incremental change in their economic, technological and social environments. Rather it has been because of fast-moving, almost cataclysmic change going to the core of their economic and social structures, with widespread implications for organisational functioning and human resource management practice.