Burke Litwin 1992 Essay

Change is depicted in terms of both surgical process and content, with particular emphasis on transformational as compared with transactional factors. Transformational change occurs as a response to the external environment and directly affects organizational mission and strategy, the organiz. ations leadership, atid refinement, lit ttirn, tfie transactional factors are affectedstrtictute. systems, management practices, and climate. These transformational and transactional factors together affect motivation, which, in turn, affects peifornumce.In support of the sit downs potential validity, theory and look as wellaspraetke are cited. Orgatiization change is a kind of chaos (Gleick. 1987). The fleck of variables changing at the same lime, the magnitude of environmental change, and the frequent defense of human systetns cteate a whole confluence of ptocesses that are extremely intemperate to predict and al almost impossible to control. Nevertheless, there are consistent patterns that dwelllinkages among classes of events that fill been demonstrated repeatedly in the research literature and nookie be seen in actual organizations.The enormous and pervasive impact of culture and beliefs to the mind where it causes organizations to do fundamentally unsound things ftom a business point of viewwould be such an observed phe nonnenon. To build a most likely model describing the causes of organizational performance and change, we must explore ii important lines of thinking. First, we must understand more thoroughly how organizations function (i. e. , what leads to what). Second, given our tiiodel of causation, we must understand how organizations might be deliberately changed.The linkage typically is in the direction of theory and research to practice that is. to ground our audience in what is known, what is theoretically and observationally sound. Creation of the tnodel to be presented in this phrase was not quite in that knowledge-to-practice direction, h owever. With respect to theory, we sttongly believe in the frank system frame spurt, especially represented by Katz and Kahn (1978). Thus, any organizational model that we might develop would stem from an input-throughput-output, with a feedback loop, format.The tnodei presented hete is definitely of that genre. In separate wotds. the fundamental framework for the model evolved from theory. The components of the model and what causes what and in what order, on the separate hand, deport evolved frotn our practice. To risk stating what is often not politic to admit in academic circles, we admit that the ultimate development of our causal model evolved from practice, not extensive theory or tesearch. What we are attempting with this article, therefore, is a theoretical and empirical justification of what we clearly believe works.To be candid, we acknowledge that our attempt is not unlike attribution theorywe are explaining our beliefs and actions ex post facto This seemed to have w orked I wonder if the literature supports our action. Our consulting efforts over a period of nearly 5 years with British Airways taught us a lotwhat changes seemed to have worked and what activities clearly did not. It was from these experiences that our model took form. As a case example, we refer to the work at British Airways later in this article. For a more late overview of that change effort, . see Goodstein and Burke (1991).