Organizational change failure: Framing the process of failing

Abstract

Despite what we know about how organizations and their members respond to change, organizations continue to spend an inordinate amount of time confronting, mitigating, and dealing with failure during change. This special issue focuses on what happens when organizational change fails. Its goal is to enhance knowledge and advance theory regarding the processes and mechanisms that underlie the emergence of organizational change failure. In this editorial, we first take stock of the established perspectives on failure, and introduce an integrative approach to offer a more holistic account of the process of change failure. The framework constitutes a multilevel, interlocking strategy for future scholarship. It highlights how the evolving experience defines, creates, and enacts failure during change across three structures: the surface (i.e., context), intermediate (i.e., building block dimensions), and deep (i.e., enduring aspects) structures of failure. With this frame as its basis, the articles in the special issue prompt discussion of what exactly failure means for organizations and their members dealing with different accounts of change failure.

Keywords

change engagement organizational degeneration organizational failure process

This special issue focuses on expanding an understanding of the process of failing during change. It extends a growing interest in studying process models that help make sense of the complexity, the multilevel nature, and the temporality associated with an organization’s failure to change (Habersang et al., 2019; Langley et al., 2013). The motivation in proposing this issue was to move past convention and enhance knowledge regarding the process and the mechanisms bringing together change and failure. Our initial premise is that failure and change intersect despite the perpetual interest in organizational success stories (Bledow et al., 2017). We recognize that most failure in organizations also generates some sort of change and adaptation, and it is this process and aspect of what happens when organizational change fails that we focus on – the conditions and stages of failure during change. With an emphasis on exploring failure in this context, the special issue moves past the characteristic step-by-step accounts and descriptions of how to manage or avoid change failure through a series of interventions (e.g., Basford and Schaninger, 2016). Rather than focus on these linear causal stage-based models, it illustrates that research into organizational change failure can benefit significantly from understanding and incorporating the deeper process approaches in the study of failure and thus willingly goes down the proverbial rabbit hole, as Heracleous and Bartunek (2021) describe it, rather than stick with surface-level, ubiquitous understanding of the phenomenon. Doing so, in this editorial we propose an integrative approach to change failure to provide a more holistic account that (a) gives shape to the actions taken to deal with change failure, and (b) categorizes the five contributing articles in the special issue.

The perspective proposed by this special issue draws from the earlier seminal works of Pettigrew (1985, 1987), who questioned the idea of change and its resulting failure as being caused by neglecting to follow a linear causal stage-based model aimed at switching direction or design towards a particular goal. Organizational change failure is not just a terminal endpoint but may alternate between cycles of generating success as well as producing destruction over longer periods of time. In that way, organizational change failure and organizational change success are not mutually exclusive events but result from dialectical processes (as highlighted by De Keyser et al., 2021, in this special issue). Despite what we know about how organizations and their members respond to change, organizations continue to spend an inordinate amount of time confronting, mitigating, and dealing with failure during change.

Though it is widely acknowledged that some degree of failure in organizations is pervasive, and ultimately, unavoidable, critical scholarly attention continues to focus on common questions and themes related to managing and surviving failure, or questioning the implications of failing, especially in the context of organizational change (Mellahi and Wilkinson, 2010; Sitkin, 1992). Central to this outlook is that organizational research has long been concerned with the features of and mechanisms for how organizations change, while at the same time acknowledging separately that large-scale organizational changes tend to fail (Hughes, 2011). In promoting more study on the depth of intersection between organizational failure and organizational change, we recognize the work already done on the subject typically explains failure as a continuum (failure to growth), with various accounts including coping with failure (Shepherd et al., 2011), the positive psychology associated with failing (Seligman, 2011), learning from failure (Shepherd and Cardon, 2009), the role of decision-making errors in failure (Lord et al., 2015), consequences of failure (Anheier, 1999), and explaining failure (Cannon and Edmondson, 2001). This context indicates the breadth of these studies and the numerous important contributions previously made to our understanding of failure in an organizational context.

So why study organizational change failure specifically, given the inroads made through research on established, broad themes such as escalation of commitment, groupthink, sensemaking, risk-taking, and learning norms? The simple answer is that, despite four decades of research since Whetten called for researchers to “improve the conceptual clarity of organizational decline” (Whetten, 1980: 582), we understand failure in and between organizations possibly better than at any other stage since theorizing on the field, yet acknowledged gaps still persist specific to change. For instance, given the pressure for continuous change, our understanding is concentrated on the narrow view of exploring how individuals and collectives cope with failing when the focus is on avoiding failure, and thus depicting failure as a destructive organizational event to mitigate or manage. This reality is perplexing. After all, the literature on the topic is as rich as it is interesting – failing (Meyer and Zucker, 1989), accidents (Perrow, 1984), inertia (Hannan and Freeman, 1984), downward spirals (Brockner, 1992), behaviors (Caldwell and Oreilly, 1982), personnel (Kofter, 1995), and reasoning (Mantere et al., 2013), among others, all implicitly dealing with approaches to failure during change. But our deeper understanding (and explicit sensemaking) of change and failure together is far less well integrated and explored.

The majority of this previous research focuses on identifying linear stage-based models of change failure, treating time as a quantifiable entity for which all events that proceed or follow failure are arranged along a linear axis that is real and independent of perception. Think of most of the prominent, visible examples of research on an organization’s failure during change and the instances of ability to survive, impaired judgment, missed targets, or decline. Despite its prominence, this scholarship focused on growth and effectiveness, assuming a more limited, deterministic view on failure as something to manage (Scott, 2001), but these assumptions rely on oversimplification. As Delaney puts it, what “if a small business shuts down and abandons a toxic waste site, yet the owner has reaped huge rewards for many years, transferring all externalities onto the back of a local community, what exactly has failed?” (Delaney, 1996: 1038). Conversely, if an organization learns from failure to deal with its mistakes, then what exactly is failing in this context? Adopting a process-based perspective accounts for the subjective nature and differences in sensemaking across different levels, and therefore help focus on combining insights from psychology, sociology, complexity sciences, and institutional theory in explaining the processual dynamics of failure specific to change (Amankwah-Amoah, 2016; Habersang et al., 2019). It is this extension that we sought in our initial call for papers to make inroads into this integration of the process of failure during change.

In the remainder of this editorial, and moving away from thematic summary type reviews which are already well done (Mellahi and Wilkinson, 2004; Trahms et al., 2013), we offer conceptual clarity of organizational change failure, and a discussion of its processual nature. This overview culminates with the positioning and framing of the five special issue articles into an integrative process model that will, we hope, serve as a platform for future debate on and study of organizational change failure.

Defining organizational change failure

All firms experience failure at some stage in their life cycle, and yet there are multiple, overlapping explanations of what it means for an organization to fail. Since Whetten’s (1980) call for more research on organizational decline, the development of scholarship on failure has grown considerably, with publications in sociology, organizational psychology, economics, general management, entrepreneurship, and strategy-oriented journals (Kücher and Feldbauer-Durstmüller, 2019). As a result, numerous definitions and conceptualizations of failure have emerged, often mirroring the context of study rather than focused on elaborating failure itself, leading to the fragmentation and heterogeneity of this literature. With this dispersion, there is no common, agreed definition of organizational failure, and the community is thematically splintered (Balcaen and Ooghe, 2006; Jenkins and McKelvie, 2016; Mellahi and Wilkinson, 2004; Ucbasaran et al., 2013). Notwithstanding the breadth of research, this lack of consensus highlights two definitional clusters. A first cluster of definitions focuses on the discontinuance of organizations (Hamilton, 2006; Walsh and Bartunek, 2011), discontinuance of ownership (Everett and Watson, 1998), or formal bankruptcy petition (Watson and Everett, 1996). A second cluster of definitions, and one more commonly known or referred to, is much broader in focus and encapsulates trends and themes in the organization’s inability to attain expected goals, thresholds, aspirations, or desired results (Baum and Oliver, 1991).

Owing to this heterogeneity, this lack of a commonly agreed definition has made it challenging to conduct meta-analysis (Kücher and Feldbauer-Durstmüller, 2019), leaving gaps in the depth of our understandings of themes and perspectives specific to failing (with most focused on antecedents of failure; Bouckenooghe et al., 2015; Park and Shaw, 2013) and barriers to building systematic knowledge on failure. This shortcoming is most evident in the continual lament on the limitations in the field, and the lack of comparative study (Cameron et al., 1987; Pettigrew et al., 2001). Given this context, although we recognize the relevance of meta-analysis to provide definitional confidence and move the field forward systematically, we advocate that different perspectives and definitions of organizational failure hold promise on the condition that some creative synthesis emerges from these different perspectives. With an emphasis on the need for contextual specificity in theoretical perspectives (Johns, 2006; McFarland and Hamilton, 2006), and given that we focus on nominal failure in organizations (i.e., those that fail to meet some nominal goal or outcome measure rather than failing substantively or emphatically), we consolidate the variety of definitions on organizational failure by focusing on change.

Recognizing that many types of failures ensue from organizational change (Beer and Nohria, 2000), as well as the scope of different views on what organizational failure entails (Ackroyd, 2007), we define organizational change failure as an organization’s deviation from goals and outcomes that are expected and desired from organizational change. This framing acknowledges the aforementioned definitional clusters while incorporating Edmondson (2011), Hughes (2011), Mellahi and Wilkinson (2010), and Mueller and Shepherd (2016) in giving a boundary to failure and change occurring together. It also recognizes Cameron et al.’s (1987) assertion that failing can be both functional and dysfunctional at the same time. With this foundation, we diverge from the perspective of failure as a terminal end-state (i.e., mortality, discontinuation of organization, bankruptcy) or something to correct, resolve, or avoid. Further, our framing recognizes that organizational change failure can be diverse, ranging from minor technical errors and mistakes due to incremental change, to breakdowns and large-scale failure ensuing from transformational change strategies (see Dahlin et al., 2018). Recognizing the intrinsic overlap of this framing, we premise organizational change failure as part of a process of regenerating changes and adaptation during failure, and it is this aspect that we explore in expanding an understanding of the process of failing during change.

With this foundation, the special issue diverges from providing more accounts on explaining organizational failure, or commentary on the state of failure to change, with typical observations on how failure research remains fragmented, dispersed, of secondary interest, or in need of more dedicated attention. With this (ongoing) assumption, failure research tends to adopt a common pathway of critically reflecting on the field, and then noting a need for consolidation and a coordinated response (the search for a “grand theory”; Mellahi and Wilkinson, 2004: 31). But how long should organizational scholars hold onto this response, rather than develop it or build alternative views on failure? Instead of engaging in this continuous search for the “holy grail” of meta-theorizing in organizational failure research, we prefer to draw from the richness that the context of failure has to offer.

In particular, we believe that the field has advanced and progressed because of its multidisciplinary character recognizing the complexity that entails organizational failure. As noted in Kücher and Feldbauer-Durstmüller’s (2019) bibliometric study, since 2000 the idea that organizational failure is out of management’s control has been abandoned, shifting to how to make sense of its process-related aspects. It is interesting that such broad-based commentary on failure appears primarily amongst accounting, decision science, and economic researchers, rather than driven by organizational scholars. Extending this stream of research, the special issue starts from the awareness that already exists about failure and change, with a focus on framing the process of failure during change – that is, elaborating and modelling the process of changing to explain and incorporate failure in parallel – a recognition of the centrality of change to failure and failure to change. With this stance and framing, the articles in the special issue prompt discussion of what exactly failure means for organizations (and through its members) dealing with change failure (both as a dysfunctional and as a constructive process). We first turn to perspectives on failure in order to position organizational change, before modelling the process of failing.

Taking stock of failure in organizations

Having contextualized failure to change, the purpose of this section is to provide an overview on established perspectives in failure research (see Table 1). Given our focus on understanding the process of failing during change, it is not meant to offer a comprehensive review of what we know and do not know about failure in organizational literature. Rather, it enables a positioning of organizational change failure within primary perspectives on failure in organizations. Using this analysis and critical review highlights areas that require further investigation in general, offering us a fertile base for pushing failure research away from the thematic and theoretical straightjackets that have characterized the field since Whetten’s (1980) initial call (Schwarz and Stensaker, 2014). This summary gives shape to the integrative framework that we highlight later, raised through the five contributing articles in the special issue.

Table 1.

Overview of theoretical perspectives on failure in organizations.

Dimensions	Theoretical perspectives
	Deterministic perspective	Voluntaristic perspective	Entrepreneurial perspective
Purpose	Explaining conditions that cause terminal failure	Avoiding failure, learning from failure	Sensemaking, coping with failure
Nature of failure	Failure as terminal endpoint/dysfunctional	Failure as terminal endpoint/to be avoided	Failure as a process/can be reframed
Theoretical level of analysis	Population level	Firm/organization level	Individual level
Role of time	Mainly objective clock time Focus on before failure	Mainly objective clock time Focus on before failure	Objective and subjective time (perception, temporal focus, etc.) Focus on after failure
Primary historical period	Publications mainly between 1994 and 2000	Publications mainly between 2001 and 2007	Publications mainly since 2008
Exemplar theories	Organizational ecology Industrial organization	Stage-based models (e.g. strategic choice) Learning organization	Sensemaking theory Attribution theory
Positioning of change in theorizing	Change as inevitable force (e.g. environmental conditions) of failure	Change as strategic choice invoking success or failure	Not specified

The basis for views on failure are captured across three dimensions in failure literature, namely its level of analysis, the role of time, and positioning of change, guided by their commonality across several prominent thematic reviews on the subject (i.e., Amankwah-Amoah, 2016; Mellahi and Wilkinson, 2004; Ucbasaran et al., 2013). Given its overlap with these reviews, alongside its recency and sample, we use Kücher and Feldbauer-Durstmüller’s (2019) bibliometric analysis of clusters and schools of thought on organizational failure to coordinate with special issue research themes.¹ This approach reveals that the dominant stance taken on failure is to investigate the causes and processes of failing firms. Within this focus, two theoretical streams are most visible in characterizing failure in organizations – deterministic and voluntaristic perspectives.

Given its foundation in long-established organizational ecology (starting with Hannan and Freeman, 1977) and industrial organization (see Coase, 1972) research, the deterministic perspective is rooted in the view that a firm cannot overly influence its destiny because external effects and context impose pressure and constraints – that the firm is affected by a range of industry-specific and environmental conditions which leads to failure. With this perspective, failure is inevitable when environmental conditions are unfavorable to the company because change decreases survival probabilities due to the risk of lower stability. With the primary unit or level of theorizing at the population level, any change is viewed as a major cause for decline in established organizations. Illustrative of this type of research is Stinchcombe’s (1965) hypothesis about increased failure or mortality rate for young firms in diverse organizational populations (Carroll, 1983; Dunne et al., 1989; Freeman et al., 1983). With this perspective, time is viewed as objective and linear whereby the passage of time can be measured and flows in one direction (Bluedorn and Denhardt, 1988). Taking this “clock time”, firms go through sequential, objective phases of birth, change, and mortality or decline independent of perception (e.g., Josefy et al., 2017). Recognizing the prominence of this stream of research, the limitation of the deterministic perspective is the assumption that change is a negative force that invokes terminal failure or decline. As a consequence, this view has lacked explaining or adequately exploring how some organizations can be successful despite change failure.

In response, a second approach emerged, predicated on engaging with change and thereby how managing change can lead to or help minimize failure (Mellahi and Wilkinson, 2004). This voluntaristic perspective shifted the focus from environmental change conditions as harmful and the major cause of failure in different populations of organizations (Kücher and Feldbauer-Durstmüller, 2019), to internal limitations and inappropriate governance decisions. Failure is something to manage and adapt to and therefore actionable through stage-based models, such as strategic choice, threat-rigidity, and rational adaptation approaches (Heine and Rindfleisch, 2013; Staw et al., 1981). The dominant hypothesis in this strand is that organizations seek efficiency, and that those failing to attain it are in some way vulnerable (e.g., value, reputation), their managers somehow culpable (e.g., mismanagement, incompetent) and labelled a “failure.” In this context, failure is relative to notions of success and something to be managed. Hence, the role of change through a voluntaristic lens is often framed as beneficial instead of harmful, and explains organizational failure coming from choosing the wrong change strategy (Hall, 2003) or due to an inability to fit internal resources with external circumstances (Moulton et al., 1996). With the primary unit or level of theorizing at the firm level, failure is viewed as coming from internal inadequacies, such as responses to change, decision-making choices, and risk taking (e.g., Heracleous and Werres, 2016; Schwarz et al., 2011).

Contrary to the deterministic perspective, where the role of management actions is not a central consideration, the voluntaristic perspective posits that who makes the decision is essential to predicting organizational survival or failure rather than the external context. Accordingly, how organizations learn from their failure has been an important theme emerging from the voluntaristic stance. This literature typically presents the adoption or rejection of failure as a type of assimilation and adaptation, so that learning is actionable knowledge created specifically from the experience of failing. Without this loss, and a retrospective account of it, organizations are less likely to engage in learning and acting on failure (Birkinshaw and Haas, 2016; Edmondson, 2004), reflecting what Sitkin (1992) shows as learning from small, intelligent failures. This strategy is part of a research stream that considers knowledge as a central resource of competitiveness in failure (Madsen and Desai, 2010). Like a deterministic perspective, time in voluntaristic theorizing is mainly concerned with objective, clock time, because the end goal is to avoid failure in an absolute way, through analysis, choice, implementation, evaluation, and modification. Although a practical aspect on failure, with the avoidance of failure as central to this theorizing, the voluntaristic view encompasses a complex adjustment process – failure is not just an endpoint or state that results in an irreversible course of action. Yet with this aversion to failure, individual and group barriers or mechanisms may exist that are not evident because of the firm-level focus adopted. A more basic understanding of what the process of this failure looks like could be key to understanding the virtues of failing during change from this perspective.

A final perspective, the entrepreneurial view, is the most recent prominent stream of research dealing specifically with failure (Kücher and Feldbauer-Durstmüller, 2019). Contrary to the deterministic and voluntaristic perspectives which both focus on failure as a terminal endpoint, the entrepreneurial failure perspective is more concerned with dealing with the implications and consequences of failing, and questioning how to manage or cope with the fallout of failure or how to make sense of failure. As Ucbasaran et al. (2013) illustrate in their study on life after failure, by focusing on the emotional, social, and financial consequences of failure for those affected, the level of theorizing with this perspective shifts to how individuals understand, make sense, learn from, and respond to failure after it occurs. In this way, organizational failure is viewed using emotion, attributions, and perceptions of the event, such as how individuals perceive their failures, and how a fear of failing limits activity (e.g., Mantere et al., 2013; Mueller and Shepherd, 2016).

The role of change in this stream of research is not as evident as it is in the deterministic and voluntaristic perspectives, yet the experience of failing to meet set targets and goals triggers a process of attribution and sensemaking that helps to explain behavior (Shepherd, 2003; Singh et al., 2007). In this way, failure offers the possibility of becoming a potential strategic asset to be cultivated. Previous perspectives mainly treated time in failure research as objective and linear in their theorizing and modelling (thereby providing an absoluteness to failure as a terminal endpoint) and therefore presumed to have identical meaning across individuals. By contrast, the entrepreneurial perspective treats time as subjective, meaning that it is cyclical and uneven, moving between the past, present, and future in any direction, and interpretive with the experience only understood in context once it occurs (Ancona et al., 2001; Shipp and Cole, 2015). This premise enables the sensemaking and coping approaches that are at the heart of this perspective, with its focus on how failure is perceived. With this emphasis on the consequences and implications of failure for those affected (rather than concentrate on its causes), failure during change may have a very different meaning for different individuals.

This summary highlights an issue primary to the contributing articles in the special issue. Despite the advances made within these three different perspectives, the field has not consolidated its theorizing on the complex levels of interaction and dynamic processes that occur between organizational populations, firms, and individuals, as well as the temporal contextual background against which these processes unfold, “stuck” on similar themes (Schwarz et al., 2017). This gap highlights that, though widely acknowledged and used, historically organizational failure has often been viewed as taboo (interestingly, a term used in 1980 to describe the field then; Whetten, 1980). This anathema response applies to all three perspectives. The deterministic perspective depicts organization failure as a dysfunctional or destructive event resulting in terminal decline. In response, the voluntaristic view has focused on specific ways to avoid the destruction of failure, and the dangers of failing to recognize its destructive character. Even with its sensemaking approach to failing, entrepreneurs have continued to explain how it feels to become a failure and the process of stigmatization that accompanies it. Missing from these approaches to organizational failure is a more comprehensive view that enables more sophisticated, integrated understanding on the process of failing. In this context, and given our earlier descriptions, organizational change failure enables this adjustment. Change failure encompasses a complex adjustment process of reorienting failure.

With an organizational change failure context, this special issue is specifically focused on what happens when organizational change fails and how individuals and their organizations respond to and deal with this outcome over time. We do so recognizing that, even though the majority of change initiatives fail in some way (Hughes, 2011), there is perpetual interest in successful firms and success stories (Bledow et al., 2017). Our call for papers thereby acknowledged that despite its ubiquity, and its well-theorized explanations, organizational researchers have not made substantive inroads in understanding this feature of failure.

Framing the process of organizational change failure

Having given shape to the actions organizations take to deal with change failure, establishing the basis for advocating more depth to organizational change failure, each of the articles in this special issue prompts discussion of what exactly “to fail” means for organizations and their members dealing with failure during change. Doing so, we promote a process perspective on organizational change failure (which we model below) – that is, the processes and mechanisms through which organizations and their members give direction to their failure experiences, recognizing that a response to failure is built on the process of how the experience is created, enacted, and made possible over time (Hernes, 2014; Langley et al., 2013). This framing acknowledges the previously listed dimensions in failure literature in recognizing the complexity, the multilevel nature, and the temporality associated with an organization’s failure to change. In keeping with process thinking, the five articles invite reflections on relationships between the current state of affairs and its multiple possibilities.

The previous summary on failure highlights that, by cutting across the external (i.e., deterministic) and internal (i.e., voluntaristic) causes and explanations of failure, research has primarily concentrated on a set of common themes: conceptualizing what failure is and how to delineate its parts, modelling its antecedents, and delineating its causes, examining its consequences, and theorizing its variants (decline, downsizing, turnaround, etc.). Serendipitously, these approaches have created several different process perspectives (Habersang et al., 2019; Hambrick and D’Aveni, 1988; Heracleous and Werres, 2016; Weitzel and Jonsson, 1989) that show the problem facing failure theorists; failure and change occur together, and yet they are not well integrated (exemplified by how failure is treated in time).

In general, despite broad agreement on the importance of organizational change, successfully implementing change is a complex and often chaotic process. Continuously responding to and adapting to changing goals and demands has become a growing challenge for organizations, as they deal with increasingly dynamic tensions, including managing failure. Most organizations do not obtain the change outcomes that they plan on or desire, despite ongoing efforts to understand change better or learn from change experience (Hughes, 2011). Though the literature on change implementation is vast (see Armenakis and Bedeian, 1999; Bouckenooghe, 2010; Rajagopalan and Spreitzer, 1997 as examples of extensive reviews), it continues to build on problems and pessimism about change efforts and process. Discussions have focused on the ability of the firm’s sources of capital (e.g., financial and social, Kraatz and Zajac, 2001), management (e.g., Bantel and Jackson, 1989), and actions (e.g., Tripsas, 2009) to predict different accounts of organizational-level adaptation to change. As part of this debate, the precursors for the successful implementation of change have become an important focus of attention in change research, concerned with identifying and understanding the conditions and events that facilitate, hinder, or contribute to far-reaching change, and how change eventually benefits the organization – parallel to general failure research focusing on the antecedents and consequences of failure (see above). It is this overlap between change and failure that contextualizes the special issue – of understanding the conditions and stages of failure during change.

Despite this recognition, the rich stream of research on the subject using a process perspective has been preoccupied with identifying multiple stages of events, actions, inaction, and responses that characterize the process of failure or decline – that is, attempting to capture the sequence of certain conditions and events in explaining how failure unfolds over time. For instance, Weitzel and Jonsson (1989) proposed a five-stage model of decline and generated different managerial implications for each stage. In keeping with already established theoretical perspectives (Table 1) and their portrayal of failure in a linear fashion, they contend that decline commences with “blinded management”, then “inaction”, followed by “faulty action”, then “crisis”, and finally “dissolution”. More recently, Amankwah-Amoah (2016) developed a stage-based model of organizational failure accounting for both internal and external causes and their interactions. Similar sequencing approaches can be found in change-specific literature that models and explains reactions to change by incorporating failure (e.g., Van de Ven and Poole, 1995). This limit to process in organizational analysis was previously noted by Pettigrew et al. (2001) in their call to action on change research.

Notwithstanding their limitations, these inroads highlight that studying failure as a process opens a different pathway – it is not about comparing states in time and space, but about how failure persists and changes that gives its many possibilities. This conjunction (“and”) is an essential part of providing more depth to future change failure research. At its foundation is recognition that, though connecting change to failure is long established in theorizing (e.g., Hannan and Freeman, 1984; Scott, 2001), the assumption is that organizations tend not to proactively change, but when they do, they risk failure. As Hernes (2014) highlights, the value of adopting a process perspective is that it leaves open and available what emerges rather than giving it a definitive boundary. It offers states as they become and evolve with an experience, rather than steady or already achieved states. In this way, we agree with Pettigrew (1997) that a process perspective offers a way to explore the dynamic layers, activities, and outcomes that evolve over time.

With this emphasis, and recognizing the platform this previous work provides, the special issue offers a path forward and builds on Pettigrew’s (1997) perspective of process thinking on change failure. As a set, the five articles prompt an integrative model to frame how to explore and approach change failure by incorporating this deeper process thinking (exemplified in Figure 1). The framework constitutes an interlocking strategy for future scholarship that reflects change failure as a process “in the making” (Hernes, 2008) rather than a steady state. As a holistic approach, it highlights how the evolving experience defines, creates, and enacts failure during change across three structures: the surface structure (i.e., context), intermediate structure (i.e., building block dimensions), and deep structure (i.e., enduring aspects) of failure.

Figure 1.

An integrative model framing the process of organizational change failure.

When organizational change and growth are unsuccessful, it often unsettles assumptions of the self and of the institution, often stigmatizing those associated with the failure. Hence, when failure takes shape, those on the receiving end of change are exposed to various conflicting organizational practices and threats to self, job, and organization. The process perspective on change failure offers an integrated, triaged way forward as a correction when failing. The surface structure is the immediately visible interventions that provide meanings about the change experienced. It grounds the reaction to failure. This context-based distinction feeds into the intermediate structure, which includes the substantive dimensions of how organizations and their members form a narrative on failure. These narratives enable explaining different responses such as how individuals and collectives cope with failing when the organizational focus is specifically linked to change goals (and therefore, how an organization adapts its systems, how employees deal with, cope with, or accept this downgrading). This sensemaking enables the deep structure which provides the fundamental aspects that shape a failure to change. Largely implicit, these building blocks help organize fundamental choices for the change failure (such as how failure to change becomes normalized, change linked to identity, and understanding why some fail to learn from past change failure). Our purpose in proposing this integrative model is not so much resolving current debate on potential causes of organizational change failure, but instead framing an alternative way of interpreting what happens when change fails and how individuals and organization make sense, perceive, cope with and respond over time.

Five lenses on framing change failure

With this framing we offer an analytical challenge meant to provoke more serious interest in the study of failure and change, guided by the five articles in the special issue. We briefly describe each of the five articles and how they feed into the process model.

The first article, “Organization change failure, deep structures and temporality: Appreciating Wonderland” by Heracleous and Bartunek presents a reflective provocation that challenges the prevailing views and theorizing on the meaning of organizational change failure. With its holistic take on failure, it provides the platform for our framing model because it challenges conventions on understanding change failure as an integrative process. Drawing inspiration from Lewis Carroll’s novel, the authors prompt us to reconsider the dimensions that are central to organizational change failure but received limited attention. Like Alice’s experience of going down the rabbit hole into Wonderland, where everything above ground is known and logical, the authors highlight that things “underground” are irrational, disordered, unpredictable, uncertain, unexpected, nonsensical, and contradictory. Using this metaphor, they argue that organizational failure appears to be ubiquitous, yet it frequently does not make sense, and they therefore explore these underground dimensions in comparison to its surface-level manifestations. Introducing what the problem is (common understandings of failure), Heracleous and Bartunek then dig deeper into structures and dimensions of change. They offer a whimsical but serious take on change failure, showing that to truly understand the complexity of change failure needs us to challenge what we already know and act on.

Next, De Keyser, Guiette and Vandenbempt in “On the dynamics of failure in organizational change: A dialectical perspective” start from the observation that the scholarly community has focused mainly on failure as a potential state of change, resulting in limited attention to the dynamics that underlie change failure. Adopting a time-sensitive perspective, they focus on key events of how a prominent container-handling firm in Belgium constantly struggled with organizational growth. Developing a dialectic or synthesis on how failure flows, their study illustrates that the process of organizational change failure is characterized by mechanisms that are both generative and destructive. In empirically highlighting the narrative frames and integrative principles of our process model, they illustrate that change failure emerges through the interplay cycle between three dialectical moments (rather than a normative endpoint). A retentive process incorporates how a change approach adopted is followed despite multiple tensions and signs suggesting alternatives. In the reactive process, tensions manifest, flare up and instill a new change approach that is antithetical to the one initially adopted. While in a recursive response, organizational members emphasize the positive aspects of prior failure experienced, resulting in an affirmative attitude towards failure (i.e., its synthesis). With this process, corroborating our framing focus, De Keyser et al. show failure during change as an interpretive interaction that evolves as both dynamic, interactive, and multi-part.

In “Making sense of organisational change failure: An identity lens”, based in the tradition of processual-contextual accounts of failure, Hay, Parker, and Luksyte explore organizational change failure by comparing and contrasting competing narratives of employees’ retrospective accounts of a tumultuous university restructuring. This inquiry illustrates the inherent subjectivity and multifaceted nature of organizational change failure by highlighting the role of identity and change recipient interpretation of failing. It is this polyvocality that supports the deep structures underlying failure during change that we model earlier (and cross-referenced to Heracleous and Bartunek’s article). By examining employees’ retrospective narratives, Hay et al. show how failing and preexisting work identities are intertwined, extending into work. This article shows how four distinct narrative trajectories – identity loss, identity revision, identity affirmation, and identity resilience – form an important lens through which employees understand and retrospectively interpret failure across multiple levels of change (people, product, process). With this process, the study highlights identity as a pivotal interpretive frame in ongoing sensemaking about change failure, in contrast to the view of change failure as a nominal and linear outcome.

Focusing on how entrepreneurs manage the aftermath of a publicly visible failure, “Post-failure impression management: A typology of entrepreneurs’ public narratives after business closure” by Kibler, Mandl, Farny and Salmivaara explores the strategies entrepreneurs apply to present venture failure to public audiences, demonstrating how these key organizational representatives engage in public impression management for change failure. Examining 118 business closure statements of companies with headquarters mainly located in Anglo-American countries, Kibler et al. consider five different failure narratives as a means of sensemaking the failure experience. This process response highlights our modelling of an intermediate structure in the form of how organizations and their members form a narrative on failure. Doing so, they demonstrate how entrepreneurs make use of an integrated understanding of their circumstances, detailing the use of single, dual, and multiple impression management strategies to mitigate potential threats to their professional image, following a publicly visible change failure. The link drawn between narratives and their temporal framing provides a strong basis for further research to consider subjective time in the analysis of change failure events.

Finally, Vardaman, Amis, Wright and Dyson extend our theme in a different direction with “Reframing childhood obesity: The role of local communities in change implementation failure”, which contemplates how the implementation of field-level change in childhood obesity policies in US public schools failed. Studying a three-year period of the implementation of policies through school-based interventions in eight public schools, the article shows how leaders’ ambivalence towards conflicting change initiatives redefine the meaning of an implementation, and how these frames reflect back to stakeholders in the local community in which an organization is embedded. Anchored in interpretive schemes that frame social processes, Vardaman et al. show how this framing evolves through the dialectical interaction between organizational members and stakeholders and its influence on change failure (or success). Reinforcing our modelling that failing during change can be both functional and dysfunctional at the same time, they present an alternative to the binary classification of failure as an opportunity or a threat. The article indicates how change leaders regularly confront issues that simultaneously evoke positive and negative attitudes, at which point local stakeholders’ pressures and priorities become more salient, leading to reframing of the implementation. Adding to our focus on the process of what “to fail” means, the article prompts researchers to reconsider what constitutes success in the context of failed change implementation, and from the perspective of different stakeholders.

Concluding comments

With this article, we introduce our special issue, with the goal of expanding an understanding of social relationships associated with an organization’s failure to change. As we acknowledge earlier, there is a long history of theorizing specific perspectives on the ways that organizations seek to manage, frame, and understand failure and its conditions during change. With this basis, there are many types of reactions to and explanations of differences in how organizations fail. Notwithstanding the breadth of this work on failure and its numerous contributions highlighting the opportunities that emerge from failure, within the arena of organizational change there remains a deep-seated unease with becoming a change failure, and it is this posture that has coloured how the field has traditionally theorized failing. Consequently, while it is widely acknowledged that some degree of failure in organizations is pervasive, and ultimately unavoidable, critical scholarly attention continues to focus on common questions and themes related to managing and surviving failure, or questioning the implications of failing, especially in the context of organizational change. Aligned to the proposed framework, the five articles in the special issue suggest that there are alternative ways forward.

With this context, the special issue establishes a broader challenge. Most work on failure follows a logical, conventional path and perspectives in how it considers failing, most regularly focused on the nature and antecedents of failure. In doing so, the field has cultivated a dual focus of both establishing the need for more failure research (or calls for more clarity in this domain) or challenging the deficiencies and constraints that are known to exist in our knowledge on failure. Missing from this narrative is an understanding of nuances of the process of failure – of dealing with change failure both as a dysfunctional and as a constructive process. Despite the advances made, the field has not consolidated this view or its theorizing on the complex levels of interaction and dynamic processes that occur between organizational populations, firms, and individuals, nor the temporal contextual background against which these processes unfold. Rather, it is “stuck” on similar, familiar themes. The motivation for this special issue, therefore, was to move past this convention and to enhance knowledge regarding the processes and mechanisms that underlie the emergence of bringing change and failure together. The proposed integrative framework provides this holistic account and gives shape to the actions taken to deal with failure.

The process model proposed (Figure 1) depicts the dynamic and multilevel nature that underlies the emergence of organizational change failure. Although there is no ideal way of representing the emergent processual character of change failure, we decided to visualize the interconnective nature of our model by highlighting the layered/multiple structures that characterize change failure. Most of the studies on organizational change failure have focused on studying one layer of change failure at a time, with the majority of studies concentrating on surface structure or visible context manifestations, which aligns well with traditional analytical thinking in organizational sciences (Deetz, 1996; Evered and Louis, 1981). This type of thinking assumes that an organizational phenomenon can be best understood by dividing it into smaller or elemental properties and separately studying under controlled conditions how these properties work, yielding insights into how the “whole” phenomenon emerges or unfolds. With this article, we present an alternative. To capture completely the complexity of change failure with its multiple layers, we model a more holistic approach, as the emphasis of this type of thinking assumes that the emergence of a complex phenomenon like change failure can be best understood by focusing on the relationships and context of the elemental properties to one another. In this context, change failure and its complex nature can only be fully understood by taking account of the multiple structures that make up organizational change failure.

As part of its advance, the tripartite process model we present is analogous with atomic and molecular physics, which incorporates the study of the properties, dynamics, and interactions of the basic building blocks of matter as a foundation to explain how atoms and molecules interact and behave with their environment (Born, 1965). There are three layers that make up the structural properties of a molecule (i.e., molecule, atoms, and subatomic particles). In order to understand how the entire molecule behaves, it is essential to account for the smaller elemental properties or sublevels that a molecule consists of, with a particular emphasis on how these different levels relate to one another (Demtroder, 2010). In this same vein, we suggest that if we want to map and fine-tune our understanding of the process character of complex phenomena such as organizational change failure, future research needs to consider the interrelations and intersections between the three structural properties of organizational change failure (i.e., surface structure, intermediate structure, deep structure).

With these perspectives, we recognize just how much organizational change is an important offset to the focus on failure. After all, change is a fundamental, ongoing, and routine part of organizations, even though we know that many intended changes regularly do not achieve their original objectives. Inevitably, organizations and their members continue to spend time on understanding failure and learning from it to continue growing, and researchers continue to focus on common questions and themes related to managing and surviving failure, or questioning the implications of failing. It is this logic trap that we both highlight and warn away; because of the continuous nature of change in organizations and the high failure rate that accompanies these changes, researchers run the risk of continuing to concentrate on examining similar comfortable themes that are neatly explored: the reasons for failure, the processes associated with it, its consequences, and ways of coping with failing (i.e, surface structure in our model).

Through the special issue, by proposing an integrative model on the process of organizational change failure, we provide the momentum for an alternative. Let us focus on what happens when organizational change fails, and differences in how individuals and their organizations respond to and deal with this outcome over time. To this end, this article highlights that, despite the range in thinking, failure can be diverse and complex, drawing from the richness that the context of the act of failing has to offer. By modelling this process as a multilevel, interlocking strategy, the special issue suggests ways forward in exploring and approaching change failure by incorporating deeper process thinking. As an interaction that evolves as both dynamic and multilevel, change failure needs to be challenged, understood, and examined through the different lenses of time, levels of analysis, and alternative positioning of change. As we argue it, this alternative is promising precisely because it combines insights from a variety of fields that have historically dealt with failing, including psychology, sociology, complexity sciences, and institutional approaches, enabling further study specific to organizational change failure. In this way, the special issue prompts deeper consideration of – and we hope a platform for stimulating debate on – the dynamic character of the emergence of organizational change failure.

Footnotes

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Gavin M Schwarz

Maria Vakola

Notes

Gavin M Schwarz is Professor in the School of Management at the UNSW Business School, University of New South Wales, Sydney. His research and work interests include organizational change and organizational inertia, with a particular interest in better understanding how organizations fail when changing and developing applied strategies for dealing with failure to change. He is also interested in exploring how knowledge develops in organizational and change theory and has published in numerous journals, including Academy of Management Learning and Education, Journal of Management, Group and Organization Management, European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, and British Journal of Management. He is Editor-in-Chief for the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science and sits on several editorial boards. He co-edited Preparing for High Impact Organizational Change: Experiential Learning and Practice (with Buono and Adams). [Email: g.schwarz@unsw.edu.au]

Dave Bouckenooghe is an Associate Professor at Goodman School of Business, Brock University, Canada. His research interests include how people and organizations are impacted by change and failure, and how they make sense of and respond to change and change failure. He is also doing research on the role of leadership (i.e., abusive leadership, authentic leadership, servant leadership, etc.) and positive resources (i.e., work engagement, psychological capital, and emotional intelligence) in shaping in-role job performance, extra-role behaviors (OCB, creativity, etc.) and counterproductive behaviors. Bouckenooghe’s work appears or is forthcoming in leading management and I&O psychology journals, such as Journal of Management, Journal of Business Ethics, Human Relations, Journal of Business and Psychology, European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, Journal of Business Research, Applied Psychology: An International Review, among others. [Email: dbouckenooghe@brocku.ca]

Maria Vakola is an Associate Professor of Organizational Behaviour and Director of HRM Laboratory at the Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece. Her research interests include the psychology of organizational change, employees’ reactions to change, individual differences, and silence at work. Her work appears in the Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, Work and Stress, Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, and European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology. She is the author and co-editor of five books related to organizational behaviour, psychology, and change. Maria is an Associate Editor at the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science and has co-founded an international network of change researchers called IFPOC [Email: mariavakola@aueb.gr]

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