It's Not the Seed, It's the Soil Social Psychological Influences on Outcomes of Organizational Change Programs

Scholars and managers alike question the efficacy of programmatic organizational change; indeed, reports from the field of organization-wide change programs failing to meet their stated goals are commonplace. Such reports tend to treat the success or failure of a change program as dichotomous and as monolithic at the organization level of analysis. We argue instead that a change program can reach different degrees of success in different parts of an organization, depending on interpersonal factors. We propose that the appropriate level of analysis for understanding these results is the work unit--small numbers of individuals who work closely together--and that psychological safety is a critical factor in enabling work units to respond productively to an intervention. To explore the merits of this theory, we studied the results of an organization-wide change program designed to promote learning through dialogue in a large manufacturing company.