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The Palgrave
Handbook of
Organizational
Change Thinkers
Second Edition
The Palgrave Handbook of Organizational
Change Thinkers
David B. Szabla
Editor
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Foreword
I really appreciate the opportunity to update my foreword for this most interesting
book because it allows me to reminisce even a bit further about the history of
organizational development (OD) and its focus on the management of change.
I remember well in the mid-1960s, my efforts with Warren Bennis and Richard
Beckhard to capture the essence of OD, not by writing an integrated text, but by
accepting the fact that the best we could do is produce a paperback series which
allowed us to express our own views of what OD was at this point in its youth. The
Addison-Wesley Series eventually grew to over 30 volumes and reflected the many
strands of thinking and practice that evolved.
In many ways, this current volume and its revision is further evidence of the
enormous diversity that is now present in the practice of change management, a
diversity that is much needed as the world, through pandemics and the threat of
global warming, keeps challenging us with new change requirements. This impor-
tant book highlights through its varied presenters how the field of change manage-
ment has grown geographically and theoretically, evolving new models,
assumptions, and areas of application. What better way to track this evolution than
by presenting the work of many new thinkers and practitioners that have emerged
since the last printing.
The issue of integration or consolidation which I tried to highlight before is still
with us, possibly in even more dangerous form. By presenting the contributions of so
many different OD practitioners and theorists, the editors have exposed us to a
deeper cultural truth about our approach to knowledge and practice. The rampant
individualism and pragmatism that has been the hallmark of US culture shows up
very well in the variety of styles of thinking, practicing, and writing about these
organizational issues and organizational change. In a way, I lament this diversity
more than ever because it reflects individualism and competition in a world that
requires collaboration more than ever. The global problems of pandemics and
climate change will not be solved by the major cultures of the world continuing to
compete economically and politically. Hopefully out of the diversity of our various
theories and practices will come some insights on how to move the world toward
more collaboration.
I feel more than ever that as academics, our culture seems to play out the
marketing dream of just putting our ideas out there and seeing who will buy.
v
vi Foreword
We have very little taste for acknowledging and critiquing each other, we have very
little impulse to construct the grand theory that pulls it all together, and we have no
great desire to acknowledge all the versions of our own model that may have already
been presented in other writings. We built our own edifice with our small team of
collaborators and put our energy into improving it rather than seeing how it might
connect to others. We let the market decide and compete as best as we can, but have
little energy for integrating the many theories and practices that are out there. This
willingness to tolerate diversity of thought, even encourage it, is well reflected in
reviews of research. It will again be an interesting challenge to the readers of this
handbook to find the common elements, the integrative strands that have emerged
from over 75 years of work in this arena.
Readers should note the creative way in which the work of change agents is
presented through their colleagues. That mode of presentation will provide interest-
ing experiences for each of us who are represented in this book and will provide a
level of feedback we are ordinarily not privy to. The readers will get the unusual
opportunity to compare how they read a particular author and how the biographer
writing in this book represents that same author. The reader will also get a great view
of the history of change management through reading about almost three generations
of thinkers and practitioners in this field.
The editors are to be commended for having found a way to go beyond presenting
several of us in our traditional writing or speaking mode, and to give us a new voice
through the many authors writing these chapters. That will provide readers an
opportunity to see how their interpretation of what each of us said matches the
written presentations in this book, and for those of us who are still present, yet
another opportunity to see how our own perception of what we said matches with
what our biographers have said.
I look forward to an exciting read and congratulate the editors for providing us
with a whole new approach to understanding the many points of view toward
organizational development and the management of change.
Edgar H. Schein
Preface to the Second Edition
It is with great pleasure that I bring to you the second edition of The Palgrave
Handbook of Organizational Change Thinkers. With the first edition of the hand-
book, Bill Pasmore, Mary Barnes, Asha Gibson, and myself brought to readers
numerous inspiring stories of thought leaders in the field of organization change. In
our work with contributing authors, we were able to connect with and establish
relationships with new people in the field of organizational change and rekindle
relationships with people with whom we had not been in contact for a long time. It
was a wonderful experience for each of us, and the outcome of our labors developing
the first edition was a handbook that began to capture, in one reference work, the
personal and professional accounts of the people who created the field. The success
of our efforts is demonstrated by the fact that the handbook is one of Palgrave’s most
popular handbooks, with several thousand downloads of chapters to date across the
two-volume set. With this second edition, I continue the hard work exerted by Bill,
Mary, and Asha producing the first edition, adding several new profile chapters to the
handbook.
Eighty-six chapters were commissioned for the original handbook, which remain
here in the second edition. After listening to feedback on the first edition, it was
decided to introduce new profile chapters. The feedback indicated that some thinkers
were overlooked in the first edition, and promptly they are included here. In addition,
there were some thinkers slated for the first edition for which a contributed author
could not be identified and commissioned. These profiles are now included. With the
second edition, 24 profiles were added, for a total of over 100 thinkers profiled in this
new edition. In addition, all of the chapters in the first edition were brought up to date
using the 7th Edition of the APA manual.
The aim of The Palgrave Handbook of Organizational Change Thinkers is to
introduce readers to the fullness of thought about the field of organizational change.
This is accomplished by providing clear and concise profiles of the renowned
thinkers who built, extended, and deepened how organizational change is theorized,
researched, and practiced. The handbook provides a comprehensive review of the
sages of organizational change from early, seminal thought leaders such as Mary
Parker Follet, Frederick Winslow Taylor, and Kurt Lewin to more contemporary
vii
viii Preface to the Second Edition
authorities such as Jean Bartunek, Shaul Oreg, and Otto Scharmer. The wish is to
create a thirst to read and study more about the thinkers profiled in the handbook and
to make connections between the lessons in the profiles and the everyday practice of
researching and leading organizational change. The handbook includes, in one
manuscript, the concepts, theories, and models of the scholars, practitioners, and
scholar-practitioners who invented, built, and advanced the research and practice of
change in organizations. The objective and the format of this second edition has
remained untouched from the first edition; the only difference is the addition of new
narratives of the thinkers of organizational change.
Each chapter claims the worth of a thinker to the province of organizational
change by presenting the advancements each thinker bestowed to both academic and
practice conversations. The concision of the individual chapters makes them easy to
review. Each profile chapter captures the personal and professional background of a
legendary thinker and presents his or her key insights, new thinking, and major
legacies in the field of organizational change. While the chapters are written in a
manner that is clear and short for those beginners new to the field of change, they
offer much to the advanced students on the subject. Readers are encouraged to dig
deeper if a particular thinker is of interest to them. It is hoped that readers will be
inspired by the progressive thoughts in the handbook, furthering organizational
change research and practice today.
Being a reference work, the handbook provides authoritative facts on a specific
subject, that is, information about the women and men who created (and are still
creating) the field of organizational change. The handbook is not a book that should
be read from beginning to end. Instead, it should be recognized as a resource for
learning about specific organizational change thinkers. Readers conversant in the
field can use the handbook to learn more about thinkers with whom they are familiar,
or they can scan the handbook and identify and study thinkers with whom they are
unfamiliar. Readers new to the field of organizational change can skim the abstracts
of the different profiles and then review profiles that resonate with them. Organized
alphabetically by thinkers’ last names, readers will find it easy to identify thinkers of
interest to them.
To select the thinkers to be profiled in both the first and second editions of the
handbook, simultaneously, the editors conducted a review of the literature and
initiated conversations with men and women in the field asking them for advice
about who should be profiled in the handbook. The publishing records (scholarly and
practice) of potential thinkers were assessed using a set of criteria that included the
extent to which they contributed a unique innovation to the field of organizational
change or extended or deepened an existing innovation. In the case of which thinkers
to finally include in the handbook, in the end, it was the men and women working in
the field who vetted the list and determined inclusion in the handbook.
All of the profile chapters were commissioned by authors who had extensive
knowledge of the life and work of their assigned thinker. For example, Jean
Bartunek’s first doctoral student wrote her chapter; Tony Petrella’s profile was
developed by Diana Old, a woman who worked alongside Tony for much of his
Preface to the Second Edition ix
career; and the development of Mary Parker Follet’s chapter was led by a scholar
who had published a book on Follet’s life and work. Because of the relationships
between contributing writers and their assigned thinkers and/or their deep under-
standings of the lives of the thinkers, the chapters present credible and rich portraits
of the thinkers in the field. In addition to having intimate knowledge of their
appointed thinkers, it was also important to identify and contract with writers who
showed enthusiasm, not only for the chapters they would write, but for the project as
well. This fervor resulted in a compilation of thought-provoking profiles that are
inspiring, particularly, for graduate students who can delve deeply into the work of
specific thinkers and ponder how they might themselves make their own contribu-
tions to the field. The remarkable hard work of our contributing authors helped to
deliver our intentions for both editions:
It’s important to point out that many of the contributing thinkers are well-known
thinkers in the field of organizational change themselves, and several others may be
on their way to establishing themselves as leaders in the field.
The common format of the profile chapters was well-received by readers of the first
edition. They found that, because of the consistent organization across the chapters,
it was interesting and enjoyable to read the profiles and compare and contrast the
thinkers when reading multiple chapters. The common format was also welcomed by
contributing authors. Although very few of the contributing authors did not find it
possible to follow the standard layout established by the editors of the first edition,
most authors adhered to the format to the letter in both the first edition and this new
edition, and, in most cases, were happy to follow the format presented below.
x Preface to the Second Edition
This first section of the profiles briefly describes the influences that motivated the
thinker to investigate change in organizations, for example, the thinker’s mentors.
The focus is on the professional, intellectual, educational, social, and real-world
influences that stimulated the thinker’s curiosities about change in organizations and
acts as an introduction to the thinker’s story.
Four or five advancements that were central to the work of the thinker are reviewed
in this section. These are theoretical, methodological, and practical contributions.
This is not an exhaustive coverage, but a presentation and discussion of a thinker’s
most significant contributions to the field of organizational change. Innovations or
ideas that have endured over time are emphasized.
In this third section, contributing authors present a graphic sense of how their thinker
illuminated their own view of organizational change using examples taken from the
literature or the world of everyday life in organizations. This section underscores
how the work of these scholars has spurred new developments in research and
practice and have led change in organizations to be viewed in new and
surprising ways.
This section addresses questions such as: what are the major intellectual legacies of
this thinker? Which later thinkers has he or she influenced? Which parts of the
thinker’s legacy are still being investigated or have yet to be fully investigated? Are
there themes that have been criticized by later thinkers who have shed light on the
problem that motivated the original thinker?
This final section includes a short list of books and journal articles that enable readers
to take their interests further.
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Preface to the Second Edition xi
The handbook was designed to address the needs of different audiences. Many of the
chapters profile legendary practitioners in the field of organizational development
and change, for example, Kathleen Dannemiller, Sandra Janoff, and Tony Petrella.
Those leading change in organizations are finding the contributions of these thinkers
(and many practitioners profiled in the handbook) useful in enhancing their consult-
ing skills. Since the handbook is replete with diagnostic and process models,
assessment instruments, and everyday best practices for leading change, practi-
tioners are revisiting the fundamentals of moving individuals, groups, and systems
from point A to point B and re-thinking and enriching their consulting practices.
For organizational change researchers, the profiles are valuable when designing
research agendas. If you’re undertaking research in the field and looking for ideas,
the handbook is a good place to start. The profiles are well-referenced and the
suggestions for further reading are worth pursuing. In particular the “Unfinished
Business” sections of the profiles offer many suggestions for future research – work
in the field of organizational change that remains to be done. For example, given our
digital future, how will organizational change research and practice unfold in a new
era of profound shifts in the way we sense, think, and act in organizations?
The handbook is also becoming a key resource for professors and students
enrolled in organizational development and change graduate degree programs.
Since an online version of the handbook is available in most university libraries,
professors are assigning specific chapters as required readings in their organizational
change courses and students are becoming knowledgeable of the field by learning
about the thinkers. What a better use of the handbook than to introduce the next
generation of organizational change scholars and practitioners to the people who
created the field. Many students are finding the profiles engaging, not only because
they are learning about the theory, research, and practice in the field, but also because
they are learning about the thinkers’ personal backgrounds, influences, and motiva-
tions – information typically not found in organizational change textbooks.
Finally, for seasoned scholars and practitioners in the field, reading the profiles
has brought back many memories of the people they mentored or were mentored by,
the people with whom they facilitated large-scale organizational change, the people
with whom they published, and the people with whom they created new concepts,
models, theories, and practices. After the launch of the first edition, I received emails
from both prominent practitioners and scholars in the field thanking me for leading
the development of this project. One email stated, “David, thanks for the walk down
memory lane. I often pick up the book and read a chapter, and I am immediately
filled with wonderful memories of people who influenced me and worked over many
years.” With this second edition, I hope that these walks down memory lane will
continue.
We, the editors, have had the great pleasure of assembling this volume. It has turned
out to be more of a “labor of love” than we expected; both more labor and more love.
We have been inspired by the stories of the great thinkers profiled here. We have
loved learning more about them than we ever knew, even in the case of some close
colleagues. And, we have thoroughly enjoyed making new friends and reconnecting
with friends whom we haven’t been in touch with for far too long. The “more labor”
part was also the painstaking care that the contributing authors took in researching
the great thinkers they profiled. It is to these authors and to all the great thinkers who
created the field of Organization Development that we owe the existence of this
handbook.
For readers who might not be familiar with Organization Development, it is a
field pioneered by the social scientists whose stories you can read in this handbook.
These individuals were concerned about social justice, organizational effectiveness,
improving teamwork, understanding the role of the change agent and the effects of
different styles of leadership, and much more. The focus of the field is on change,
and especially change that takes place in organizations. Even more to the point, the
kind of change that has been at the heart of Organization Development is change that
helps organizations fulfill their purpose while at the same time offering opportunities
for greater dignity and meaning to the people who live within them or are touched by
their existence.
Although the roots of the field took hold even earlier, the real blossoming of
thought began following the Second World War. The war was an abomination to
everything that was good or worthwhile about society and human kind. It raised
questions for many about what was going wrong in the world and what could be
done to prevent something like it from happening again.
Early studies by Kurt Lewin, who fled to the United States from Nazi Germany,
investigated how attitudes were shaped by group opinion and the effects of demo-
cratic versus autocratic leadership. Coch and French explored the power of partic-
ipation in decision-making related to overcoming resistance to change. Eric Trist and
his colleagues at the Tavistock Institute for Human Relations in London worked with
the British Coal Board to find ways to make coal production more efficient after the
xiii
xiv Preface to the First Edition
war and in so doing discovered that workers held valuable insights regarding the
work they did that engineers and managers had overlooked. Bion, also at Tavistock,
had experimented with group therapy among traumatized soldiers during the war
and from those experiences and others began to help us see previously invisible
dynamics that affected the work of groups and teams. Lewin and Reginal Revans
independently piloted what became known as “action research.” This was work
intended to bring about change that took place in a real setting as opposed to a
laboratory to study what happened as a result of trying out a variety of different
approaches. What made action research unique was the collaboration of the “sub-
ject” or client in conducting and interpreting the work. It was discovered, as was the
case in British coal mines, that the people on the front lines of change have valuable
perspectives that even scientists studying an organization would have missed. The
resulting tradition of involving those affected by change in planning and executing it
has remained a hallmark of OD ever since and continues to differentiate it from
“expert change” in which consultants decide for others what is best for them, or “top-
down” change in which leaders attempt to use their position power to force others to
comply with their directives.
Kurt Lewin’s concerns about racial justice also led to the “T-group” or sensitivity
training phenomena, later formalized under the egis of the National Training Labs, or
NTL as it became known. On the other side of the Atlantic, Bion and his colleagues
invented the Group Relations Conference, which helped participants examine their
relationship with authority and their interpersonal relations. Together, these powerful
movements in human relations led to an age of “personal enlightenment” which
became central to the field for a time. Ever since, there has been a debate about
whether Organization Development belongs in a serious business environment,
since some leaders seem to be of the belief that one should leave his or her emotions
and identity at the door before starting work every morning.
It wasn’t until the next generation of scholars that the name of the field “Orga-
nization Development” was coined, simultaneously by Dick Beckhard and Robert
Blake and Jane Mouton in the 1960s. The 1960s also saw the establishment of the
first doctoral programs in Organization Development, which was followed by a
proliferation of institutions that offered master’s degrees to people working full time.
The 1970s and early 1980s saw recessions that added to the excuse for cutting out
anything “touchy-feely” and instead focus on downsizing, cost-cutting, total quality,
reengineering, and Lean Six-Sigma – anything that focused squarely on the bottom
line and was driven by objective data rather than feelings. None of these “advance-
ments” fit the values and methods of organization development and for a time, there
were real questions about the field’s survival. However, advances in scholarship
continued and the need to pay attention to people in organizations didn’t simply
disappear. In the 1980s and 1990s, in areas like employee engagement and innova-
tion, there were clear needs to call on people to do things that they would only do if
committed to the success of their organization. Gaining that commitment required
more than a single-minded focus on the bottom line. What’s more, work on high
performance systems and organizational culture brought about significant gains in
Preface to the First Edition xv
organizational performance that were hard to ignore. Accountants could cite the
costs of change but investors appreciated the returns.
The 1980s and 1990s also brought exciting new change innovations to the
forefront, based on glimmers of earlier thinking. Appreciative inquiry, large group
interventions, and future search conferences gave Organization Development a new
lease on life and thrust it squarely into the realm of dealing with societal as well as
organizational issues. This “second age of enlightenment” has us all believing that
anything was possible and that our dream of making the world a better place was
finally coming true. Then, another recession and a new villain on the scene
interrupted our progress once again. By the early 2000s, investment bankers and
deal makers who cared only about short-term shareholder profit started breaking up
organizations and selling the pieces to the highest bidder through mergers or
acquisitions. Leaders who cared about their people, took a longer-term view, or
sought a more socially responsible role for their organizations were swept aside
by operators who had no choice but to focus on cutting costs at all costs. The
2007–2008 recession led to another round of budget slashing in many organizations,
turning back the clock. Once again the field appeared to be in peril, and yet
competition and change remained constants that simply couldn’t be eliminated by
pretending they weren’t happening. By the 2010s, new forms of organizing were
investigated – forms that would allow organizations to be efficient and innovative at
the same time, local and global, and socially responsible while caring about
the bottom line. Technology continued to present new challenges as well, and
those who didn’t understand its potential for disruption at first were run over by
those who did.
The thinkers profiled here didn’t just stand by and watch this happen. They took
challenges as opportunities to rethink and reposition the field. They offered new
methodologies for change, more connected to the strategic directions organizations
are trying to move. They didn’t forget human beings, but leveraged the growing
interest in all things talent related to make change both a responsibility for able
leaders and a development opportunity for others. They learned about the future and
found ways to help clients see it and want to make it happen. They embraced
diversity and globalism, knowing that these forces could be temporarily blunted
but never overcome. Although many of the early thinkers are no longer with us, their
ideas and ideals continue to live on in the youngest generation of our scholars.
So, for those who are not yet familiar with the field of Organization Development,
this handbook will tell the story of its evolution, from its earliest beginnings to the
current day. In the profiles here you will read about important ideas, theories, and
practices that gained widespread attention as they shaped not just the field itself but
our societies and even the world.
Those who are very familiar with the field will find herein much of value and we
hope delight. Our experience as editors was that we individually were more familiar
with the works of some of the great thinkers than others. To read the profiles of these
assembled thinkers and their work was to take a high-speed tour of our shared
history, filling in spots in the landscape that we had previously zoomed past, not
noticing or interpreting clearly. Beyond that, the people we did know as scholars we
xvi Preface to the First Edition
got to know as people, through the eyes of their biographers who were often students
or close friends. In this fuller and inclusive picture, we could more easily grasp
where the great ideas in our field came from, which caused us to reflect on our own
motivations for doing the work we do. This handbook is like a personal journal; it’s
as if the intellectual giants kept private diaries that they decided to throw into one
collective pot with the hope that others would read them and perhaps be inspired to
add their own.
We wanted to know more about the influences in these thinker’s lives, both
educational and collegial. We asked for insights about their mentors or heroes, and
what problems they wanted to solve. We sought insights into how the times in which
they lived might have directed their thinking and extrapolated this to present times
and even into the future. We wanted to know why they did the research they did and
how they did it. We were curious about where they applied their ideas and with what
effect. We wondered about collaboration with other colleagues and especially about
how ideas took hold and led to branches of the field being defined by their committed
followers.
As we read on, we saw the evolution of ideas as the progression of science added
finer filigree to earlier rough sketches. We also saw continued breakthroughs,
intellectual leaps that could not be predicted simply by drawing a straight line
between the past and present. Stepping back even further, we saw parts of the canvas
that were still blank, waiting to be filled in. Other parts of the canvas were painted
over many times, without a satisfactory result (One more time, how can we get those
in power to share it willingly and for the benefit of all? Why, with all we know, are
we still not more successful in bringing about change? How is it that with all of our
research, we still allow inept leaders to rise to power and then follow them to our
own destruction?). The field of Organization Development is alive, despite several
inquiries into its health by undertakers arriving a little too early on the scene.
Gratefully, the handbook will be continuously updated thanks to the miracle of
online publishing. If new thinkers emerge or there are new ideas to report, they
will be added in the years to come.
With the amazing help of our colleagues who rose to the challenge, this handbook
has delivered on our intentions.
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