BA 4226

Managing Organizational
Change
Images of managing change

Instructor: ar Topal

Images of managing change

Dimension

Images of Managing
Subdimension

Controlling Shaping
activities
capabilities

Intended

Director

Coach

Navigator

Interpreter

Images of
Partially
Change
Intended
Outcomes

Unintended Caretaker

Nurturer
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Images of managing
Controlling

Top-down hierarchical management

Directing and controlling
organizational operations and
activities
Organization as machine
Shaping
Participative style of management
Improving organizational capabilities
Organization as organism
3

Images of change outcomes

Intended

Empirical rational strategies

Normative-re-educative strategies
Power-coercive strategies
Partially intended
Unintended
Internal factors
External factors

Director
Management

as controlling
Intended change outcomes
Managers can direct and control the
change process to produce intended
change outcomes
N-step models and contingency
theory

Navigator
Management

as controlling
Partially intended change outcomes
A variety of external factors
undermine managers ability to
achieve intended change outcomes
although managers try to achieve
them
Contextualist and processual
theories
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Caretaker
Management

as controlling
Unintended change outcomes
Managers ability to control is
severely impeded by a variety of
internal and external forces beyond
the scope of managers who only
shepherd the organization during the
change process
Life-cycle, population-ecology, and
institutional theories
7

Coach
Management

as shaping
Intended change outcomes
Managers can intentionally build in
the right set of values and skills that
organizational members will be able
to draw on in order to achieve
desired organizational outcomes
Organizational development
approaches
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Interpreter
Management

as shaping
Partially intended change outcomes
Managers create meaning for other
organizational members, helping
them to make sense of
organizational events and actions
that occur during and as a result of
the change process
Sense-making theory
9

Nurturer
Management

as shaping
Unintended change outcomes
Even small changes may have a
large impact on organizations and
managers are not able to control the
outcome of these changes but may
only nurture the organizations by
helping organizational members selfdevelop and self-organize
Chaos and Confucian/Taoist theories
10

Key uses of the six-image

framework

Surfacing

our assumptions about change

Assessing dominant images of change
Using multiple images and perspectives of
change
Image-in-use depends on the type of
change
Image-in-use depends on the context of
the change
Image-in-use depends on the phase of
change
Image-in-use depends on simultaneous
involvement in multiple changes
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