PLANNED ORGANISATIONAL CHANGE MODELS: REVIEW AND SYNTHESIS

Abstract

In the contemporary, turbulent business environment, organisations are compelled to undergo frequent and increasingly radical changes. Models of planned organisational change represent a set of managerial activities that must be carried out in a specific sequence to ensure that planned changes are executed effectively. The literature offers a wide range of planned organisational change models, and even a cursory review suggests that they display considerable similarity and overlap, both in terms of the activities they encompass and in the sequencing of those activities. This situation points to the possibility of convergence among these models and their synthesis. The aim of this paper is to synthesise the most popular and influential models of planned organisational change and to develop an integrative model. Based on four relevant reviews of such models, ten of the most influential and widely used models were selected. The analysis of the activities they contain, as well as the sequence of those activities, enabled the synthesis and creation of an integrative model of planned organisational change. This model comprises eleven groups of activities, or phases, which appear – albeit under different labels – in all the analysed models and in a broadly similar order.