Chapter 4

Organizational Change Competence

Gunhild Birgitte, Zeiner Ingstad and Live Bakke Finne

Abstract

Organizations of today are often dealing with successive changes. Therefore we argue that organizations and employees would benefit from founding what we call organizational change competence. By organizational change competence, we mean the workers’ and organization’s ability to handle continuous successive change processes, due to the organization’s focus on the workers’ psychological reactions through these processes.We argue that by using Armenakis and Harris’s (2002) three strategies –management of information, persuasive communication, and active participation – in planned organizational changes, the organization can gradually develop change competence. Building this competence might also lead the organization into what Burns (2002) has called the ‘healthy zone’ between stability and randomness. Our idea here is that the people in the organization can handle quite a lot of change as long as they also have some kind of stability.

Total Pages: 21-32 (12)

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