Shakoor,
I have taught change management at the MBA level for several years. At the
risk of over-simplifying things, there are two pretty distinct schools of
change, which I refer to as the OD school and the strategic change school.
The OD school is rooted in the work of Lewin (T-groups), Likert (scales,
surveys), socio-technical systems, and action research. It is primarily
behavioural in focus - maintaining that organizational problems can be
diagnosed scientifically and resolved through open participation and
consultation - it is a very "Theory Y" view of change. Appreciative
inquiry is a relatively new development in OD and other management fads
such asTotal Quality Management (TQM) and self-managed teams have often
found an affinity with OD practitioners.
OD has run into problems when confronted with the radical, large scale,
top-down, "strategic" changes that organizations have undergone since the
1980s (i.e. reengineering, restructuring, downsizing, acquisition
integration etc.). There is often little time and few resources for the
level of participation demanded by an OD intervention. Proponents of
top-down or strategic change have typically espoused an N-step model of
change (where N can range from four to twelve or more). These steps include
things such as crafting a vision, dealing with political obstacles,
changing reward systems, shaping the culture etc. Strategic change has less
emphasis on scientifically measuring the effects of change and views
participation as instrumental (i.e. as a means to an end) rather than an
end in itself. OD practitioners tend to find this stance offensive.
One approach might be to focus a change management course on large scale,
radical change and an OD course on small scale, incremental change. There
are plenty of textbooks on the OD approach - enough for a 3 credit course.
The strategic change approach has quite a good (if pricey) textbook in
Jick-Peiperl's "Managing Change: Cases and Concepts" and plenty of
practitioner oriented missives. Personally, I use Palmer-Dunford-Akin
"Managing Organizational Change" which sets up six distinct images of
change but then again I don't have two separate courses to run - just one!
Just my $0.02 worth
Steve Phelan
University of Nevada Las Vegas