Sonenshein: Were changing - or are we? Untangling the role of profressive, regressive, and stability narratives during staretgic change implementation

10 important questions on Sonenshein: Were changing - or are we? Untangling the role of profressive, regressive, and stability narratives during staretgic change implementation

According to Sonenshein strategic change involves altering employees' construction of meanings by using a discourse that sets a new direction for a firm. What are other conclusions of the study?

Sonenshein also found that strategic change involves the creation of a discourse of stability. He developed theory around how managers interweave narratives to implement strategic change, and how employees embellish these interwoven narratives to make sense of the change and to narrate their response to it.

By considering the narratives of managers and employees, as well as allowing for a broadened meaning space, Sonenshein elaborated theory around two pathways by which constructions influence strategic change implementation. Explain the 2 narrative pathways.

1. Transformational pathway: manager unfreezes employees by constructing a new better organization for them (using progressive narrative) and employees. This can take 2 forms: organizations is better (progressive) or worse (regressive narrative)
2. Perservational: the managers' stability narrative constructs the change as consistent with the status quo: freezing employees' existing meaning constructions. Employees do not construct new meanings for the organization and instead construct the change as consistent with the status quo.

What are the three findings of Sonenshein?

1. Transformational meanings were more common later in the change (period) and in converting stores (context)
2. That insignificant meanings were more common earlier in the change for converting stores (period)
3. That more subversive meaning were constructed at non-converting stories (context) and later in the change (period).
> Employees do not directly import managerial narratives about change, but rather the embellish (verfraaien) them. This suggests a potential danger of unfreezing employees. Because it may be a different direction than management hopes for/expects. Employees also have some agency to cosntruct their own meanings that deviate from those managers.
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Which 3 types of responses are described by Sonenshein?

1. Resisting: captures statements about subverting the change, such as reducing work efforts raising objection to new practices
2. Championing: captures statements about making the change a success, such as promotion the change to others
3. Accepting: captures statements about making necessary adjustments to implement the change, such as learning new procedures

Explain the difference between significant constructions and insignificant constructions (Sonenshein)

Significant: focused on a shift in strategic direction, challenges to existing meanings such as identities, or substantial new practices (this was used by employees to construct the meaning of change)
Insignificant: Focused on how the change did not dramatically alter the organization or was minor or cosmetic.

What is a narrative according to Sonenshein?

A discursive construction that actors use as a tool to shape their own understanding (sensemaking) as a tool to influence others understanding (sensegiving) and as an outcome of the collective constructing of meaning.

Which two related lenses are according to Sonenshein useful for examining meaning constructions during change? Explain them.

1. A narrative lens: focuses on discourse, often containing a sequential structure, that gives meaning to events
2. A sensemaking lens (closely related to a narrative one), sensemaking involves individuals engaging in retrospective and prospective thinking in order to construct an interpretation of reality.

Sonenshein conducted a field study at a retailer implementing strategic change. What was his broad research question?

How managers' and employees' meaning constructions differs, and how these differences matter for how strategic change gets implemented. Sonensheins draws from narrative and sensemaking approaches to change. He examined relationships between the broader sources of meanings (managers and employees) and broader dimensions of meanings (derived inductively) to construct change.

 One common characteristic of many theoretical and practitioner models of change is that they explicitly or implicitly endorse basic three-stage theory of change. Explain (Sonenshein)

The three stages are unfreezing an existing state, moving to a new desirable stage (change) and then refreezing the new state. (Lewin)

Data suggests that managers tell strategically ambiguous interwoven narratives about how an organization changes and how it remains the same, thereby attempting to both unfreeze and free the existing meanings of employees attribute to the organization. Employees establish these narratives to make sense of and narrate responses to change (resisting, championing, and accepting), something patterned by time period and context. What does Sonensheins study revise?

This study revises conceptualizations of managerial and employee discourse in fostering and hampering the implementation of strategic change by broadening consideration of both the sources and the types of meanings used to construct change.

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