Making sense of organisational change failure: An identity lens
研究员工如何通过工作身份视角讲述组织变革失败的故事，发现四种叙事轨迹：身份丧失、身份修正、身份肯定和身份韧性，对理解变革失败和身份动态有贡献。
This study investigates how employees craft narratives of organisational change failure through the lens of their work identity. We analysed change recipients’ retrospective sensemaking accounts of an organisational re-structuring in a university, finding these accounts to be filled with widely varying descriptions of failure – of errors, dysfunction, and loss. We explored how employees’ organisational, professional, and work-group identities were intertwined with, and fundamentally challenged by, their sensemaking about the change and its failure. Our inductive analysis revealed four distinct narrative trajectories – Identity Loss, Identity Revision, Identity Affirmation, and Identity Resilience – each characterised by distinct cognitive, affective, and behavioural patterns. We discuss the unique contributions that this study makes to the literatures on organisational change failure, sensemaking, and identity.