Contribution for a grounded theory of organizational improvisation

Abstract

Change has been a phenomenon of growing popularity among those studying organization science because of its increasing pervasiveness in most domains of organizational reality and life itself. Authors on change and learning have been touting a phenomenon they label organizational improvisation as a competence / skill necessary to survive, let alone to thrive, in environments where change is a constant. Literature on this phenomenon is abundant in theoretical discussion and metaphorically grounded theories but scarce in cumulated knowledge and empirically grounded models. In an attempt to make a contribution to widen the empirical basis of research on organizational improvisation, this study follows a ‘weak-constructivist’ paradigm and draws on three sources to build a grounded theory of this phenomenon: the development of an organizational innovation, a public performance of a company's team and a series of interviews of academicians academicians-practicioners and consultants. The first source, which is in fact an embedded multiple-case study constitutes the core data set of this study, the second aims at establishing a distinction between organizational and jazz improvisation (the most widely used metaphor on this topic) and the third aims at building the theoretical sensitivity necessary for grounded theory.

From these sources sixty-four variables emerged, which are grouped under Five constructs. These variables are presented by discussing the major conceptual issues associated with them, providing evidence of their presence in the cases and discussing how they were measured. These variables are then linked together via fifty-four propositions, resulting in a grounded model of improvisation in organizational settings. Additionally, the data show that organizational improvisation allows for a synthesis to emerge in two of the major debates on organizational change -punctuated vs. incremental change and emergent vs. deliberate change - by proposing 'punctuated incrementalism' and 'deliberate emergence' as legitimate and pervading change modes. Most importantly, the data also corroborate that improvisation constitutes is in fact a new theoretical model of change filling one of the slots Van de Ven an Poole (1995) left vacant when developing an integrating framework for studying change.