Managing Organizational Change and Commitment in a Global IT Company Jukka-Pekka Kauppinen Oy International Business Machines Ab P.O. Box 265, 00101 Helsinki, Finland e-mail: jukka.kauppinen@fi.ibm.com Hannu Kivijärvi Aalto University School of Economics P.O. Box 21220, 00076 Aalto, Finland e-mail: hannu.kivijarvi@aalto.fi Jari Talvinen Aalto University School of Economics P.O. Box 21220, 00076 Aalto, Finland e-mail: jari.talvinen@aalto.fi Abstract The main objective of this study is to investigate how the employee commitment to a change and the implementation quality affect achieving the goals and succeeding in an organizational change initiative. The secondary objective is to identify factors hindering the commitment of the employees to changes. The study is conducted in two parts in a large information technology company providing complex IT solutions and services. The first part, the pilot study, focuses on identifying factors hindering the employee commitment to a change. The results of the pilot study are utilized in content validation for the main study. The main study focuses on measuring the relationship between employees’ level of commitment during different phases of the change process, change process quality in each of the phases, their importance, realization level of the different goals set for the initiative and the final success of the change initiative. The results indicate that the employee commitment to a change seems to have a significant impact on the change process quality, but not necessarily on the final success of a change initiative. 1. Introduction At present a large number of companies offering products and services in information technology (IT) field are struggling in the middle of a severe global financial crisis. Many of these companies are forced to change their organizational structures, business models and strategies to maintain their competitiveness and to survive the harsh economic conditions. Consequently, there is a growing interest for understanding the concepts of an organizational change and change management in IT industry, too. Organizational change and change management have been studied widely during the last decades [3,7,15,27]. One of the major reasons behind such a high interest and continuous enthusiasm for understanding organizational change and its management stems from the dynamic nature of the surrounding environment of modern companies. Changes in today’s IT business environment are inevitable and the challenges associated with organizational change are constantly becoming more complex. In IT field, it is not only the changing platform technologies and the architectural directions that are changing, but also the client’s business models and constantly evolving requirements for IT products and services that shape the IT industry in a radical way. The existence of change in the surrounding environment of IT organizations is, however, widely known. The importance of studying organizational change from different perspectives has been well-understood in many organizations before this exceptional financial crisis. The results of a global executive-level study in 2008 [12] indicated that as much as 83 % of 1500 interviewed global executives expected a substantial change to take place in the next three years. The high number illustrates an increase of 20 % from the results of the same global study conducted two years earlier. At the same time, however, only 61 % of the same executives thought that they had the sufficient knowledge, skills and capabilities to manage the change successfully. This alarming situation has led to a phenomenon called the change gap. The change gap refers to a situation, where the challenges associated with an organizational change are expected to evolve faster than the knowledge and the skills to manage it. Hence, studying the different aspects of an organizational change as well as developing improved ways to manage the change successfully might not only help IT organizations in revising and implementing new business models and strategies, but in the present, exceptional circumstances, it might even determine their future and survival. An important question is, whether research can keep up with the pace of the accelerated, more intense change in technology and in the surrounding environment of organizations. Organizational change research has been traditionally divided into two major theoretical branches, the theory of change and the theory of changing [4]. The first one concentrates on describing the change process and on the dynamics by which a change occurs in an organization, whereas the theory of changing refers to how to get a change completed in an organization. Lewin’s [17] model for organizational change and Schein’s [28] interpretation of Lewin’s model are good examples of descriptive models of the organizational change process. Lewin’s model and Schein’s interpretation for organizational change have been inspiring research also in the other theoretical branch, the theory of changing. Kotter Proceedings of the 44th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2011 1 1530-1605/11 $26.00 © 2011 IEEE