| Description |
The following paper is a study on the communicative dimensions of organizational change in an academic research library in the Mountain West undergoing major reorganization of employee's roles as well as physical renovation. The overarching purpose of the study was to develop a grounded theory of the communicative dimension of organization change that can guide change implementation and improve the community of the organization. Following an extensive review of the pertinent organizational change literature, the communicative dimensions of organizational change, change in academic research libraries, and combining grounded theory and ethnography, I coded and developed first order concepts of over 500 pages of field notes, interviews and organizational documents. I wrote initial theoretical memoranda from the first stage of analysis and refined them as I continued to gather, sort and categorize data. I integrated the categories under second order findings toward the development of third order findings. With communication during organizational change as the object of study, I began to examine connections between organizational communication and the concerns of the participants toward the development of a theory. From a research-based conceptual framework, qualitative interviews and data gathered in an ethnographic study, a grounded theory that could guide action in advancing the communication among members of a research library was developed. The grounded theory revealed that there are underlying concerns and contributors to the breakdown of communication that result in or coexist with certain effects such as noncohesive community, political battles and a lack of trust between employees and the administration. These concerns and contributors can be remedied by increased uses of communicative strategies such as holding more small group meetings, disseminating both macro and micro level information to the entire organization through multiple outlets, but not fully eliminated due to personal accountability and unforeseen factors. The categories are interrelated and concepts within the categories often posed dialectical tensions. |
