Change management: after a reorganisation, do people still know who knows what?
Organisation charts describe responsibilities, but rarely identify the people colleagues consult to resolve an unfamiliar problem. The management question is specific: how can we check whether reshuffling teams has made essential expertise harder to find?
What the literature establishes
Diane Wei Liang, Richard Moreland and Linda Argote (1995, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin) observed in an assembly experiment that groups trained together performed better than groups whose members had trained separately. Their findings link this advantage to transactive memory: a collective organisation of knowledge that enables people to know who has which expertise. Possessing the skills is therefore not enough to describe a group's ability to mobilise them.
A mechanism that goes beyond the skills directory
Kyle Lewis (2003, Journal of Applied Psychology) developed and validated in field settings a measure of transactive memory distinguishing specialisation, credibility and coordination. Identifying a specialist is only part of the mechanism: people must also consider that person's expertise reliable and be able to coordinate work with them. A reorganisation may therefore leave knowledge intact while weakening the relationships through which it is used.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that existing teams should be preserved or a new directory published. These studies establish neither that a stable team is always preferable nor that a directory is sufficient to restore transactive memory. The issue is instead how to rebuild credible points of reference for expertise when contacts change. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence does not allow us to promise
The assembly experiment does not reproduce the constraints of a transformation in a bank or an international organisation. Validating a measurement instrument is not an intervention trial demonstrating effectiveness after reorganisation, either. A local indicator of routing requests to expertise should therefore remain a diagnostic tool rather than be treated as a comprehensive measure of transactive memory.
A practical check in Genève
One possible exercise within SHR's change management programme is to select comparable requests requiring expertise outside the team, before a reorganisation and again after implementation. In Genève, these might concern a compliance exception in private banking, a mandate question in an international organisation, a finishing defect in luxury watchmaking or a documentation question in commodity trading. For each request, record the first person contacted and check with them whether they have the necessary expertise or must redirect it; then calculate the proportion of requests correctly routed at the first contact. A decline would warrant examining the new routes to expertise, without immediately attributing the problem to a loss of skills. To go further: explore the Change Leadership training in Geneva in the canton of Geneva, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Change Leadership in Geneva
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