Change management: is a message delivered a message understood?
During change, communication is often assessed through the messages distributed rather than the interpretations they generate. The managerial question is more specific: how can we check whether middle managers make compatible sense of the same direction?
What the literature establishes
Dennis A. Gioia and Kumar Chittipeddi (1991, Strategic Management Journal) analyse the initiation of strategic change at a university. They distinguish sensemaking, through which people seek to understand a situation, from sensegiving, through which they seek to influence the meaning others attribute to it. Their study reveals a dynamic of reciprocal interpretation and influence, rather than the simple transmission of an already settled direction.
What develops between middle managers
Julia Balogun and Gerry Johnson (2004, Academy of Management Journal) examine middle managers' sensemaking during restructuring. Their findings highlight the role of peer interactions in the evolution of interpretations of change. The meaning attributed to a transformation therefore also develops through lateral exchanges, not only through interactions with senior management.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that more explanatory meetings or a mandatory common vocabulary are needed. These studies demonstrate neither that more communication produces better understanding nor that perfectly uniform interpretations would be desirable. The task is instead to identify divergences that lead to incompatible decisions, without eliminating useful adaptations to local work. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot establish
These qualitative studies illuminate context-specific processes; they do not measure the causal effect of a standardised communication intervention. Nor do they justify assuming that the mechanisms observed will operate identically in an industrial company in Neuchâtel. Counting the recipients of an announcement tells us about its distribution, but not about the meaning attributed to it.
A practical check in Neuchâtel
As part of SHR's « Conduite du changement » programme, one possible exercise for a Neuchâtel company in microtechnology, watchmaking or precision microelectronics is to present the relevant managers separately with the same scenario involving a trade-off between delivery deadlines and quality validation, linked to the proposed change. Each manager records the expected decision, its rationale and the point requiring escalation; the proportion of responses consistent with the decision framework explicitly approved for this change is then calculated. After discussing discrepancies, a comparable scenario allows the measurement to be repeated: it checks alignment on a specific trade-off, not general commitment to the change. To go further: explore the Change Leadership training in Neuchâtel, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Change Leadership in Neuchâtel
- change leadership
- Neuchâtel
- research
- training neuchâtel