Breaking free from the invisible cage: Leveraging institutional logics to understand and facilitate organizational change projects

Abstract

Organizational change projects suffer from a high failure rate. Extant literature identified structural inertia as the main cause of resistance to change. This structural inertia puts invisible shackles on organizations and makes the change process difficult or even pulls organizations back to their former state. However, it is still unknown how these organizations can be unchained. Drawing on an institutional logic perspective and based on an intriguing organizational change project of a state-owned company in China, we explored how institutional logic changes in organizational change projects. The results indicate that institutional change occurs through organizational deinstitutionalization, organizational institution building, and organizational reinstitutionalization across both individual and organizational levels. We developed a theory for successfully securing change efforts that relies on the level-crossing alteration of institutional logic that shackles employee behaviors. A model of institutional logic change is proposed to illustrate the organizational change carried out in the form of projects from an institutional logic perspective. Theoretical and practical contributions are discussed.