The Reversal of Strategic Change
Saku Mantere, Henri Schildt, John Sillince
Abstract
This paper elaborates a failed managerial effort to reverse a strategic change process. Our longitudinal ethnographic study documents a planned merger and the unsuccessful attempt of the top managers to return to their pre-merger strategy once external events led to its cancellation. Focusing on organizational identification, we trace the failure to contradictions in managerial sensegiving. We highlight how organizational sensebreaking, the discrediting of the prevailing organizational interpretive scheme in order to facilitate employee re-identification with a new one, inhibits reversal. More broadly, we find organizational sensebreaking and sensegiving to leave residuals in the organization, affecting future managerial sensegiving endeavors.
The paper, currently being revised for the 3rd resubmission to Academy of Management Journal, will be available on Monday.