Switching from hard to soft A comparison of composite narratives on the transition from a hard to a soft organization

Switching from hard to soft

A comparison of composite narratives on the transition from a hard to

a soft organization

University of Groningen Faculty of Economics and Business

MSc Business Administration Change Management

Groningen, 22-01-2018

Name Robert Dekker

Student number 1857630

Course MSc Thesis BA Change Management

Supervisor dr. Cees Reezigt

Abstract

Ever since project management came into the picture as to how organizations organized their work, the hard aspects were the leading measurements. Lately, however, recognition of the softer aspects of project management has begun to appear. This is noticeable through new ways of working like agile and scrum, which allow for faster responses to changes and continuous adaptation. However, implementation of these new ways of working do not always play out in the smoothest way possible. Differing perceptions from various organizational groups about the direction of the organization and the advantages the new way of working are bound to cause discrepancies in the narratives of the people in the organization. The current study has constructed and analyzed composite narratives of different groups in a banking organization and tried to discover where the differences in these narratives lie. The results showed that the narrative of the group of managers differed from the narrative of their subordinates, on a number of subjects.

Keywords: Agile project management, traditional project management, hard aspects, soft aspects, narratives, sensemaking, Cartesian anxiety, cognitive dissonance

Table of content

1 Introduction p. 4

2 Literature review p. 5

2.1 Project management p. 5

2.1.1. Traditional project management p. 6

2.1.2. Agile project management p. 8

2.2 Hard and soft aspects p. 9

2.2.1. Hard aspects p. 9

2.2.2. Soft aspects p. 10

2.2.3. Combining hard and soft aspects p. 11

2.3 Sensemaking p. 12

2.4 Narratives p. 14

2.5 Sensemaking and narratives p. 15

3 Methodology p. 16 3.1 Research Design p. 17 3.2 Data Collection p. 17 4 Findings p. 19 5 Discussion p. 26 References

1. Introduction

Aforementioned concepts of uncertainty and ambiguity are investigated by looking at the narratives that members of the organization hold about implementing this new, softer way of working. Freely translated, narratives can be understood as the way people talk about certain subjects. By analyzing these narratives, a connection was found between them, the hard and soft aspects concerned with the change, sensemaking, and uncertainty and ambiguity. The issue of this research is the existence of differences between the narratives of people in different layers of the organization. It is known that people in an organization can have widely diverging opinions on the same subject, and that this can cause friction (van Aken et al., 2012). By investigating these differences, this research aims to find out what causes them, leading to explanations through concepts such as Cartesian anxiety and cognitive dissonance. In practice, organizations can take note of these findings in order to prevent potentially negative consequences when going through a transition themselves.

The remainder of this paper consists of a literature review, where all the previously mentioned concepts will be defined, clarified, and linked to one another. Different types of project management will be contrasted, and reasons for the preference of one over the other will be explained. After that, a more elaborate definition of the hard and soft aspects of change will be presented, and the connection or co-existence between them. After that, the concepts of sensemaking will be introduced and defined by using, among others, the definition of one of the most influential authors on that theme, Karl Weick (1995). This is followed by an exposition of the concept of narratives and the linkages between them. The methodology section following thereafter describes how the information to construct the composite narratives was gathered and analyzed. In the section that follows, the findings are presented and illustrated with quotes that are associated with those findings. The findings are then discussed with additional and relevant literature in the final section, where also the recommendations for future research and the limitations of the current research will be addressed.

2. Literature Review

controls for the way people and resources are being deployed (Meredith and Mantel, 2011). It is about the management of project-based working. Nandhakumar and Jones (2001) define project-based team working as a way of working in which relatively autonomous staff work together in accomplishing complex tasks which require specific knowledge and expertise. Following Hammer (1997), they state that this type of work is becoming characteristic of many organizations. For combining the hard and soft aspects of a project, Kwak and Stoddard (2004) describe a couple of lessons that his study found to be learned from project risk management. These include, among others, that a project manager does not always have the time to implement a formal process into the system and, therefore, needs to be able to train members on the spot to deal with the problem when it comes to the fore. Another lesson is that, in order to change work practices, the people that are actually doing the development work on the project team need to have the knowledge, motivation and need to be empowered. Kwak and Stoddard (2004) also state that by changing the organizational culture to motivate the individual, effective management will succeed. However, these changes require time and repetition before they are wholly accepted and firmly embedded in the organization. These two lessons from project risk management show that, by combining the hard aspects (implementing a formal process) with soft aspects (train members/changing organizational culture), a project can be brought to a sound ending.

2.1.1. Traditional project management

suitable for the new situation. Whereas traditional organizational structures (the traditional way of formally configured roles and procedures in an organization, or the framework of the organization, defined by Ranson et al., 1980) were used in traditional project management, new ways of handling project management are to create complex communities comprised of alliances between all sorts of stakeholders such as strategic suppliers, outsourcing vendors, networks of customers and partnerships with key political groups, regulatory entities, and even competitors (Hass, 2007).

Turner and Cochrane (1993) provide a helpful model to determine what kind of project is at hand. They have developed the goals-and-methods matrix. This model defines projects as being one of four different types of projects, which are determined on the basis of two different dimensions, namely whether the goals are well defined, and whether the methods of achieving those goals are well defined. This distinction ensures that a project can be either one of the following four traditional types of projects:

- Type 1 project: in this type of projects, the goals and methods are both well defined. typical example is a large engineering project as building a new stadium.

- Type 2 project: here, the goals are well defined but the ways with which to achieve them are not. Typical projects are product-development projects.

- Type 3 project: with this type of project, the goals are not well defined, but the methods are. One can think about software-development projects, where it always proves to be very difficult to determine a user’s requirements. Goals exist, but the precise nature of those goals can only be determined later, when the user can see what is being produced. - Type 4 project: neither goals nor methods are defined with this kind of project. Typified

by organizational-development projects.

2.1.2. Agile project management

The term “agile methods” was first mentioned in 2001, when the Agile Manifesto was developed to provide principles/guidelines on which the agile movement is now built (Beck et al., 2001; Highsmith, 2001). Since then, various other authors have defined and explained the term ‘agile’.

One comprehensive definition of agile project management comes from the book of Chin (2004). He recognizes that over the years, project management and business environments have become increasingly dynamic. To cope with this shift, there also needs to be a shift from traditional project management towards a more flexible type of project management. He states that, since the rise of more dynamic environments, “the effective planning horizon becomes shorter” (p.2 and p.3) and therefore, there needs to be a shift from planning to execution. Chin (2004) mentions three characteristics of agile project management environments: uncertainty, unique expertise and speed. Uncertainty can be one of two kinds of uncertainties: internal or external. Internal uncertainty is about the factors that can be more or less controlled by the project manager, such as scope, schedule, and cost. External uncertainty concerns those factors that are outside the project manager’s control, such as industry business environment, competition, and business strategy decisions. In innovative companies, certain brilliant minds are usually at the heart of them, where unique knowledge and expertise is needed to keep the company innovative. Making use of these brilliant minds is a part of agile project management. According to Chin (2004), “speed” does not equal “agile” in project management, but it is a multiplying factor. He captures this relationship in the following equation:

Agile PM environment = [Uncertainty + Unique Expertise] x Speed

As mentioned before, agile project management is an approach to project management that is more appropriate in uncertain, fast changing environments and is more flexible than traditional project management. It is oftentimes used in (but not limited to) projects where there is a big software component that needs to be implemented and where the requirements are volatile and uncertainty is high. Agile project management is a process whereby project stakeholders are working together very intensely to understand the domain, identify what needs to be built, and prioritize functionality (Hass, 2007). Hass suggests that agile methods are used when (among other factors):

- the value of the project is clear,

- the customer actively participates throughout the project,

- built on test-driven development, - there is adaptive control.

The approach builds on cycles of the project where the different stakeholders engage in rapidly changing development cycles, which allow a project team to constantly reconsider and evaluate the product. Also, these cycles make sure stakeholders get immediate feedback on which they can then build. Agile project management is built on the notion that there is continuous feedback from users and stakeholders and thus stimulates continuous learning and improving of the product. The development in agile project management is conducted through a series of sessions where the team writes code, tests working modules of the system and repeats the process. In this stage, there is very little documentation because the team relies on informal and internal communication. This also is a big difference with traditional project management, where significant amounts of requirements documentation is produced. In the next section on hard and soft aspects, it will become more clear that the hard and soft aspects of project management are oftentimes compared with the traditional and agile approaches to project management, respectively.

2.2 Hard and soft aspects 2.2.1. Hard aspects

Defining hard and soft aspects in project management has always been somewhat tricky, but research has come to some sort of understanding of what both terms mean in relation to project management. Following the article of Crawford and Pollack (2004), the hard issues are the traditional aspects on which project success is defined, like the time, cost, quality of the project. Yeo (1995) states that project management traditionally is brought about through the hard, systematic approach of doing things. This approach is characterized by its emphasis on discipline and compliance with systems policies and procedures. This is established through effective and strict ways of communication and feedback control.

Another way of defining hard projects is provided by Crawford et al. (2003). They state that hard project management is typically underpinned by traditional views of project management. In this view, it is assumed that the goals of a project and the ways by which these can be achieved are well understood over the course of the whole project. As mentioned in paragraph 2.1.2., this approach is not always feasible in the uncertain, unstructured environment that project management oftentimes is in this day and age.

and methods, which have to be solved by a ‘best’ solution, however that solution is characterized. In this view, functions are related to the systems which can be quantified and controlled. Also, organizations are compared to machine-like structures in which the people working there are seen as predictable and interchangeable.

Again turning to Turner and Cochrane (1993), some more aspects of the harder side of project management are mentioned. They state that some definitions imply clearly defined objectives and methods, which in turn leads to the idea that a project’s design should be established as soon as possible. These ‘frozen’ objectives then become a measure for the quality of the project, and the project managers are seen as successful if they deliver the project on time and within budget, regardless whether or not the end product is usable by the customers.

2.2.2. Soft aspects

In some projects, the goals as well as the methods to achieve those goals are not well defined or developed (Turner and Cochrane, 1993). The term that is often used in agile project management for these types of projects is a ‘soft project’, where uncertainty and complexity are high, and flexibility is much higher than with traditional project management, or type 1 and type 2 projects. One can think of research and development and organizational change projects (Crawford and Costello, 2000).

The soft, systemic approach is concerned with the ill structured, ambiguous and soft problems that come to play in project management. The soft side concerns issues as community perception, safety, environmental impacts, legal acceptability and social and political impacts (Jafaari, 1999). Following the line of reasoning from Midgley (2000), he provides a somewhat different definition of the soft paradigm. This view adopts the perspective that the causes of the problematic nature of a situation are not easily defined or isolated. In contrast to the hard approach, people are seen as individuals which continuously make sense of the world around them in which they operate, by constantly refining their views of that world around them. This highly associates with the concept of sensemaking, a topic which will be returned to later in this paper.

2.2.3. Combining hard and soft aspects

Hard and soft aspects of project management are oftentimes spoken of as two different and contradicting terms, though they are actually two opposites on a continuum (Crawford and Pollack, 2004). Even though hard and soft aspects are to be dealt with by “different managerial approaches and skill sets, these skill sets need not be mutually exclusive and can be applied in a complimentary way” (Crawford and Pollack, 2004, p.645). As discussed earlier, typically, traditional project management can be conceived of as being a stage-gate type of project management, whereby the project can be considered to consist of stages, which has to be passed through gates in a certain sequence. On the other hand, there is agile project management, where the direction and methods are often determined sort of on the go and uncertainty is more prevalent. So how to combine these two ends of a spectrum?

As Gustavsson and Hallin (2014) argue, some dimensions of the agile approach can be coined hard and some aspects of stage-gate-models can be coined soft. They provide the example of the emphasis that is placed in the Agile Manifesto on “functioning software”. They argue this can be seen as a hard aspect because it can be measured as a SMART-goal, and because “it is tangible in the sense that it can be experienced” (Gustavsson and Hallin, 2014, p.573). On the other hand, there are methods in traditional project management that can be seen as soft. One can think of the idea that “effective leadership needs to be dynamic and flexible rather than static and rigid” (Gustavsson and Hallin, 2014, p.574).

It could also be questioned whether hard and soft project management is actually separated in real-life projects. As Karlström and Runeson (2006) mention in their study on the integration of agile software development into stage-gate managed product development, the software development projects do not exist separately. Instead, they commonly exist as sub-projects in an environment that consists of hardware development, marketing, production planning etc. which must all be managed simultaneously (Cooper, 2001). This goes to show that it is fairly common for hard and soft aspects of project management and their methods to exist next to each other.

the public sector to help deal with organizational problems “in which information provision is a feature and for making sense of the experiences gained” (p.2). The methodology can be used to act as a framework for action research in which organizational learning and desirable change are the goals. SSM is based on the idea that the world we experience and the world that we think about cannot actually be separated.

Another way of combining hard and soft aspects is described by Karlström and Runeson (2005). Following their research, they came to a recommendation as to how agile methods can be combined with stage-gate projects, and vice versa. They state that agile methods can provide powerful tools for a stage-gate project for “microplanning, day-to-day work control, and progress reporting” (p.49). The working end product and meetings that are held face-to-face are much more influential and helpful in communicating than the reports that are written on A4’s. The opposite is also true, stage-gate project management can be helpful for agile methods to be helpful. For example, it gives agile methods a way of coordinating with other development teams and it offers a way to communicate with functions as marketing and senior management.

2.3 Sensemaking

It might be tempting to define sensemaking according to its everyday definition. Since the concept of sensemaking is not unfamiliar to most people (one tries to make sense of something), it might look like a logical term. However, the scientific definition requires a bit more of an in-depth explanation.

Sensemaking has been defined in a lot of different ways through a lot of different strings of thought. Probably (one of the) most influential authors on this subject, though, is Karl Weick. In his 1995 book “Sensemaking in Organizations”, he was one of the first to try and capture the concept of sensemaking in a comprehensible way. He states that sensemaking is comprised of seven characteristics: it is grounded in identity construction, retrospective, enactive of sensible environments, social, ongoing, focused on and by extracted cues and it is driven by plausibility rather than accuracy (Weick, 1995, p.17), characteristics which will be elaborated on briefly.

self is appropriate. This implies that one’s definition of what is “out there” differs according to the different “selves”.

Second, the retrospective aspect of sensemaking implies that one can only make sense of something that has already happened. Retrospective sensemaking means actively synthesizing many possible meanings because many different projects are occurring at the same time reflection takes place (Weick, 1995).

As a third property of sensemaking, enactive of environment means that people oftentimes produce the organizational environment they face (Pondy & Mitroff, p.17). Or, as Weick (1995, p.31) puts it: “They act, and in doing so create the materials that become the constraints and opportunities they face”.

Fourth, sensemaking is social in that it is not a stand-alone activity, because everything a person does internally is dependent on and influenced by others.

A fifth property of sensemaking is that it is ongoing, which implies that there isn’t really a starting point (nor ending, for that matter) which implies that people are always in the middle of things. These things can only actually become things when those people focus on the past from some point in the future (Weick, 1995).

Sixth, to say that sensemaking is focused on and by extracted cues means that a person focuses on particular cues of the situation that help him or her extract meaning from that situation. So one extracts a cue to develop a larger sense of what is occurring (Weick, 1995).

Lastly, sensemaking is not so much accurate as it is plausible. It need not be totally accurate, just as long as it is a good enough approximation of reality.

Another, but (maybe not surprising) fairly similar definition of sensemaking is provided by Weick, Sutcliffe, and Obstfeld (2005). According to them, “sensemaking involves the ongoing retrospective development of plausible images that rationalize what people are doing” (p.409). Considering multiple arguments, sensemaking can be seen as a process that is continuing, instrumental, sophisticated, quick, social, and easily taken for granted. Sensemaking is the first place where meaning is given to people that inform and constrain identity and action (Mills, 2003, p.35). This means that language, talk and communication play a very significant role in sensemaking, with organizations, situations and environments being talked into existence.

When the world as it is being experienced differs greatly from the world as it is expected at a certain point, a very conscious way of sensemaking can occur. People will look firstly for reasons that will allow them to keep on going in the same way of acting, which is derived from frameworks that they have internalized. One can think of institutional constraints, organizational premises, plans, expectations etc. One of the similarities with the characteristics of sensemaking with Maitlis and Christianson (2014) is that Weick et al. (2005) also state that people make sense of equivocal input through organizing, and that this sense is enacted back into the world to make that world more orderly. It is, thus, an iterative process.

As one can see, the definitions share some common ground, from which a more integrated definition might be derived. Comparing the various definitions of the concept, Maitlis and Christianson (2014) have derived the following definition of sensemaking:

“a process, prompted by violated expectations, that involves attending to and bracketing cues in the environment, creating intersubjective meaning through cycles of interpretation and action, and thereby enacting a more ordered environment from which further cues can be drawn.”

As we will see in the next paragraph on narratives, sensemaking and narratives are closely linked, since narratives represent ways of talking about organizations and reflect shared and widespread perceptions about organizing (Weick, 1995).

2.4 Narratives

modes of thinking with modes of organizing. They can be seen as ways to enact reality, give existence to things and events, and to organize the world (Goodman, 1978; Lanzara and Patriotta, 2001). Narratives locate occurrences in time and space and translate them into meaningful events by organizational actors. Action can, according to Ricoeur (1981), be regarded as a text, whose construction is subject to competing interpretations that can only be resolved by a process of argumentation and debate. This text eventually becomes a script for action. In the end, texts provide a guide for conduct and serve to link action to cognition and sensemaking (Patriotta, 2003). This relationship between text and action depicts narratives as involved in both the process and content of organizational knowledge. Weick (1977) states that “narrative knowing highlights the fundamental sensemaking processes leading to the enactment, punctuation, and retention of organizational action”. Narratives can be viewed as emphasizing the processual nature of knowing and organizing. They carry tacit knowledge and act as storage devices, sort of like routines. The difference with routines, however, is that routines refer to organizations as constituted by mechanisms of repetition and standardization, while narratives refer to organizations as enacted through discourse and characterized by continuing processes of transformation and social becoming (Patriotta, 2003).

Brown (2000) refers to several other, but similar definitions of narratives, building on different authors. A narrative can be described, for example, as “a tool or program for making sense of events” (Gephart, 1991, p.37) or as “a blueprint that can be used to predict future organizational behavior” (Martin, 1992, p.287), to name just two. Brown and Humphreys (2003) describe narratives as ways that provide members with an agreed understanding of their history, which are constantly modified or updated to account for recent and current occurrences, which can be subtle or more profound.

2.5 Sensemaking and narratives

Weick and Browning (1986) argue that organizational realities are based on narration, though most traditional models of organization are based on argumentation. This kind of sensemaking is top-down, and not the kind of sensemaking one normally engages in when spontaneously constructing a world of meaning for himself (Taylor and Lerner, 1996). Bruner (1991) states that when people need to construct and represent the “rich and messy domain of human interaction, they organize their experience and their memory of human happenings mainly in the form of narratives – stories, excuses, myths, reasons for doing and not doing, and so on”. In other words, people use narratives to make sense of the world around them. Narratives are the way in which people try and create a comprehensive image of the world.

Closely linked to the narratives people use to describe the world (organization) around them, is the concept of organizational identity. Albert and Whetten (1985) were the first to define this concept in a comprehensive manner, by implying it is socially constructed and stating that it are those characteristics of an organization that are collectively understood by the members as central, distinctive and enduring. Since the organizational identity is socially constructed (Ashfort and Mael, 1996), it may come as no surprise that members from different organizational layers perceive central and peripheral characteristics of the organization differently (Corley, 2004). Since organizational identity consists of different components (Gioia et al., 2000; Whetten and Godfrey, 1998), which are interpreted differently at different times by different members (Corley, 2004), it can also be argued that members of different layers in the organization make sense of situations in a different manner. This leads to the research question of this paper:

How do members of different layers in the organization vary in their narratives about the transition from a hard to a soft way of working in the organization?

3. Methodology

the information that is gathered ought to be similar to reality, this means that one wants “to get an intersubjective view by combining perspectives” (van Aken et al., 2012, p.207). The research in this paper is just exactly about these differences in viewpoints and combining them to comprise so-called ‘composite narratives’.

3.1 Research design

This paper discusses the results of an exploratory, descriptive research, conducted between February and July, 2017. This specific paper builds on the data acquired in that period of time by other researchers, which makes that this paper is based on secondary data. The primary data were collected by three researchers conducting 36 interviews in three different departments within the organization of a global financial institution, located in Amsterdam. It serves over 36 million customers and is the employer of about 56.000 people. The interviewees were from different layers of the organization, but mostly they were from upper layers in the organization. The interviewees were from three different departments at ING. As can be seen in the findings section, the quotes start with a two-lettered abbreviation, which implies at which department the person works; TS (Transaction Services), LS (Lending Services), or FM (Financial Markets). For research purposes, the interviewees were divided in an ‘upper management layer’ (which include the members of the organization from scale 14 and up, hereinafter called ‘managers’), and a ‘lower management layer’ (the members from scale 13 and down, hereinafter called ‘employees’).

3.2 Data collection

The interviews were semi-structured with participants asked questions like “what is ING for you?” and “why is ING implementing the new way of working?”. The interviews were of between 60 and 90 minutes in duration and were conducted at the building of ING in Amsterdam. All of the interviews were recorded and transcribed, with a couple of exceptions where the recordings were accidentally deleted and the transcriptions had to be written down from memory and/or notes taken during the interview.

happened and the respondent will answer in a storied form. Also, the subjects’ answers are the natural way of making sense and communicating life episodes (Polkinghorne, 1995). To analyze the answers of the subjects in full, the interviews need to be transcribed. As van Maanen (1988, p.5) states, they must be “textualized” for “only in textualized form do data yield to analysis”. This way of analyzing the data was considered the most appropriate way of handling the data collected and was done by using the program Atlas.ti, which made sure that information was gathered in a consistent and systematic way, thereby increasing researcher reliability (van Aken et al., 2012).

A couple of factors influence the reliability. Swanborn (1996) and Yin (2003) state that one comes to reliable results when they are independent of four potential sources of bias: the researcher, the instrument, the respondents and the situation. Since this is an exploratory study, it proved to be somewhat difficult to cover for all these factors. In the first paragraph of this section, the relationship between respondents and reliability has been discussed, so the other three will be discussed below.

As van Aken et al. (2012) state, there are differences in methods used to gather data and in their relative risk for bias. Interviews, for example, depend in a large part on personal characteristics, which in turn may lead to a so-called cold bias, a bias related to the researcher. This entails the subjective influences of the researcher that have a cognitive origin and no personal motivation. According to Weick (1995), people tend to interpret observations in a way that they are in accordance with their beliefs. This is a factor that can harm reliability, and was reduced by performing the interviews by three different researchers instead of one.

Another source that can influence reliability is the instrument that is used to collect the data. Combining different ways of gathering data can yield complementary or contradictory results. For example, people can differ in what are termed their ‘espoused theories’ (what people say) and their ‘theories-in-use’ (what people do), which can be discovered using different instruments. Since only semi-structured interviews were used in the current research, there might be an instrument bias.

Different circumstances are also mentioned by van Aken et al. (2012) as a potential threat to reliability. As a solution, they mention that one ought to perform a study at different moments in time, yet this seems unrealistic since the interviews take at least 60 minutes and are not to be repeated on a different moment, since this would take too much of everyone’s time, and time is money in a bank as large as ING.

generated. To clarify the rather abstract definition of validity, different types of validity will be discussed below. Construct validity, internal validity and external validity will be discussed. Construct validity has to do with the extent to which a measuring instrument measures what it is supposed to measure (de Groot, 1969). This means that “the concept should be covered completely” and that “the measurement should have no components that do not fit the meaning of the concept”(van Aken et al., 2012, p.210). They state that in open interviews, the concept can be either completely covered or not completely covered. It is assumed that the concept in this research, with semi-open interviews, is completely covered so the criterion of construct validity is met, since semi-structured interviews are typically “well suited for the exploration of the perceptions and opinions of respondents regarding complex and sometimes sensitive issues” (Barriball and While, 1994, p.330).

The second type of validity, the internal validity, concerns the “conclusions about the relationship between phenomena” (van Aken et al., 2012, p.211). This means that the results of a study are internally valid when the conclusions about those relationships are complete and justified. This can only be established when all other explanations about the phenomenon are ruled out as a possibility.

The third type of validity, external validity, is about the generalization or transferability of the results to other people, organizations etc. Since this research was conducted at ING, which is an organization with its own culture, people and ways of doing things, it is not likely that the results of this study are blatantly applicable to other organizations. It is more likely to assume that the results are solely applicable to ING and thus the criterion of external validity is probably not met. However, within ING itself, it is important to establish whether the results of the first pilot are transferable to other departments.

4. Findings

codes in total, of which 171 codes (39%) were captured under broader ‘umbrellas’ as to allow for better analysis. For their subordinates (‘employees’), there were a total of 1158 codes, of which 404 codes (35%) were captured under some broader umbrella. After this step, it could already be noticed that there were significant differences in themes that were addressed by the different groups. Also, it was found that one theme was not mentioned at all by the one group but was a very dominant theme in the other group. These findings will be presented below by comparing the two groups per theme and, secondly, addressing the themes that were unique for each group. The themes that were common and recurring and will be compared are autonomy, belief in new WoW (Way of Working), faster responses/delivery, hierarchy, not there yet, and role unclarity. To clarify each theme on what is meant by them, actual quotes are used to exemplify that theme. Also, since the number of codes in the groups are not equal, it was deemed relevant to look at the percentages of the quotations instead of the absolute numbers. This way, it is easier to compare between the different codes.

Autonomy

The first common theme among the respondents was that of autonomy. In the group of managers, the topic of autonomy made up 11% of the total amount of quotations that were linked to autonomy, whereas in the group of the employees it comprised 6%. This is quite a difference, which is interesting to notice since there is not a clear explanation for this difference. The managers might have a clearer image as to what the future holds in terms of new roles and the consequences for autonomy than the employees, and this might lay at the heart of this difference. Both groups were fairly similar in their expressions about how the new, agile way of working would influence the future degree of autonomy of the teams and their members. They agreed that autonomy would be greater and the teams would be much more self-steering than in the old situation. The following quote from one of the managers illustrates the importance that is placed on autonomy in the new way of working:

LS11: “If you come to think of it, it was really unique right. Well, more generically, I think what we do with autonomous teams and agile, let’s say if you take a step back and look what is happening, I think it is the best way to organize knowledge work, performed in teams. Not specifically IT, but knowledge work in teams.”

play less of a role in the ‘new’ organization, since there is no one person that’s calling the shots, but the teams themselves can make decisions on what they need to do and how they need to do it. Hierarchy, a topic which will be returned to later, was always a subject in a big organization like ING, but one of the consequences of the new way of working is that this hierarchy will make room for self-steering teams. This means that members do not always have to go up the chain to ask for help or to ask what they need to do, but instead they can decide for themselves. The following respondent uses a metaphor to describe what the new way of working will entail:

FM06: “It's the people and the thing is, we want to cross the river, I'm not gonna tell you "I want to have a bridge", and I'm not gonna tell you that the bridge needs to be two meters wide and five meters long, I'm just gonna tell you "I would like to cross the river with this group of people or with this car" and then you are going to tell me how I'm gonna do that. And it's up to you whether you gonna build a boat, or you're trying to build a bridge, but it's up to you, you're the expert. You can tell me on how you gonna do it.”

The fact that both groups agree on this might be a good predictor for the actual implementation results, since believing the new way of working might bring something good to the organization is a good way of making sure it actually does. Also, if both groups agree on this fact, it will probably be much easier to realize it.

Belief in new way of working

FM11: “So even people where I sometimes doubt whether they are really supportive, they speak out their minds and say well this is what we need to do. I’ve never seen this. This is really unique.”

The fact that both groups expressed their belief in the new way of working is very positive because it implies a certain degree of unity among the members of the organization. This solidarity among both managers and employees makes for the gaining of momentum to make the change happen.

Faster responses/delivery

Faster responses to client needs or market changes and faster delivery of products were often referred to as reasons for why the change should happen. Both groups agreed on the fact that ING as an organization could not allow itself to fall behind on their competitors, due to slow reaction times to outside factors. Percentages from managers and employees were 5% and 6%, respectively. According to the respondents, the current day and age in which ING is finding itself is a prominent reason for implementing the agile way of working in the organization. An ever changing environment and the need to keep up with their competitors were reasons that were often phrased to express that change was inevitable. Again, the fact that this topic was mentioned by both groups indicates a degree of agreement on where the organization should be heading and how to get there. The following quote from one of the employees exemplifies this:

FM11: “And now that, by introducing the agile way, you really proof, you're really closer to the client, you can really experience what the client is meaning, do we understand each other right? and you can also show little improvements in a little way, so you involve the client much closer in the organization, I think you understand client is central for us, so the client is really leading. So the closer you are to him and the earlier you can show what you can do for him, I think that is the better product that you can deliver. It is good for the client, of course, and it is also good for us, because we are able to move much faster, at a much lower cost.”

changes to make sure the organization can stay in the running, and ideally ahead of the competition. As one respondent, belonging to the employees, puts it:

TS01: “So we had very lengthy projects and also, if you have an idea, then it takes a lot of time before you can actually bring it to the client. And that is of course a benefit of agile: the fast pace that you can have. I think that’s the main benefit.”

The only way for ING to stay ahead of the game is for them to retain their competitive advantage, which can only be achieved by having the capability to respond quickly to their changing environment and to react in an adequate manner to the requests of clients. Both the managers and employees seemed to agree that, in order to achieve that, the agile way of working needs to be implemented and the old way of working should be abandoned.

Hierarchy

TS01:”I say make sure people have guidelines what is expected from them or how should you work. because we didn't have that, we had to invent everything ourselves.”

Managers did not seem to see hierarchy as a very important issue, neither in the old, nor in the new way of working. Also, while the agile way of working would entail a marginalized role for hierarchy, employees expressed the need for someone higher up to determine the end goal and to receive some guidance/direction on how to get there, while the managers, in their turn, sometimes seem to think that the role of a manager in the Netherlands is an inferior one. So there is a discrepancy between the desired state and how to get there, as one of the managers explains:

FM11: “In the Netherlands obviously nobody listens to a manager [laughs] and everybody is- you know, it's part of the culture, […].So I do think that at ING, at least in the Netherlands, at least in Wholesale, there is a sort of.. a loose hierarchy. And it's more managed on delivery, on output, than on hierarchy. So if you are good in- if you can deliver something, then it will be seen, and it doesn't need to flow through hierarchy, basically.”

Not there yet

This category of quotes has captured all the quotes that were somehow linked to expressions that showed that the organization is not there yet in terms of implementing the new way of working. There was a big difference in phrases between both groups, with managers voicing that they are not there yet 22% of the time and employees only 8%. What was oftentimes expressed is captured by the following statement of one of the managers:

TS02: “I think we already have some changes implemented in this agile way of working direction, but we are not there yet at all, I would say”.

Role unclarity

The last category to compare is that of the role unclarity. This theme was mentioned in only 2% of the total by managers, and 5% of the total by employees. Employees expressed concerns about their new roles in the new way of working, stating that it was very unclear what they were expected to do, which also relates to the lack of guidance they felt during the transition. These notions of uncertainty were expressed in pieces similar to the one this employee mentions:

TS06: “And also, what are their roles in teams. What can I do. What is the role of the scrum master, what is the role of the other. Do I have to cooperate – you also have to work together with other teams. How do they do that. And so, we have some technical things, about what is a backlog, and what is a scrum master, how do we do the technical things about scrum/agile work. And how do we – what is the change in competence of the people?”

As this quote illustrates, people were very much concerned about their new roles and how they needed to fill those in. This has very much to do with the fact that ING has always been a hierarchical (hard) organization. This hardness of the organization is also shown in the way this new way of working has been implemented, namely in a hard manner, from the top down. This creates uncertainty about how the implementation should take shape. The quote below shows an employee describing the difference with the old roles, and the addition of new roles which made the situation even more unclear:

LS05: “ Initially it was a lot of no clarity. And there is still no clarity on roles, because we are still flipping around a bit - before [head] came in, there was only a value chain, and inside the value chain you had product owners, and you had 4 teams basically to whatever what was required from the value chain. And now since somewhere last year the change leader was introduced.”

It seems that the employees do not find the end goals to be very tangible, and lack clarity. The results generally show that there is a big difference in the vision on the future of both groups. For the managers, the end goals and matching roles are much more clear than they are for their subordinates.

Managing teams

A theme that was not at all shared by the different groups was the theme of ‘managing teams’. This theme was only mentioned by the managers, which accounted for as much as 21% of the total amount of quotes. It seems rather obvious that managers speak of the managing of teams, since they’re the ones who need to do the actual managing. The formation of new teams and deciding on who should do what in those teams is of great importance for the smooth transition to the new way of working. The following quote is one of many that emphasizes the importance of managing teams:

LS04: “Make sure that you picture the red dot on the horizon, the bigger picture. This is our vision. This is where we want to go in the future. Yes, we have to do something now, improve it along the way, involve them, make them aware, make them responsible and all that kind of people management stuff. But you have to manage the change. Absolutely.”

The fact that this manager mentions that one needs to “manage the change” implies a concern about the way the implementation of the new way of working needs to be managed. What strikes the most about this quote is that the managers do seem to value giving their subordinates a sense of direction, but that this sense of direction is not picked up by the employees, who state that there is still a lot of uncertainty about everything. This ambiguity is likely to be caused by a certain lack of communication.

5. Discussion

for them to get there. It was noticeable, however, that the employees did not share that many expressions about the fact that they were not there yet. This might be explained because they had less of a clear image on where the change should bring them eventually. This means that they could not make statements on where they were or where exactly they were heading, while the opposite was true for the managers. In their (rather conceptual) article, Burnes and Jackson (2011) underline the importance of the alignment of the value systems of three factors for successful change: the people that are involved with the change, the approach towards the change, and the objective of the change. When one of the value systems of these three aspects is out of alignment, it is more likely that the change will not be successful. The situation at ING can be visualized using the (slightly modified) factors that are described by Burnes and Jackson (2011), with the current situation noted in parentheses. As one can see in the figure, an implicit mismatch is created when a change is taking place, since one of the factors will change, and be out of alignment with the other two.

Figure 1: Alignment between different aspects of the change

Armenakis and Bedeian (1999) state that content, context, and process are factors that severely influence employees’ reactions to change efforts. These aspects show similarities with the ones mentioned by Burnes and Jackson (2011), but are of a broader nature. Where the factors that are mentioned by Burnes and Jackson (2011) concern the values systems, the authors recognize that the influence of the alignment of these three factors is also dependent on factors as implementation effectiveness, change leadership, and other influential factors. The factors that are mentioned by Armenakis and Bedeian (1999) concern all of these factors that have an influence on successful change. Following this line of reasoning, it is highly likely that when

alignment is actually the case at ING; the hard culture and way of working is being replaced by a softer one, but the way that the change was initiated was very hard (top-down, with no room for deliberation).

The approach to/process of the change greatly influences employees’ reactions. Changes in corporate culture, the structure or design of the organization, and the introduction of a new technology are considered by employees as factors that threaten their job, which create feelings of uncertainty and insecurity (Callan, Terry and Schweitzer, 1995; Ito and Brotheridge, 2001). This was noticed in the narratives on role unclarity, whereby managers hardly mentioned the uncertainty hanging around the new roles, but the employees expressing very often that there was a lot of unwanted vagueness on the new roles. Following Thiry (2002), however, it might not be uncertainty the respondents are experiencing, but ambiguity. Thiry (2002) describes uncertainty as the difference between the data that is required and the data that is already in possession. Ambiguity, on the other hand,

is the co-existence of multiple and conflicting interpretations, which in turn lead to confusion and a lack of understanding. It is this ambiguity that calls for sensemaking, as shown in figure 2, especially in the concept stage of the project and in the design phase where uncertainty is high. Atkinson et al. (2006) also mention that if that continuous need for sensemaking is not acknowledged, than the realization of the project plan and the increasing commitment may make further sensemaking impossible while the project moves forward. The figure shows that when the change is at the soft end

of the spectrum, where uncertainty and ambiguity are high, sensemaking and value analysis are important coping mechanisms.

Beer and Nohria (2000) proposed a distinction between the content of changes, differentiating between economic-driven transformations and changes to support organizational capabilities. At ING, there seems to be a combination of these two types. Introducing the new way of working is, ultimately, a mean to an end, namely more profit. This is and always will be the main goal of the organization. But also, it is a transformation to support organizational capabilities, by providing a faster way to respond to the client and to the environment. However, both types of changes have different consequences, and ING will probably face both of those

consequences. The economic-driven transformations are mostly associated with cutting costs and downsizing, resulting in layoffs. These can be consequences from the agile way of working and can be detrimental to employee morale, attitudes and well-being, even when it does not concern that person’s own job (Armstrong-Stassen, 2002; Paulsen et al., 2005). So the content of the change also plays a big part in the acceptance of the change by employees. This was retrieved from the narratives on role unclarity. Employees experience the change as a second-order change (Bartunek and Moch, 1987); a radical, disruptive change, whereby all of a sudden they have to abandon their old way of working entirely and adopt this new way of working, without knowing actually anything about the future.

The context of a change is as important as the other two factors in influencing the success of a change. For the topic of hierarchy, the difference in the composite narratives is explained by a finding of Edmondson and Woolley (1999), who found that the relationship between supervisors and their subordinates is a crucial factor in enabling employees to support the change. They go on by saying that if subordinates cannot rely on their supervisors’ help, they will find it very difficult to handle the change productively. This was found while looking at the narratives and especially on the theme of hierarchy, where employees expressed their difficulties in shaping the new way of working and their need of some form of guidance, while the managers expressed a non-importance of their hierarchical role as managers.

Proposition 1: Narrative differences on hierarchy during the transition as well as in the new way of working will remain, as long as non-alignment exists between either one of the three factors of content, context, and process of the change proposed by Armenakis and Bedeian (1999).

the fact that employees actually follow their managers, or that the employees long for the fact that they will not have to work for their current managers anymore in the new way of working, which causes a positive glance on the future.

Proposition 2: Composite narratives on the belief in new way of working of both groups will be similar when trust in management is high, with positive or negative belief trickling down to employees, depending on the narratives of the managers.

cognitive dissonance predicts that one will make adjustments to either their attitudes or their behavior, the theory of Cartesian anxiety states that one will fall back on old habits. This is not the same as adjusting one’s attitudes or behavior and is a different way of coping with a situation.

Proposition 3: Holding on to the old way of working because of the concept of Cartesian anxiety will cause members of the organization to be inhibited to fully adopt the new way of working, and return to old habits.

Future research and limitations

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Appendix A

|

Percentages of total amount of quotes of similar

categories mentioned by managers and employees

11% 14% 5% 5% 22% 2% 6% 5% 6% 10% 8% 5% 0% 5% 10% 15% 20% 25%

Autonomy Belief in new way

of working Faster delivery Hierarchy Not there yet Role unclarity

Percentages mentioned by managers and employees

Code Description Example

Autonomy Composite narratives of

both groups reveal the expectation of an increase in autonomy with the new, agile way of working

LS12: “We are in a transition he. We are trying to work Agile, dev ops and Scrum. With business involved. And we are trying to facilitate the teams to make that jump. Or leap. Or whatever. In the end stage we are hoping that the teams can work on a solitary basis, without involvement from the management. So that’s the end stage.”

LS04: “You give people more freedom, because they need to be creative around things. They need to really – what I try to have is that my people are early with their ideas. Hopefully entering into an advisory situation in which they can do all of the things we believe this is the best way to go.”

Increased autonomy is regarded as an important motivator to commitment and delivery

goes wrong, call me because there is nobody else to blame. And every individual team member says that, I think that delivers a lot so. I think that really helps to get that ownership done. And if they really feel that they can, that they are responsible, then I think they will strive to understand what they need to deliver, before they commit.”

LS08: “Lastly it also

benefits for employees in the teams, which get way more autonomy than they have today. And we learned that autonomy is a big motivator for people. We want to build purpose based teams. So purpose is a second very relevant motivator of people. So, theoretically, the change we are going to do, is very good for the people on the going, the change included myself. Because to be honest, I also experienced sometimes very low

degrees, look at my payslip, I earn a shit load of money, and I don’t have autonomy to decide on stuff.

Sometimes I think well they should pay me half and then even I’m over paid given the autonomy I have. So

actually on a bad day that really demotivates me.”

Belief in new way of working Positive belief in the new way of working was found in the composite narratives of both groups

LS11: “But, in the way of working, this is the first real paradigm shift. And this is also the first and only thing that really makes a difference.”

TS06: I'm looking forward to work in the new way of working, because I think it is really good. It's good for ING, it's good for the people (…)”.

Faster responses/delivery Agile way of working is expected to enable faster responses to changes

TS03: “And now that, by introducing the agile way, you really proof, you're really closer to the client, you can really experience what the client is meaning, do we understand each other right? and you can also show little improvements in a little way, so you involve the client much closer in the organization, I think you understand client is central for us, so the client is really leading. So the closer you are to him and the earlier you can show what you can do for him, I think that is the better product that you can deliver. It is good for the client, of course, and it is also good for us, because we are able to move much faster, at a much lower cost.”

million and then find out "well, maybe we should just stop". I think, earlier on in the cycle you can realize "okay, this is not where we should be going", and you can take either another direction or you can stop it.”

Agile way of working is expected to deliver products to the market in a timelier fashion