Purpose -Organizational change is a risky endeavour. Most change initiatives fall short on their goals and produce high opportunity and process costs, which at times outweigh the content benefits of organizational change. This paper seeks to develop a framework, offering a theoretical toolbox to analyze context-dependent barriers and enablers of organizational change. Starting from an organizational identity perspective, it aims to link contingency-based approaches, such as environmental scan, SWOT and stakeholder analysis, with insights from organizational behaviour research, such as knowledge sharing and leadership. Design/methodology/approach -The framework is informed by long-lasting field research into organizational change in an international policing environment. The theories in the framework are selected from the perspective of field validity in two ways; they were chosen because the topics covered by these theories emerged as relevant during the field research and therefore it can be expected they have applicability to the field. The authors' insights and suggestions are summarised in 13 propositions throughout the text. Findings -The analysis provides a clear warning that organizational change is more risky and multifaceted than change initiators typically assume. It is stressed that the external environment and the internal dynamics of organizations co-determine the meaning of managerial practices. This implies that cure-all recipes to organizational change are bound to fail. Originality/value -This paper makes an ambitious attempt to cross disciplinary boundaries in the field of organizational change research to contribute to a more comprehensive and holistic understanding of change processes by integrating perspectives that focus on the internal context and the external environment of organizations.

Summary This review examines workplace identity conflicts, offering three primary contributions. First, it reconciles hitherto fragmented perspectives on identity conflicts to offer an integrative and cross‐level perspective on identity conflicts at work. Second, it elucidates an important distinction between two types of identity conflicts, namely intra‐unit and inter‐unit conflicts, also outlining the different roots, moderators, and reconciliations of these conflict types. Third, it proposes an alternative perspective on identity conflicts as constructive forces for individual and organizational change, also stressing the importance of context and content in shaping identity conflict outcomes. Thus, this paper provides a comprehensive overview of identity conflicts in the workplace, clarifying the current state of the science and offering new directions for future research. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

There is a lack of consistent evidence that downsizing leads to improved financial performance. Lowered commitment after painful downsizing periods is identified as an important reason why downsizing does not show the intended long-term effects. This paper provides a meta-analytical overview of the impact of fairness on organizational commitment for survivors and victims after a downsizing operation. Among 37 samples (11,256 persons), a positive relationship was found between fairness and affective organizational commitment (q 5 0.40) for both survivors and victims. Three moderators of the fairness-commitment relationship were identified: (1) for survivors, procedural justice matters more than distributive justice; (2) the impact of fairness is stronger in countries with an individualistic (versus collectivistic) culture; (3) fairness matters more when mass layoff is initiated for profit maximization (versus economic necessity).

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Brand managers constantly face the dilemma of adapting their brands to changing consumer taste without diluting the brand’s essence. This study presents an approach that can be used to establish which features constitute the essence of a brand, and how candidate new features would affect the perceived essence of the brand. We build on Ahn’s (1998) causal status hypothesis, which holds that the essence of concepts (e.g., brands) consists of those features perceived to cause most other features of the brand. We empirically illustrate how this approach provides important information about consumer perceptions of envisaged changes to an existing brand. Copyright Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2006Branding, Positioning,