Intellectual landscape of research on change management: a bibliometric analysis

Abstract

Purpose This study aims to illustrate an overarching picture of the knowledge base on change management, including contributing authors, institutions and countries. The study also aims to elicit the intellectual structure of the knowledge base using science mapping. Design/methodology/approach The authors engaged 1,457 published documents, generated from a SCOPUS search, to analyse research conducted in the area of change management. Bibliometric indicators such as authors, institutions and countries were used in the analysis. Additionally, science mapping analyses such as keyword co-occurrence and co-citation were also performed using VOSviewer. Findings The findings indicated that scholarly work in the field of change management is on the rise. Furthermore, while the contribution from different regions of the world was observed, the most impactful scholarly works came from the West and Asia. Finally, it was found that research on change management could be classified into four schools of thought; engineering and information and communication technology (ICT) industry, organisational aspects of change, leadership aspects of change and human aspects of change. Originality/value This study contributes to the knowledge base on change management by creating an intellectual landscape of the existing research. The results demonstrated that the existing literature on the topic forms four broad clusters of knowledge and that the ICT industry is the current epicentre of research in this area. These findings could benefit researchers, as well as practitioners in streamlining their actions towards the most relevant and critical areas on the topic of change management.

Unravelling trends, patterns and intellectual structure of research on bankruptcy in SMEs: A bibliometric assessment and visualisation

“…Notably, systematic reviews incorporating bibliometrics are now widespread in business and management research [ [73] , [74] , [75] , [76] ], as a bibliometric analysis, which is essentially quantitative in nature [ 77 ] can help alleviate the bias that exists in manual and qualitative reviews as they are essentially subjective and thereby error-prone, mainly when the returned dataset for review is considerably large [ 72 ]. In concordance with previous review articles from the business and management discipline [ [78] , [79] , [80] , [81] , [82] ], this study incorporated bibliometric analysis tools like (1) performance analysis [ 83 ] to delineate the trends of publications, prominent articles and publication outlets (journals), most cited authors, influential institutions, and dominating nations in the field, and (2) science mapping using a coauthorship analysis [ 84 ] and network analysis with keyword co-occurrence [ 85 ] in VOSviewer [ 86 ] and bibliometrix in R [ 87 ] to deconstruct the major topics and themes delineating the critical intellectual structure of knowledge. Moreover, to ensure efficacy and effectiveness while interpreting the bibliometric analysis results, we scanned, sensed and substantiated the retrieved data, as suggested by Lim and Kumar [ 88 ].…”

Anthropomorphism and consumer behaviour: A SPAR‐4‐SLR protocol compliant hybrid review

“…Review methods based on bibliometrics emerged from information and library sciences (Schiuma et al, 2020) but now find their application in several fields (Ellegaard & Wallin, 2015; Sharma et al, 2021). It has also been extensively employed in studies belonging to business and management (Hota et al, 2020) and its subfields like marketing (Lara‐Rodríguez et al, 2019; Sepulcri et al, 2020), entrepreneurship (Block et al, 2020; Hota et al, 2020), finance (Baker et al, 2020; Pattnaik et al, 2020), organizational behaviour (Anand et al, 2020; Moosa et al, 2022), and so forth.…”

The Role of Managers in Corporate Change Management: A Bibliometric Review

“…From the global perspective of the literature on the management of business change provided by the proposed classification, it is striking that the main models for dealing with transformation processes in companies have been developed in recent times (the starting point can be established as the 1940s, with the work of Lewin) so that we have not yet accumulated even a century of scientific knowledge on the subject. Moreover, the number of publications about change management is "on the rise" [13].…”

“…Ref. [13] identifies three main clusters in its research on change management literature from 1995 to 2019: organizational change, management, and humans. The first two clusters fit properly with our findings, i.e., "organizational change" and "manage-ment", while the "humans" cluster could be linked with the critical role of the managers in pursuit of company performance, i.e., "performance".…”