Most organizations strive for improved performance, yet often these efforts fail to generate the expected results. Rather than focusing on specific tools and techniques for increasing efficiency, this research presents three studies that examine patterns in the way that employees perceive and enact change. Each study highlights a different pattern that contributes to change processes and outcomes through comparative case analysis.

These studies redirect attention from external programs of change to the internal processes of translating and integrating change within the organization. I propose that the reason that improvement efforts fail is because organizations fail to attend to the underlying meanings, beliefs, and behaviors that shape change processes and outcomes. This research makes three primary contributions. First, it develops an understanding of how patterns of discourse produce meanings that can either inhibit or promote change. Two distinct patterns are identified and their implications are discussed. Second, it extends a methodology developed in the field of cognitive anthropology to studies of organization development and change. Cultural consensus analysis (CCA) is a set of statistical procedures that can be used to objectively examine shared values, and the findings demonstrate that this methodology can be used to assess alignment between organizational culture and a desired program of change. The final study links planned and emergent theories of change to examine how organizations can foster a system of continuous improvement. While most studies treat planned and emergent change as dichotomous approaches, few have explored how both approaches simultaneously contribute to change outcomes.