GRA 2425 Change Management
GRA 2425 Change Management
Organizations today often struggle to create meaningful, sustainable changes. Practitioners often draw on popular recipes for managing change rather than research-based insights and approaches.
The course aims to equip students to better manage organizational change by learning underlying theories and perspectives as well as gaining skills and develop their reflection on values and norms guiding change efforts. Through the course, students shall be able to critically assess recipes, templates and models of change that are circulated by consultants and management theorists. The students will also be exposed to a series of cases that are controversial and ambiguous, thus well suited to develop judgment from. The course draws on literature from social psychology, organization theory, culture studies, action research as well as applied management studies of organization development, change management, and design thinking.
After completing the course the students should:
- Know different models for managing planned and emergent change processes.
- Understand how a change process is rarely linear and episodic, but is characterized by fluctuations, adjustment, and sequencing of activities.
- Know how change agents can attend to and address recipient reactions to change
- Understand how sustainability transitions at the organization level entails integrating new objectives, and changing formal structures, work processes and beliefs.
After completing the course the students should be able to:
- Assess an organization’s need for and readiness for change
- Mobilize engagement and communicate need for change towards sustainability.
- Develop and evaluate systematic plans of action that carefully sets out and sequences the various stages of deliberate change processes
- Involve stakeholders in change processes
- Develop inquiry skills to tap into recipients understandings of change processes
After completing the course the students should be:
- Reflective and critical towards popular recipes for planned change
- Aware how change management models are based on different assumptions about employee motivation and skills.
- Aware of ethical dilemmas in change processes
- Conscious about the impact of organizational change on individual recipients
- Directive change
- Sensemaking and meaning making
- Organization development and participative change
- Positive and strength-based change
- Design approaches to change
- Simulation - implementing a sustainability initiative
- Digital transformation
- Cultural change
- Sustainability engagement
- Integrating sustainability in organizations
The course will be a combination of lectures, action learning exercises, case discussions, student poster presentations, paper discussions, simulations and other interactive learning elements.
This is a course that emphasizes action learning and students' active involvement. Class participation is important to facilitate an ongoing conversation between students across the different sessions. Expectations are that assigned cases, articles and book chapters are read prior to each lecture, so that students are well prepared for small group discussions or theoretically informed case analyses.
This is a course with a mandatory coursework requirement. The coursework must be approved to be able to sit for the exams.
It is the student’s own responsibility to obtain any information provided in class.
All courses in the Masters programme will assume that students have fulfilled the admission requirements for the programme. In addition, courses in second, third and/or fourth semester can have specific prerequisites and will assume that students have followed normal study progression. For double degree and exchange students, please note that equivalent courses are accepted.
Disclaimer
Deviations in teaching and exams may occur if external conditions or unforeseen events call for this.
| Mandatory coursework | Courseworks given | Courseworks required | Comment coursework |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mandatory | 4 | 6 | For each course day, a small exercise or written assignment is given. A complete list of assignments will be published at the start of the course on itslearning. At least 4 out of 6 assignments must be submitted and approved. |
| Assessments |
|---|
Exam category: Submission Form of assessment: Submission PDF Exam/hand-in semester: First Semester Weight: 40 Grouping: Individual Duration: 1 Semester(s) Comment: Individual reflection essay, where students build on and extend their insights from a selected subset of their work requirement assignments. The added expectation for the individual exam is that students reflect on their learning process and discuss their assignments in light of the course literature. Length 2000 words. Exam code: GRA 24254 Grading scale: ECTS Resit: Examination when next scheduled course |
Exam category: Submission Form of assessment: Submission PDF Exam/hand-in semester: First Semester Weight: 60 Grouping: Group/Individual (1 - 3) Duration: 1 Semester(s) Comment: A central learning element of the course is the term paper project which will be conducted in small groups of 3 students (smaller groups by exception). The term paper should empirically analyze an event of major organizational change event/process in a public, private or non-profit organization. Length 4000 words. Exam code: GRA 24255 Grading scale: ECTS Resit: Examination when next scheduled course |
All exams must be passed to get a grade in this course.
| Activity | Duration | Comment |
|---|---|---|
Teaching | 28 Hour(s) | |
Webinar | 4 Hour(s) | |
Feedback activities and counselling | 3 Hour(s) | |
Seminar groups | 20 Hour(s) | |
Student's own work with learning resources | 30 Hour(s) | |
Submission(s) | 50 Hour(s) | |
Group work / Assignments | 25 Hour(s) |
A course of 1 ECTS credit corresponds to a workload of 26-30 hours. Therefore a course of 6 ECTS credits corresponds to a workload of at least 160 hours.
