Navigating through uncertainty : senior manager sensemaking during strategic change

Abstract

Strategic change is a fundamental type of organisational change that is dependent on senior management’s engagement as well as their role in interpreting and enacting the new direction of the organisation. Strategic change unfolds in the organisation through the processes of sensemaking and sensegiving as organisation’s members construct new meanings for the organisation and environment. Sensemaking is considered a team-based process that creates and gives meaning to change, thus working as the key mechanism for shifting the organisation in the desired direction.

Strategic sensemaking research has neglected the senior manager aspect, and researchers have been calling for more knowledge on how meanings develop in senior management teams. Especially the public sector has been given less attention, while researchers have pushed the field to understand how senior managers in the public sector use sensemaking to construct meanings. This thesis aims to enhance the understanding of how senior manager sensemaking manifests during a strategic change initiative by focusing on how meanings are attached to the change, how sensemaking evolves during the change initiative, and how these changes are reflected in senior management narratives. The research is constructed as a single-case study on a public sector organisation using a narrative analysis.

The findings indicated that senior managers were seen to construct two types of narratives. One narrative was a progressive narrative with transformative meanings, and one was a stability narrative where senior managers attached preservative and regressive meanings to the change. The narrative development was non-linear, as the senior managers fluctuated between the narratives based on their value perceptions of the change. When value perception was seen to be higher, senior managers engagement with the progressive narrative, senior managers’ sensemaking and strategic vision drove the organisation to adopt the new direction and construct new organisational meanings. Conversely, senior managers were seen to engage with the stability narrative when the value perception of the change was lower. This narrative was seen as the balancing effect when the organisation was facing uncertainty. With lower value perception, regressive meanings were also linked to the change.

Leading strategic change was seen as the balancing act between narratives and subsequent sensemaking. The sensemaking of the senior managers was seen to emerge from frames of reference, local context and value perception. Value perception mechanisms were seen to enhance sensemaking and aimed in increasing engagement with the change as well as supportive meaning construction.