Organizational change and development.

By Karl E. Weick, Ryan W. Quinn. Annual Review of Psychology, 2026

3,020 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recent analyses of organizational change suggest a growing concern with the tempo of change, understood as the characteristic rate, rhythm, or pattern of work or activity. Episodic change is contrasted with continuous change on the basis of implied metaphors of organizing, analytic frameworks, ideal organizations, intervention theories, and roles for change agents. Episodic change follows the sequence unfreeze-transition-refreeze, whereas continuous change follows the sequence freeze-rebalance-unfreeze. Conceptualizations of inertia are seen to underlie the choice to view change as episodic or continuous.

Subfields: Management Science and Operations Research, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/95f7bcfe957402b813627e02891b7fc2427ff6e7

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Citations in the corpus

The effects of transformational and change leadership on employees' commitment to a change: a multilevel study. (2008, background): “Although change processes have been conceptualized in a variety of ways, the manner in which leaders treat and involve employees during change has received the greatest amount of attention and has been shown to be a powerful determinant of individuals’ reactions to organizational changes (Beer, 1980”
Cause Maps, Sensemaking, and Planned Organizational Change (2001, background): “This is consistent with the writings on sensemaking by Gioia (1986), Weick (1979), and Weick and Quinn (1999).”
Psychological capital, work engagement and organisational commitment amongst call centre employees in South Africa (2013, background): “Weick and Quinn (1999) thus believe that sustaining employees’ hope is necessary for employee wellbeing.”
Positioning Change Recipients’ Attitudes Toward Change in the Organizational Change Literature (2010, background): “…the four dualities are (a) the nature of change (i.e., planned or episodic change vs. emergent or continuous change; Porras & Silvers, 1991; Weick & Quinn, 1999); (b) the level of change (i.e., individual level or collective level; Aktouf, 1992; Bray, 1994; Pettigrew, Woodman, & Cameron,…”
Can Positive Employees Help Positive Organizational Change? Impact of Psychological Capital and Emotions on Relevant Attitudes and Behaviors (2008, background): “In particular, the capacity for generating new pathways seems essential to navigating discontinuous and unpredictable change processes (Weick & Quinn, 1999).”
Transformational change: governance interventions for climate change adaptation from a continuous change perspective (2017, methodology): “Originally, this intervention repertoire is targeted towards realising a situation in which organisations are capable of continuous changes to changing circumstances (Weick and Quinn 1999).”
Middle managers' uncertainty management during organizational change (2006, background): “Although potentially too linear in nature (see Weick and Quinn, 1999), many change process models categorize change into pre-, during, and post-implementation.”
Leaders’ Impact on Organizational Change: Bridging Theoretical and Methodological Chasms (2019, background): “Overall, the research of organizational change (for reviews see, Oreg et al., 2011; Weick & Quinn, 1999) can be classified into two streams.”
Institutional Entrepreneurship for Knowledge Regions: In Search of a Fresh Set of Questions for Regional Innovation Studies (2011, background): “More often than not, however, it is stressed that change is the normal state of affairs and stability is just an anomaly (Pettigrew, 1992; Tsoukas and Chia, 2002; Weick and Quinn, 1999).”
Toward a Theory of Managing Organizational Conflict (2002, methodology): “Applied behavioral scientists have developed organizational development strategies and techniques for improving the organizational effectiveness (Beer & Walton, 1987; Burke, 1994; French, Bell, & Zawacki, 1989; Golembiewski, 1998), The International Journal of Conflict Management, Vol. 13, No. 3,…”