National Culture and Organizational Change

In this chapter, we examine the role of national culture for understanding organizational change. We review extant cross-cultural studies of organizational change and offer an integrative framework of micro and macro approaches. We then highlight the dimensions of national culture that are conceptually related to the notion of change and elaborate on a recently developed taxonomy of cultural change orientations, including the dimensions of cultural rigidity, cultural affective reactance, and cultural routine seeking. Drawing on this taxonomy we develop conceptual propositions linking national culture to key events and components in the evolution of organizational change, including the initiation of change, the change process, and recipients’ responses to organizational change. We conclude by discussing the implications of our framework for theory and practice.