| Modern scholars and practitioners, alluding to the dynamic complexity of organizational change, have become disillusioned with linear approaches to organizational change and have tended to abandon traditional theories. Scholarly literature suggested that organizations need new approaches and conceptual frameworks regarding organizational change. This research investigation empirically explored organizational change. A global services company that represented a large hierarchical structure undergoing organizational change was selected for this study. Interview and observational data were collected and analyzed using the full suite of classic grounded theory research methods. Mentoring as soft social control was the basic social process by which mentors and mentees in the participating organization drove organizational change toward the ideal organization envisioned by the senior VP and other leaders. These leaders authored and supported a mentoring culture of equality, diversity, and inclusion. Over time, as generations of mentees of senior leaders developed into new corporate leaders and continued the mentoring culture, the leadership at the top of the bureaucratic hierarchy had gradually become a mentoring network comprised mostly of increasingly talented minorities, women, and minority women with a diverse array of talent filling the leadership pipeline. Rather than traditional linear approaches to organizational change, this study's grounded theory of mentoring as soft social control offered a new approach and conceptual framework regarding organizational transformation. |
