Based On Organizational Identity: An Study On Strategic Change

Organizational development itself is a process of continuous change. Faced with a changing environment and fierce market competition, only those who are good to change their strategy and promote strategic change may have access to more opportunities and survival space. But for most organizations, strategic change did not obtain the desired improvement and development, but make the organization stuck into troubles. The reason is that strategic change is a complex process involving a variety of specific factors and abstract factors, ignoring these important factors may result in conclusions out of reality.Organizational identity provides a new and valuable perspective to strategic change research. Organizational identity is defined as members’ perception of “who we are, as an organization”. Previous studies have shown that the organizational identity has a significant role in strategic change, corporate core competencies, competitive dynamics and strategic performance. Among them, the study on organizational identity and strategic change is a cutting-edge issue that is gaining more and more attention. Research in this field is still rare.Through the studying literature on organizational identity and strategic change, this paper explains the connotation of strategic change and organizational identity, analyzes the environmental factors related to strategic change, recognized the important role of the top management team. Through the in-depth and detailed study of literature, this paper analyze and summarize the incremental change and radical change, emphasize identity management during incremental changes and reconstruction identity in radical change.This paper comes to three conclusions. First, strategic change and organizational identify is closely related, thus changes in strategy is often accompanied by changes in organizational identity. Secondly, from the perspective of organization identity, strategic change can be divided into incremental change and radical change. Incremental changes cause little identity gap. Implement incremental change is to maintain the stability and continuity of the organization identity. Radical change often brings great identity gap, during which organizations need to change the core elements of the organization and reconstruct organization identity. Third, sensemaking and sensegiving are essential for strategic change. Senior managers make sense of strategic change through their own behavior and affect the sensemaking of members to successfully implement strategic change.Based on the concept of organization identity to study strategic change is a brand-new method. This paper try to turn researchers’ attention to "as an organization, we who are" and concerns the managers’ sensemaking and sensegiving. This article enriches and develops the theory of strategic change and organizational identity. Meanwhile, the paper focuses on the dynamics of strategic change and organizational identity may provide theoretical guidance for enterprises in a time of great change.