Document Type

Article

Publication Date

5-1-2007

Abstract

Academic Medical Centers, despite their research and educational prowess, are in a financial crisis. Increasing costs, stiffer competition, and anticipated tightening of budgets have created new levels of urgency and vibrancy among medical school deans and hospital CEOs about the need to increase the productivity of the clinical enterprise. To date, most of these efforts have failed- this study attempts to understand why. The conceptual model sets up the relative advantage created by the organizational innovation and resulting organizational performance as the primary independent variable and dependent variables respectively. Organizational sensemaking among the sponsors, designers, and implementers of the change effort mediate the outcome. The power of physicians to either embrace or resist the change moderates the outcome. A preliminary conjecture is that for successful coordination to occur during the change process, two ingredients must be present simultaneously: (1) efficient and effective sensemaking among all actors involved in the change continuum, and, (2) physicians who build on the results of the sensemaking to channel their organizational power to embrace and champion the change. It is expected that this study will assist in the understanding of distributed sensemaking in loosely coupled organizations and will be of value to both scholars and practitioners.

Keywords

financial crises, loosely coupled systems, planned organizational change, sensemaking, strategic responses to change

Rights

© The Author(s). Kelvin Smith Library provides access for non-commercial, personal, or research use only. All other use, including but not limited to commercial or scholarly reproductions, redistribution, publication or transmission, whether by electronic means or otherwise, without prior written permission is strictly prohibited.

Department/Center

Design & Innovation

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