Abstract

Organizational culture is widely known as one of the main influencing factors on the success of change projects. Nevertheless, there is only few hands-on help for change managers on how to deal with the influence of organizational culture. The two main research trends in this topic focus on either describing culture with elaborated models or finding methods to change culture. But for many change managers the question is how to bring a project to success under the circumstances of the actual culture. The pragmatic approach of the research project “culture based change” is based on two assumptions: First there are certain characteristics in culture which are essential for the success of change projects. Second there is not the one “change culture”, but rather different cultures are successful in different situations or different types of change projects. To find out similarities more than 500 managers and consultants were interrogated in an online survey about their experiences in change projects to find out, which characteristics of organizational culture are typically enhancing or blocking change attempts. Correlations between the success of change projects and cultural characteristics are presented for four different types of change projects. Finally further research demand is shown. The findings of this survey will be presented in a 30 minute paper presentation.