Measuring Institutionalization of planned organizational change

Over the last ten years, a multitude of projects designed to improve organizational effectiveness have implemented bold, innovative strategies to bring about fundamental changes in how we design work and organizations.. Developing and refining innovations such as self-designing teams, labor-management problem solving groups (hierarchically designed) and parallel organization have given us ways to bring about large scale system changes designed to improve productivity and the quality of working life (Lawler, 1982). While there has been a good deal of interest in whether these large scale system change efforts have improved productivity, there has been less interest in the life and viability of these projects over time" Unfortunately, a good deal of the literature on change focuses on techniques of change and for introducing change but not on maintaining change over time (Goodman and Kurke, 1982) .. To bring about effective organizational change, we must extend out knowledge to the process of institutionalization, which underlies the persistence or viability of these organizational change programs.. While some recent theoretical works (Goodman, Bazerman, and Conlon, 1979; Goodman and Dean, 1982) have begun to explore the meaning of institutionalization, very little work has been done on measuring institutionalization.