Background
A Literature Review is an important part of every paper. It is basically used to provide a brief but complete summary of the evidences or the related literatures that the researchers were able to dig out. Conducting a literature review enables the researchers as well as the readers to be assured that the paper they are reading is valid, reliable and does not contain any major type of error. This paper will focus on reviewing two journal articles that are both related to management and organizational change. The sources will be reviewed based on the strengths and weaknesses of the contents, the theoretical focus, the methodology used, the overall analysis of the results and how the results could affect other people’s practice.
Understanding Yourself as an Instrument of Change
Change is an important part of organizational development. An organization of people who does not know how to adjust and cope up with both internal and external changes will surely suffer from some dire consequences. To teach an organization or an individual how to adapt to changes was the author’s main objective. Most of the contents were focused in giving the reader tips and advices how to understand that change is concomitant with success. It did not simply talk about why change is an important part of organizational development—it gave the readers a good place to start in organizational development by giving out and explaining concepts and principles about organizational change. Understanding biases, the difference between problems and opportunities, and the different approaches in solving problems are some of the best concepts discussed in the text. It is critically relevant to the topic (organizational development) and the contents presented were all significant.
The greatest strength of this text is its content. The subtopics discussed in the text were all relevant to the topic. They were also very well organized and so the readers could never have a hard time searching through the entire text in case they came to look for specific data they want to extract from the text. Another strength of this paper is its strong thesis statement. The thesis statement was not directly stated in the text but it was as if it was. This is because all of the information presented relates to that thesis statement—that is, organizational change is doable, it’s just that the members of the organization have to know how. Nevertheless, this text has one weakness. The paper appears to be a systematic review. In a systematic review, the author does not typically do his own experiment. Instead, he uses other people’s work and uses them, together with the results and the conclusion, for his own research paper. So basically, a systematic review is a collection of the results, the literatures used and conclusions of other people’s study. Although the text reinforces the fact that organizational change is a feasible thing (Free Management Library, n.d.), it could still be considered a weakness since it only reinforces facts that had already been established.
Reading the text could change a person’s belief system as to how he could initiate change within an organization. This is because the text presents a collection of methods how to do so. Therefore, it’s only logical to think that the text could be used as a tool to impose changes in an individual’s practice.
If I Should Fall From Grace: Stories of Change and Organizational Ethics
This text is also strongly relevant to the topic “Organizational Change” just like the first one. It added other variables such as ethics and other things that may be affected with change. In fact, ethics was one of the primary variables discussed in the text. Rhodes, Pullen, & Clegg (2010) discussed how most people commonly think that organizational change will always result to good things. It is clear however, that such people do not know the ethical implications of organizational change. This was the topic where the text revolved.
The text could be considered good in terms of the number of examined variables. Unlike the first text, the second one tried to explain the relationship between ethics in practice, organizational change and organizational narrative. These three variables were carefully introduced, described and examined in the text. In a way, organizational changes could potentially affect the other two variables and how organizational change affects ethic in practice is exactly the equation that the authors are trying to figure out. One weakness that we could see in this text is that the authors were not able to formulate a decisive and specific conclusion. The authors concluded that downsizing is the usual practice of organizational leaders whenever they talk about change. The conclusion was actually a vague one. It may be said that they were not able to meet the objectives of their paper because the conclusion part is usually the tool used by other researchers to judge other researchers’ paper, although other parts of a source such as the methodology could also be used for the same purpose. Since the conclusion was quite vague and it was also clear that the author generalized, it could be said that this second text cannot be used as very strong evidence. Therefore, the text could not really be used as a tool to influence other people’s practice unlike the first text.
Works Cited
Free Management Library. (n.d.). Understanding yourself as an istrument of change. Accessed April 2012. Available at http://www.managementhelp.org/misc/fp-self.pdf .
Rhodes, C., Pullen, A., Clegg, S. (2010). If I Should Fall From Grace. Stories of Change and Organizational Ethics. Journal of Business Ethics.
