Explaining the Selection of Routines for Change during Organizational Search

Abstract

We examine how organizations select some routines to be changed, but not others, during organizational search. Selection is a critical step that links an exogenous trigger for change, change in individual routines, and larger processes of organizational adaptation. Drawing on participant observation of an initiative to improve perioperative efficiency in seven Ontario hospitals, we find that organizational roles shape selection by influencing both politics and frames in organizational search. Roles shape politics by defining the role-specific goals of the people who have authority to change a routine. Organizations will not select a routine for change unless at least some elites-people with role-based authority-frame the existing routine as negatively affecting their role-specific goals. Roles also shape individuals' frames.Because people are only partially exposed to interdependencies between routines in their dayto-day work, they may not be fully aware of the diverse impact that an existing routine can have on their goals. Proponents for change can use strategic framing to focus attention on interdependencies between routines to get elites to better see how an existing routine negatively affects their goals. They can also change elites' goals by using strategic framing to focus attention on new and broader goals that the change in routine would promote.Keywords: work, search, routines, hospitals and health care, conflict and cooperation Organizational routines are a key mechanism by which organizations can change, adapt, and maintain stability over time (Nelson and Winter, 1982;Feldman and Pentland, 2003;Becker et al., 2005;Pentland et al., 2012). Routines are recognizable, repetitive patterns of interdependent action that govern work processes in organizations (Feldman and Pentland, 2003). Research over 20 years has articulated a practice perspective on routines, theorizing how routines change. This literature shows that the lived experience of an organizational routine, including flexibility in how it is used, can be a source of change in the routine and thus the organization (e.g., Feldman, 2000;Feldman and Pentland, 2003;Howard-Grenville, 2005; Pentland and Feldman, 2005;Parmigiani and Howard-Grenville, 2011;Salvato and Rerup, 2011). It has developed the idea that individual routines could be generative systems, in which the dynamics within a routine could trigger change endogenously. In conceptualizing the individual routine as a generative system (Pentland and Feldman, 2005), the source of change comes from experience-feedback, observation, and trial-and-error-in enacting the routine.Change in a routine can also be triggered by an exogenous event. Cacciatori (2012) examined challenges experienced in an effort to alter the bidding routine in an engineering firm in response to an environmental shift-a change in government contracting procedures.Zbaracki and Bergen (2010) examined change in the pricing routine in a manufacturing organization in response to an industry shift-a competitor's move ...

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