FROM CHANGE MANAGEMENT TO ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE CAPABILITY: RETHINKING THEORY, PRACTICE, AND RESEARCH IN AN ERA OF CONTINUOUS TRANSFORMATION
Abstract
Organizational change has shifted from an episodic managerial intervention to a persistent condition of contemporary organizational life. Technological disruption, artificial intelligence (AI), digital transformation, globalization, regulatory reform, economic uncertainty, workforce transformation, sustainability pressures, and changing stakeholder expectations have accelerated the speed, scope, and complexity of organizational transformation. Although change management has generated numerous theories, models, and intervention frameworks, organizations continue to struggle to implement, sustain, and institutionalize change. This article critically examines contemporary challenges facing change management theory, practice, and research through an integrative review of recent literature, with particular attention to scholarship published between 2024 and 2026. The article argues that the principal challenge is no longer the absence of change models but the persistence of assumptions that organizational change is predictable, sequential, and substantially controllable. Contemporary scholarship increasingly portrays change as dynamic, context-dependent, multilevel, and socially constructed, with employee responses shaped by timing, culture, leadership, emotions, justice perceptions, work environments, learning, and technological conditions. Digital transformation and AI further complicate change by generating new forms of technological, occupational, psychological, and structural uncertainty. The article identifies theoretical fragmentation, linearity, contextual variation, employee ambivalence, leadership and communication challenges, organizational culture, digital transformation, AI, change fatigue, and methodological limitations as major contemporary challenges. It proposes a shift from model-centered change management toward an adaptive organizational change capability perspective. From this perspective, sustainable transformation depends on the interaction of strategic direction, adaptive leadership, employee participation and readiness, sensemaking, technological capability, organizational culture, psychological safety, organizational learning, and continuous adaptation. The article concludes with a research agenda emphasizing longitudinal, multilevel, comparative, mixed-methods, digital, and context-sensitive approaches. Its central contribution is to reposition change management from the management of discrete transformation initiatives toward the development of an enduring organizational capability to interpret, mobilize, learn, adapt, and institutionalize change under conditions of uncertainty.
Keywords: organizational change, change management, change theories, employee responses, resistance to change, digital transformation, artificial intelligence, change leadership, organizational culture, organizational change capability
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