A Newtonian metaphor for organizational change

A Newtonian metaphor for describing the effect of a radical change stimulus on the productive ability of work groups is presented in this paper. The impact of a downsizing process on a Fortune 500 company was modeled in terms of its effect on employee perceptions of their work context and their capacity for doing productive work. Also investigated was the extent to which downsizing led to entropy (disorder) or negentropy (order) as employees revised their work schemas. The results indicate that a mechanistic shift in information processing perceptions and a decline in capacity to maintain effective work behaviors occurred as a result of the downsizing. An interesting finding was that the magnitude of this productivity decline depended only on the initial and terminal information processing perceptions of the managers and not their intermediate perceptions, suggesting that the managers' perceptual state demonstrated the open systems property of equifinality.<
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