Change management within XR training

Against the backdrop of increasing globalisation deregulation, the rapid pace of technological innovation, a growing knowledge workforce, and shifting social and demographic trends, few would dispute that the primary task for management today is the leadership of organisational change.

Since the need for change often is unpredictable, it tends to be reactive, discontinuous, ad hoc, and often triggered by a situation of organisational crisis. Despite the  salience of change management as a necessity in order to survive and succeed in today’s highly competitive and continuously evolving environment (Luecke, 2003; Okumus and Hemmington, 1998), Balogun and Hope Hailey (2004) report a failure rate of around 70 per cent of all change programmes initiated.

To explain these findings, it has been  suggested that this poor success rate indicates a fundamental lack of a valid framework of how to implement and manage organisational change as what is currently available to academics and practitioners is a wide range of contradictory and confusing theories and approaches (Burnes, 2004). In a similar vein, Guimaraes and Armstrong (1998) argue that mostly personal and superficial analyses have been published in the area of change management.

This stream of my PhD project attempts to address this gap by consolidating the research literature on chanage management, and to provide a framework for the the integration of XR technologies.