Kotter’s eight-stage model

Another widely-known model of change is the eight-stage model that Kotter (1995) has presented in order to guide leaders to transform their organisation successfully and avoid the common pitfalls (Figure 12). Furthermore, Kotter (1996) has also gathered the insights into a book Leading Change that has brought the eight-step process into wider awareness. The model has received a significant popularity in the context of change management (Appelbaum et al., 2012; Pollack & Pollack, 2015), and even some applications can be found from the procurement context (e.g. Day & Atkinson, 2004; Lintukangas et al., 2009). Kotter’s model cannot be clearly categorised either as a planned or as an emergent approach as By (2005) sees the eight-stage model as a way to structure the emergent change, whereas Worley and Mohrman (2014) and Cummings et al. (2016) consider the eight-step process more as a continuum of the planned approach as they state that the steps of Kotter’s process can be mapped into the three steps Lewin has initially proposed. Hence, it seems that clear consensus about the categorisation of the eight-stage model does not exist even though it is widely applied in many organisational contexts.

Figure 12. Kotter’s eight-stage model (based on Kotter, 1995)

As Figure 12 presents and the name suggests, Kotter (1995) models the change process through eight steps that are (1) establishing a sense of urgency, (2) forming a powerful guiding coalition, (3) creating a vision, (4) communicating the vision, (5) empowering others to act on the vision, (6) planning for and creating short-term wins, (7) consolidating improvements and producing still more change, and (8) institutionalising new approaches. As presented here,

Kotter’s change process may appear as a sequential process, but in reality, the process can be more complex than a linear series of stages as the speed of different sub-groups in an organisation moving through the stages may vary, or alternatively, the stages can be even overlapping in a real change process (Pollack & Pollack, 2015). In the same vein, Appelbaum et al. (2012) present some criticism for example regarding the rigidity of the approach, but on the other hand, they also acknowledge that the eight-stage process provides a good starting point for implementing change and it is likely to improve the results even though its relation to success should not be taken for granted.

4 METHODOLOGY

The research is conducted as a qualitative research. According to Eriksson and Kovalainen (2008) qualitative research is often applied in order to understand the reality as socially constructed, which means that qualitative methods often require interpretation and understanding, and aim at creating a holistic insight of the issue concerned in the study. As category management and change management in the procurement context are emerging topics lacking comprehensive prior knowledge in academic research (see e.g. Heikkilä &

Kaipia, 2009; Hesping & Schiele, 2015; Schneider & Wallenburg, 2013), there is a need to understand those phenomena in a detailed level and produce new knowledge. Furthermore, qualitative research suits well when the phenomenon is sensitive in its context (Eriksson &

Kovalainen, 2008). Change management is especially a context-specific topic for example due to its dependency on organisational culture and values, and thus, needs to be studied in the concerned organisation.

The research combines two qualitative research approaches: case study and action research. A case study has typically two main characteristics: firstly, it focuses on investigating a contemporary phenomenon in-depth in its context, and secondly, the phenomenon and the context cannot be separated from each other (Yin, 2009). This study also focuses on emerging topic that requires profound understanding. Moreover, as the reaserch is targeted on change management approach, it is not easy to set clear boundaries between the phenomenon and the context since the context strongly influences the change management required. As case study is especially a useful approach when striving for an in-depth analysis of phenomenon (Ellram, 1996; Kähkönen, 2011) that can be relatively novel and only little is known before (Ellram, 1996), it can be applied in this reaserch to gain a better understanding about the concerned phenomena that are relatively immature in the procurement context. In addition, case study is particularly suitable for research questions that aim at answering “how” or “why” (Yin, 2009), which makes it also relevant for this research as the main research question starts with “how”

and concerns a contemporary phenomenon with only little control. To be more specific, the research can be considered as an exploratory case study since according to Voss et al. (2002) exploratory case studies are typically needed in the beginning when the topic is relatively

novel, which applies also to the topic of this research. Hence, the aim is to identify questions to investigate in the further studies (Kähkönen, 2011), which can be also seen as a goal and contribution of this study.

Secondly, the research can be considered as action research that according to Eriksson and Kovalainen (2008) involves not only deriving the research problem from practice, but also actively collaborating in solving the research problem through engaging and working with the business. Hence, this research can be considered as actions research since the researcher is part of the case organisation and involved in the implementation of category management process on a daily basis. Furthermore, action research is particularly useful in describing series of actions occurring over time, which makes it especially suitable in studying the process of change (Eriksson & Kovalainen, 2008). Thus, also in this study, action research can provide significant value since the change management perspective is adopted for the implementation of category management.