Organizational Change and Sensemaking: How Micro-actors Ignite Change through Sensemaking: A Case Study

Abstrakt

This thesis analyses how micro-actors ignite change within a large organization, namely the multinational tech company Jabra. To answer this question the researchers collected observation data and conducted qualitative interviews with 12 advisory board members of Jabra Women's Network, a group of 17 employees in Jabra who formed a volunteer network with the ambition to address gender diversity issues in Jabra. The results showed how board members from the Jabra Women’s Network, as micro-actors, had successfully been influencing their ambitions upon Jabra, thereby igniting change, through iterative sensemaking processes and the ability to organize through sensemaking. The results further show how bottom-up change was initiated because of the need for micro-actors to have organizational identity and values aligned with their own.
From a theoretical perspective, this study contributes to the understanding of change by showing the interplay between micro-actor and organizational sensemaking to be crucial for successful implementation of change.