EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS ON THE UTILITY OF RESEARCH DESIGNS IN CHANGE MANAGEMENT

Change Management is one discipline that is becoming a subject of interest to many academicians, organizations, consultants and other professionals from various disciplines, industries and sectors. This interest has been on the rise and has heightened research studies building on the existing body of knowledge. In the recent past, there has been an increase in the number of studies being conducted worldwide on Change Management. This paper has focused on the types of research designs being utilized to conduct studies on Change Management. An empirical analysis on the utility of research designs around the discipline of Change Management has been done on randomly-sampled studies, published in peer-reviewed journals, in the last five years. The scope of this study included 100 studies. The reference lists in these studies identified as the sample population, has resulted into a credible source of reference for some of the studies on Change Management undertaken between 2011and 2016. This brings together consolidation of research work from different sources in one paper, and can be adopted as a quick reference for empirical review. Findings of this study has revealed that majority of Change Management research utilizes qualitative research designs (17%) and case studies (13%). The study identified 11 types of research designs that included: qualitative, case study, hypothesis testing, empirical reviews, longitudinal, multiple design, exploratory, conceptual, survey, descriptive and experimental research designs. This paper has also provided a high-level description of these research designs and their applicability. From the findings, the utilization of the research designs has been explored around: themes of studies for instance leadership, resistance to change, application of models among others; places where the studies were conducted such as industry or sector, geographical location or across various organizations and the targeted population.