By making autonomy, mastery and purpose a critical part of their culture, IBM has aligned with a critical lesson learned of working in high performance cultures, and that is to create ownership of tasks and roles (Levin, Gottlieb, 2009). The most difficult and riskiest organizational change strategy is r-creation. This involves moving into new markets with new products, significantly changing the culture of an organization in the process. It is often done amidst significant stress and the threat of major loss to an organization, rarely taken on as part of a strategy of growth, more taken on as a strategy for survival. Most critical for re-creation strategies to succeed is the ability to create autonomy, mastery and purpose (Levin, Gottlieb, 2009) yet this is exceptionally difficult given how large the changes are that organizations face when going to this type of organizational strategy. Typically this strategy is relied on when a company faces exceptional threats. Microsoft being nearly rendered obsolete by the Internet is a case in point, as is the challenges they face with open source operating systems as well.

Conclusion

Of the four approaches to managing organizational change the most successful is adaptation as organizations can move into new, adjacent market areas without risking their entire organizational structure. Using adaptation as a strategy there is also the ability to set up customer listening systems and better understand the dynamics behind how markets are changing over time as well. In short, adaptation opens up the opportunity to grow in new markets without the risks associated with reorientation or re-creation. The Adaptation-based strategies are also the most effective...

This is also the riskiest in that it requires an organization to change both its product offerings and markets served, all the while also keeping its culture in place. It's exceptionally difficult to make this work. Adaptation is on the other hand more incremental and selective in its approach to choosing and securing on opportunities, and as a result has significantly greater rates of success over time. Further underscoring this approach is the fact that organizations can selectively define which areas of their cultures will also shift and change over time as well.
References

Jeffrey H. Dyer, and Kentaro Nobeoka. 2000. Creating and managing a high-performance knowledge-sharing network: The Toyota case. Strategic Management Journal: Special Issue: Strategic Networks 21, no. 3, (March 1): 345-367.

Levin, I., and J. Gottlieb. 2009. Realigning Organization Culture for Optimal Performance: Six principles & eight practices. Organization Development Journal 27, no. 4, (December 1): 31-46.

Newman, J. 2009. Building A Creative High Performance R&D Culture. Research Technology Management 52, no. 5, (September 1): 21-31.

Sackmann, S., P. Eggenhofer-Rehart, and M. Friesl. 2009. Sustainable Change: Long-Term Efforts Toward Developing a Learning Organization. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 45, no. 4, (December…