Stephan Ryf
Last Name
Ryf
First name
Stephan
Email
stephan.ryf@unisg.ch
5 results
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Item type:Publication, Making Sense of Strategic Change: A Systematic Review(2025-07-05)Over the last 30 years, scholars have provided rich insights into how organizational actors make sense of and give sense to strategic change. However, the respective literature has become increasingly fragmented, as different parts of the literature focus on different actor groups (top management, middle management, or frontline employees) and on different change phases (change initiation or change implementation). This fragmentation prevents a more holistic understanding of how organizational actors construct intersubjective meaning over time. Against this background, I provide a systematic review of the key sensemaking processes and practices through which top managers, middle managers, and frontline employees contribute to the construction of intersubjective meaning during the initiation and implementation phases of strategic change. My review highlights ambiguity as a central theme, fostering openness and flexibility during initiation while requiring careful management during implementation to ensure alignment. Drawing on this trade-off, I propose a conceptual model contrasting two key approaches to navigating these challenges: top-down and collaborative. This perspective deepens our theoretical understanding and offers actionable insights for future research, guiding scholars in exploring the interplay between organizational sensemaking, ambiguity, and time across organizational levels.Type:conference paper - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Managerial Sensegiving in Times of Crisis: Facilitating Strategic Change Under High Distress(2024-08)While prior research has provided rich insights into how strategic change unfolds through sensemaking and sensegiving, the existing literature has predominantly focused on contextual conditions characterized by relatively low levels of urgency and threat. My study contributes to addressing this gap by examining how the effort of leaders to effectively construct and disseminate meaning around strategic change is influenced by the context of an organizational crisis. Drawing on the drastic turnaround of multinational corporation ABB in the early 2000s, I find that the CEO effectively mobilized the company’s strategic change program to shift institutionalized cognitive schemes through sense breaking, sense specification, sense enactment, and sense reinforcement. In a supportive process, the CEO constructed meaning around the uncertainty surrounding the crisis to ensure continued commitment, establish clear expectations, create cognitive capacity, and invoke the company’s core identity. My analysis contributes to the body of work on managerial sensegiving by elucidating mechanisms and dynamics that allow for a particularly quick and abrupt shift in established interpretive schemes, all the while facilitating a continued, positive enactment of change.Type:conference paper - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
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