Abstract
Globally, the world is changing at an unprecedented rate and organizations must continuously
find ways to stay relevant. This holds even more true within South Africa, a country still coming
to terms with a complex and painful history whilst trying to grapple with the current socioeconomically
and politically challenged landscape. Top management is faced with an array of
decisions and potential changes to make externally to ensure competitiveness in the market,
whilst internally ensuring engaged and committed employees. To navigate this constantly
changing environment, organizations employ the services of change management
consultants.
However, the change process is notoriously intricate and challenging. For many employees,
when confronted with change, a reaction process occurs where unconscious processes and
habitual defence mechanisms arise. These defences can potentially hinder the way
employees adapt to organisational change. This difficulty is amplified when change
consultants do not have access to adequate information and resources from the relevant
organization. These elements are vital to the employment of both the change processes of
sensemaking and sense giving. Studies continuously indicate the importance of top
management in providing the support and access to information and internal resources.
However, it many cases they obstruct the change process leaving change consultants to
navigate the change process with little internal support.
This study aims to decipher the process and contribute to the limited empirical South African
data by investigating how sensemaking and sensegiving are used by change management
consultants to facilitate the change management practice in South Africa, with a specific
consideration of how internal communication is used to facilitate this process. This exploratory
research was done by a conducting firstly, a literature review to ground the study and
secondly, a qualitative study grounded in the interpretive paradigm. The literature review
explores the theoretical framework of this study - sensemaking and sense giving, as well as
key concepts that include organisational change and the management and resistance thereof,
and the role of internal communication. The empirical study consisted of semi-structured
interviews with change consultants working within the South African context. Non-probability,
snowball sampling was applied to identify change management consultants with more than
five years’ experience at business management or change management consulting firms
working with JSE listed companies in South Africa. The data was inductively analysed using
a thematic analysis based on Zang and Wildemuth’s (2009) eight step qualitative content
analysis process.