Gestão de mudança organizacional durante a pandemia de COVID-19: um estudo de caso

Abstract

This study argues that 1) employee autonomy and empowerment have positive effects by preventing resistance to change, 2) organizations that empower their employees with minimal structures are agile and impede balance or stability, and 3) organizations in constant change enable employees to feel comfortable with subsequent changes. The arguments are relevant to theory and practice in organizations as they defend a holistic perspective based on structures and cognition. This qualitative case study with multilevel data collection in a Brazilian retail e-commerce company aims to answer the question: how the organization and its employees responded to the COVID-19 pandemic, generating individual changes and influencing the change process? Each employee and manager had the opportunity to make sense (sensemaking) in different ways. First, the pandemic mitigated the need for awareness and desire stages. In a disruptive life-or-death scenario, the lack of agile response causes organizations and people to succumb. Second, step-by-step change management models cannot be considered to be sequential, one prerequisite to another. Each individual's abilities to embrace complexity, paradoxes, and improvise with an experimentation mindset were key to successful change.