infonet-economy

Analyzing the change of organizational routines in a public health care organization, this paper contributes to a better understanding of how organizational routines change when a network of interconnected routines is affected by a change initiative. We focus on the role of reflexivity (Feldman, 2000) and individual as well as collective agency (Howard-Grenville, 2005) in different stages of the change process. We identify the establishment of reflection routines as a key success factor for implementing routine change and enabling continuous adaptation of organizational routines. The process of "routinizing reflection" that we observe in our empirical case explains how collective reflection becomes established within an organization and how it drives the change of organizational routines not only as temporary episodic change but as a basis for ongoing continuous adaptation of routines.