DDBA 8521 Week 8 Change Theory Comparison Example

Kotter's Eight Steps or Pettigrew's Process: Which Account Explains What the Documents Show About a Regional Airline's Integration of a Smaller Carrier, and What Evidence Would Reverse the Choice

Student Name

Walden University

DDBA 8521: Seminar in Change Management

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Kotter's Eight Steps or Pettigrew's Process: Which Account Explains What the Documents Show About a Regional Airline's Integration of a Smaller Carrier, and What Evidence Would Reverse the Choice

The Shared Case

The seminar's shared case is a composite regional airline's integration of a smaller carrier it acquired in 2023, combining two pilot groups, two reservation systems and two maintenance operations into one airline by early 2025. The documents available for the period include the integration plan presented to the board in March 2023, monthly integration committee minutes, two employee surveys, the pilots' seniority list arbitration decision and the post-integration report written in mid-2025. The question is whether Kotter's stage model or Pettigrew's processual approach better explains what the documents show.

What Each Account Predicts

Kotter (1996) set out an ordered path of eight moves for successful change, opening with persuading people that change cannot wait and assembling a strong group to lead it, passing through a shared picture of the future and early visible gains, and closing with new ways of working embedded in the culture. A stage account predicts that the documents will show these steps in roughly that order, and that problems will trace to skipped or rushed steps.

Pettigrew (1990) urged researchers to follow change as it unfolds inside its setting, history and politics, with content, context and process interacting over time, and that apparent sequences are often constructed after the fact. A processual account predicts that the documents will show change moving through negotiation, contested interests and events outside leaders' control, with the order of developments shaped by those forces rather than by a plan.

What the Documents Show

The March 2023 plan reads like Kotter's model: it opens with the urgency of competition from low-cost carriers, names a steering committee and sets out a vision of "one airline, one culture." But the committee minutes tell a different story. For the first nine months, they record the integration being driven by one issue the plan barely mentioned: merging the two pilot seniority lists. The pilot unions could not agree, the dispute went to arbitration and the reservation system merger was delayed twice because it depended on combined crew scheduling, which depended on the seniority decision. The arbitration award in December 2023 reordered the entire integration. Short-term wins, which the plan scheduled for mid-2023, came in mid-2024. The post-integration report, written in 2025, presents the integration as following the plan's steps, with the seniority dispute described as a single obstacle.

The Choice

Pettigrew's account explains more of what the documents show. The sequence of the integration was set by a contested negotiation between pilot groups and by an outside arbitrator, not by the plan. Kotter's steps describe the plan and the final report, but the minutes show those steps were rearranged by events. Weick and Quinn (1999) noted that what leaders later describe as episodic, planned change is often a series of continuous adjustments; the final report's account of a stepwise integration is such a later description.

What Would Reverse the Choice

The choice would reverse if the documents showed that the guiding coalition anticipated the seniority dispute and planned around it, so that the delays were managed steps rather than reactions. The March 2023 plan mentions seniority in one sentence, and the minutes record surprise at the arbitration timeline, so the evidence does not currently support that reading. If interviews with committee members revealed private planning that the documents do not record, the stage account would gain ground.

What Each Account Offers Practitioners

The choice between accounts is not only academic. A leader using Kotter's model would have planned the integration as a sequence and, when the seniority dispute stalled it, treated the delay as a failure to build enough urgency or coalition. A leader using Pettigrew's approach would have expected the integration's order to be set by contested interests and would have mapped those interests, starting with the two pilot groups, before fixing a timeline. The documents suggest the airline's leaders thought in Kotter's terms and were surprised by an obstacle that a processual reading would have placed at the center from the start. For the next acquisition, the lesson is to identify the negotiations that will set the sequence before publishing one. That would not make the plan unnecessary; it would make it honest about which steps depend on agreements the company does not control.

Limits

Documents record what their authors chose to write. The minutes may understate planning done outside meetings, and the final report may be a summary rather than a claim about how events unfolded.

References

Kotter, J. P. (1996). Leading change. Harvard Business School Press.

Pettigrew, A. M. (1990). Longitudinal field research on change: Theory and practice. Organization Science, 1(3), 267-292. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1.3.267

Weick, K. E., & Quinn, R. E. (1999). Organizational change and development. Annual Review of Psychology, 50(1), 361-386. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.50.1.361