The challenge of managing organizational change: Exploring the relationship of re-engineering, developing learning organizations and total quality management

Coping with increasing rates of environmental change and turbulence requires that management changes an organization to a form that is flexible, adaptive, responsive and value adding. Having this as a widely accepted clear goal for organization transformation, the emphasis shifts to how to accomplish the desired change. Several approaches seem to compete for this task, with total quality management (TQM), re-engineering and learning organizations being the most promising options in this decade. This article examines the relationship of re-engineering, TQM and the learning organization, the last two considered most likely to yield enduring long-term results. Unlike re-engineering, they manage to accomplish this without disrupting the social fabric that affects an organization's human resources, widely accepted as the most valuable means to bring about such transformation.