Organizational Change

Lewinian Field Theory

From a social psychological perspective, Kurt Lewin developed in the 1940s a general theory of change in social systems, including organizations, that remains influential to this day. Lewin's field theory characterizes organizations as dynamic systems in semistationary equilibrium—a state of balance maintained by an active field of psychological and social forces both driving and restraining change. From a field theory perspective, organizational change results from an increase in driving forces for change or the removal of restraining forces or both. Changes in the field of forces can themselves be an outcome either of ongoing psychological, organizational, and environmental processes, such as informational and normative social influence, group dynamics, managerial turnover, and competitive dynamics, or of planned organizational change and transformation.

Lewin conceptualized the process of change as undergoing three stages: (1) unfreezing, or actions that increase the susceptibility of organizations to changes in the dynamic balance of forces affecting organizations; (2) movement, or actions that change the magnitude, number, and direction of driving and restraining forces, consequently changing the organizational equilibrium in a new direction; and (3) refreezing, or actions that reinforce the new distribution of forces, thereby stabilizing and maintaining a new organizational equilibrium.

Lewin's field theory has been particularly influential in applied work in planned organizational change and has been influential in the establishment of the subfield of organizational development within organizational studies. Force field analysis, derived from this perspective, is a tool for examining the unfolding changes in driving and restraining forces affecting the organizational change process. While the focus of organizational development and force field analysis has been primarily on individual, group, and cultural drivers and restrainers of change, the generality and abstraction of Lewin's field theory permits the incorporation of more macro sociopolitical, structural, cultural, economic, and institutional determinants of change. Force field analysis remains a useful and widely used conceptual and practical tool for examining both the likelihood of organizational change and its unfolding process over time.

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