A NEWTONIAN METAPHOR FOR ORGANIZATIONAL-CHANGE

A Newtonian metaphor for describing the effect of a radical change sti mulus on the productive ability of work groups is presented in this pa per. The impact of a downsizing process on a Fortune 500 company was m odeled in terms of its effect on employee perceptions of their work co ntext and their capacity for doing productive work. Also investigated was the extent to which downsizing led to entropy (disorder) or negent ropy (order) as employees revised their work schemas. The results indi cate that a mechanistic shift in information processing perceptions an d a decline in capacity to maintain effective work behaviors occurred as a result of the downsizing. An interesting finding was that the mag nitude of this productivity decline depended only on the initial and t erminal information processing perceptions of the managers and not the ir intermediate perceptions, suggesting that the managers' perceptual state demonstrated the open systems property of equifinality.