Institutional Entrepreneurship in Health Management: A Survey Experiment on Appreciative Inquiry®

Abstract

Employing the lens of institutional entrepreneurship to help understand the logic of organizational change management, we conduct an analysis of the impact of Appreciative Inquiry® in a multi-unit division of a large, university-based health system. Our results indicate that, although there may have been some marginal impact in temporarily reducing an observed decline in employee commitment indicators, the program failed to sustain positive impacts over the longer term. Implications for the study of organizational change as the action of institutional entrepreneurs are briefly discussed.

Keywords

• institutions
• entrepreneurship
• organizational change
• appreciative inquiry®
• survey experiments