Research and Resources
QUICK LINKS - QUEEN'S IRC ARTICLES & PAPERS
CONTACT
For more information on Queen’s IRC’s practitioner-focused research, please contact our research team at: ircresearch@queensu.ca
CHANGE MANAGEMENT
Living Happily Ever After… with an Acquisition
Research has revealed that often, mergers mean high failure rates, sinking profits and negative human resources impacts. This study identifies success factors and provides advice for managers for navigating a merger successfully.
Transforming Your Workplace: A Model for Implementing Change and Labour-Management Cooperation
How do you manage change while promoting labour-management collaboration? In today’s organizations, unions and management are increasingly being asked to work together in areas that stretch far beyond collective agreements, such as organizational design and business and profitability planning.
Building a Foundation for Change: Why So Many Changes Fail and What to Do About It
A surprisingly high percentage of organizational changes are doomed to fail. According to recent surveys, reengineering efforts have about a 33 percent chance of success, mergers and acquisitions succeed 29 percent of the time, quality improvement efforts achieve their goals half the time, and new software applications hit the mark in less than 20 percent of the cases. What often goes wrong: Bright people develop a plan that includes a sound business reason for the change.
Exploring Alternatives to Downsizing
Market pressures force organizations to change rapidly. Given this unrelenting pace, leaders find they no longer can mull over decisions before taking action. Organizations must be nimble in considering and acting on changing needs in staffing. Leaders must ask…
The Cycle of Change
Resistance to change often appears when people are at different points on the cycle. Take the time to compare the relative positions on the cycle held by everyone involved; it can help you anticipate potential problems and develop the most appropriate strategies.
Layoffs and Survivors’ Career Motivation
Hundreds of thousands of Canadian workers have been laid off during the organizational restructuring of the past decade. Although the laid-off worker has been extensively studied, until recently there has been very little research on the effects of layoffs on those who remain in the downsized organization—the survivors. This study helps to close that gap in the research by identifying the factors that help to determine the career motivation of survivors.
A Change Strategy for Industrial Relations: When the Old Meets the Future at CP Rail
This article from 1996 takes a look at CP Rail, and the tremendous pressures for change it was being confronted with. Environmental forces, government policy and the responses of management and labour to their environment had a significant impact on industrial relations policies and practices at CP Rail. The story at CP Rail represents a classic case of an old system of industrial relations finally yielding to overwhelming forces for change.
ABOUT OUR PRACTITIONER-ORIENTED RESEARCH
Our research includes a variety of activities that complement our programming. Through surveys, interviews, and articles, we aim to communicate trends in the HR and LR fields.
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