The Handbook of Public Sector Communication

13Change Management and Communication in Public Sector Organizations: The Gordian Knot of Complexity, Accountability, and Legitimacy

Helle Kryger Aggerholm and Christa Thomsen

Introduction

The relationship between communication, management, and organizational change has attracted increasing attention from practitioners and scholars ever since the mid‐1990s, when Larkin and Larkin (1994) published their book on communicating change (see also Richardson & Denton, 1996) and Lewis and Seibold (1998) reviewed the literature within the field of organizational change and proposed to reconceptualize the implementation of organizational change as a communication problem.

Basically, organizational changes entail a movement from the known to the unknown, and from the safe to the uncertain. Thus, it becomes crucial for managers to be capable of handling the uncertainty, risks, and ambiguity arising in the wake of a change initiative (Weick, 2000). In this process, the communication undertaken by management plays a pivotal role in the success of the change initiative, since open and active communication between the different internal and external members of the organization is key in the handling of the uncertainty (Isabella, 1990; Jablin & Kramer, 1998). As a result, communication between the organization and its stakeholders is the be‐all and end‐all in change management, as it constitutes the basis for the sustained change process. Communication becomes one of the most important tools ...