Currently, a trend is under way to change the design of organizations. Today, business
leaders are facing the complex task of leading their organizations and even their
countries into the future. A tendency aimed at stressing opposite values.
Decentralization, involvement, and personnel development are believed to be better
means to capture the essential value of all organizational coordination and productivity.
For instance, cultural change has produced a workforce that virtually demands being
involved into the life of the organization. This new organization form is horizontal
rather than vertical in its basic shape. It results from the elimination of layers of
management and the delegation of more responsibility onto the employees. In this
sense, the whole quality management movement has been largely responsible for this
new shape of organizations. This dissertation is focused on the challenge of
formulating, implementing and sustaining a fundamental change in Central Bank
Organizations in South America. A holistic and integrated framework for thinking about
the process of formulating, implementing, and sustaining a fundamental change in
complex organizations such as the Central Bank of Colombia was developed. To this
end, research on several fields has been conducted. Subsequently, this framework was
empirically validated in a single, in-depth case study of a transnational corporation. This
chapter explains the practical and theoretical background of the research problem, the
research objective and approach, and the key concepts underlying the theoretical
framework. Furthermore, this thesis was validated with the Central Bank of Colombia
as a pilot project.