The fatal smirk: Insider accounts of organizational change processes in a police organization

Purpose – The key to success and failure in change projects may lie not in groundbreaking events or heroic gestures but in the many seemingly meaningless acts and events that occur throughout all change projects. In order to gain a better understanding of factors leading to success in change projects, the purpose of this paper is to examine insider accounts of successful and unsuccessful change projects in a non‐business public context, namely the German police.Design/methodology/approach – The research can be located in the exploratory, inductive research tradition and consistent with that we used in‐depth semi‐structured interviews to elicit the views of 92 high potential future managers as to what constitutes a(n) (un)successful project, and what factors lead to (un)successful project outcomes.Findings – The qualitative approach adopted allows for the tracing of a range social behavioural issues identified by members of the organization as criteria to evaluate the success of projects – commitment of pe...