Tracking change management – using attidudinal and behavioural bench-marking

In this paper a system of internal and external bench-marking is described. The bench-marking was developed to facilitate the tracking of change management programmes within a business school in an Australian university. The first change management programme was developed to modify faculty members' attitudes towards research. It was necessary to bench-mark attitudes towards research with a comparable university which was also more research mature, thus providing a role model or goal. The bench-marking also allowed the tracking of the change managment programme per se. Research attitude assessment was undertaken using social judgement theory in both the Australian business school and the ‘peer’ business school in the USA. The bench-marking was then performed using these data. However, while attitudes had been successfully modified, considerable change was still needed to bring about a significant increase in research activity and output, i.e. research behaviour. A second change management programme was devised and implemented. The impact of this second programme then needed to be tracked through observing the change that was being wrought on research activity via bench-marking.