Toward an dynamic conceptualization of organizational self-assessment

Organizations frequently seek for contemporary methods and tools to monitor activities and respond to changes in their business environment which can be supported through organizational self-assessment (OSA). OSA has traditionally been conceived as a comprehensive analysis of an organization’s activities, allowing the latter to discern its strengths, weaknesses, and areas of improvements. OSAs share one common objective: triggering organizational change based on opportunities identified in the course of the assessment process. We argue that most existing studies on OSA rely on a static view of organizations and have given little consideration to the underlying interactions between OSA and organizations. In addition, the extent to which OSA projects produce effective changes and improvements remain unclear. For these reasons, we suggest revisiting the premises of OSA with the aim of offering an alternative view to its current conceptualization. To do so, we challenge six main assumptions of traditional research on OSA: what is OSA?; what does the “self” entail?; what is the tangibility of the processes information?; what does the deployment strategy consists in?; how are organizational impacts foreseen?; and how is OSA success evaluated? After addressing these assumptions, we redefine OSA as a political and interpretative process based on the use of management tool(s) in the course of which a multiplicity of organizational members uses and produces socially constructed information. The expected outcomes of this research consist in depicting a catalyst for organizational change, which largely rely upon individuals’ enactment, appropriation and development of the process itself.