The Worldview LOA Framework

Despite decades of research on planned organizational change, organizations struggle to accelerate transformation while maintaining participation, trust, and executive engagement. Dominant approaches frame acceleration as a technical or temporal problem, frequently producing resistance or symbolic compliance. This study reframes accelerated organizational change as an interpretive and moral accomplishment shaped by executives’ worldviews—deep meaning structures organizing legitimacy, obligation, and agency. Drawing on a longitudinal qualitative study of a multinational bank’s digital transformation, and employing a critical realist, abductive process methodology informed by Strong Structuration Theory, we develop a process model explaining how worldviews become consequential across three moments of planned change. We show that identical strategies produce divergent executive engagement depending on worldview alignment. We advance worldviews as a primary generative mechanism, with change-supportive behavior (CSB) as the observable outcome of worldview activation. For practice, we identify four worldview-driven accelerators that enhance executive sensemaking, perceived agency, and highly activated CSB.

This paper explains why executives experiencing the same organizational transformation develop divergent engagement trajectories over time. Drawing on Strong Structuration Theory and a critical realist process perspective, it introduces worldviews as generative evaluative structures comprising legitimacy beliefs, moral obligation, and perceived agency that shape executive interpretation and action during transformation. Based on a longitudinal qualitative case study of digital transformation in a multinational African bank, the study demonstrates how differences in worldview alignment produce sustained engagement, symbolic compliance, or disengagement. The paper contributes a process-based explanation of executive engagement and offers practical guidance for fostering enduring transformation through evaluative alignment rather than communication alone.

Qualitative process researchers increasingly invoke abduction and retroduction to explain how organizational trajectories unfold over time. Yet mechanism-oriented studies often report explanatory outcomes more clearly than the inferential work through which those outcomes were produced. This paper addresses that methodological problem by developing a worked strategy for inferential reconstruction in longitudinal qualitative research. Drawing on a longitudinal study of digital transformation in a multinational African banking institution, I show how divergent executive engagement trajectories were interpreted through recursive movement between empirical observation, anomaly detection, rival explanation evaluation, and retroductive refinement. Rather than treating mechanisms as pre-given categories, the analysis reconstructs how legitimacy, obligation, and perceived agency became progressively inferable as evaluative dimensions shaping engagement over time. The paper contributes in three ways. First, it reconceptualizes inferential transparency as the reconstruction of analytic reasoning rather than procedural disclosure alone. Second, it demonstrates abductive–retroductive analysis as a recursive practical accomplishment through which explanations are progressively stabilized. Third, it develops a process-sensitive approach to mechanism inference that treats mechanisms as dynamic, configurational, and temporally reworked rather than discrete explanatory entities. The paper thus shows how qualitative researchers can make mechanism-based explanation more transparent and assessable without sacrificing ambiguity, temporal complexity, or interpretive openness.

Despite sustained organizational investment in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), shared commitments frequently produce uneven outcomes across actors and organizational units. This paper develops a mechanism-based explanation of how participation and solidarity are differentially enacted under conditions of power asymmetry. Drawing on strong structuration theory and a critical realist perspective, we advance an evaluative microfoundations model of unequal inclusion, grounded in a longitudinal qualitative study of a superdiverse Global South organization undergoing large-scale digital transformation. The model conceptualizes inclusion as a recursive process unfolding through three moments: interpretive internalization, in which inclusion claims are evaluated through prior configurations of legitimacy, obligation, and perceived agency; worldview-activated volitional pathways, in which these evaluative configurations authorize or withhold action; and externalization through position-practices, in which reinforcement and erosion dynamics stabilize or fragment inclusion trajectories over time. Volitional pathways are identified as the mechanism through which moral commitment is translated into coordinated practice—a translation conditioned by power asymmetry and strengthened by reflexive equity. The paper contributes an evaluative microfoundations account that extends beyond cognition-centric approaches, reconceptualizes inclusion as a temporally recursive trajectory rather than a static outcome, and specifies reflexive equity as a stratified alignment mechanism, advancing DEI and organizational change scholarship by explaining how power asymmetries shape the translation of shared commitments into sustained collective practice.