**1. Introductions**

Within the development field, actors are increasingly interested in channeling development assistance through development cooperation programs and projects involving organizations in the Global North and South (Boeren 2012; Hartvigson and Heshmati 2022; Nakabugo et al. 2011; Teferra 2016). Despite variations in scope and structure (Raetzell et al. 2018), the primary temporal and spatial impacts of these North–South development interventions, particularly in the areas of technology transfer and capacity building in the Global South, have been well documented (Boeren 2012; Craveiro et al. 2020; Raetzell

**Citation:** Mugenyi, Andrew Ronnie, Charles Karemera, Joshua Wesana, and Michaël Dooms. 2022. Institutionalization of Organizational Change Outcomes in Development Cooperation Projects: The Mediating Role of Internal Stakeholder Change-Related Beliefs. *Administrative Sciences* 12: 60. https://doi.org/10.3390/ admsci12020060

Received: 23 March 2022 Accepted: 2 May 2022 Published: 11 May 2022

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et al. 2018; Van der Veken et al. 2017). Encouraged by the potential and actual benefits of these and similar development interventions, development stakeholders are increasingly demanding that development initiatives demonstrate impact while raising concerns about the sustainability of interventions (Maier et al. 2016). According to Hartvigson and Heshmati (2022), the delivery of sustainable development outcomes is a primary concern in development cooperation initiatives, but it has proven difficult to achieve as many development projects face sustainability challenges (Aga et al. 2018; Harsh and Jobe 2020; Samara et al. 2020). As Wilson and Kurz (2008) have argued, many grant-funded and externally sponsored interventions, despite displaying beneficial outcomes, are not always sustained, resulting in a decline or stoppage of function when external funding is withdrawn or ceases. Sustainability in this context is viewed in terms of interventions meeting the needs of stakeholders beyond the project implementation phase (Johnson et al. 2004) or the long-term success of a development intervention (Maier et al. 2016). While a lot of attention has been paid to sustainability in scientific research on issues, projects, and policies related to environmental management and industrial and agricultural production (Ruggerio 2021), in addition to sustainability management (Samara et al. 2020), there are limited studies on the sustainability of organizational-level change outcomes of aid-based project interventions.

Studies on organizational development and change identify institutionalization as a strategy for sustaining change in organizations by integrating the change intervention into the host organization's systems and culture, so that the new practices are accepted, sustained, and normalized (Armenakis et al. 1999; Stouten et al. 2018). The concept of organizational change institutionalization can be traced back to Lewin's (1947) refreezing change concept, which contends that the changed state must be protected from further change or regression to the previous state. Other scholars have argued that institutionalization is related to the persistence of change over time (Jacobs 2002), and Maes and Van Hootegem (2019) have argued that institutionalization is possible if change is incorporated into the organization's systems, or if there is "interiorization of what is learned during change into cognitive schedules and routines" of the organization. While Lewin's change theory and related models have been beneficial in understanding the unfreezing of behavior and the creation of a willingness to change (Burnes and Cooke 2013), less attention has been paid to the processes of sustaining (refreezing) changes in organizations.

In the project context, institutionalization entails the long-term sustainability and integration of project outcomes into an organization (Goodman and Steckler 1989), or what Johnson et al. (2004) refer to as "integration into business as usual." Without institutionalization, the organization struggles to maintain the benefits of the project interventions (Goodman and Steckler 1989; Wilson and Kurz 2008). Development projects that are planned and implemented using a linear activity–output–outcome–impact logic while being constrained by strict time frames, donor guidelines, and budgets (McEvoy et al. 2016) prioritize project activity implementation over the institutionalization and sustainability of project outcomes (Chambers et al. 2013). As a result, beneficiary organizations can carefully implement donor-funded projects strictly adhering to the established implementation guidelines, but fail to bridge the implementation–sustainability gap. Consequently, project outcomes may be short-lived and never integrated into the organization's normal operations (Wilson and Kurz 2008), resulting in frustration and demotivation among the project actors, with evidence of no value for money and effort expended during implementation (Clausen and Kragh 2019).

According to Goodman and Dean (1982) and Jacobs (2002), the persistence and impact of any organizational change intervention are determined by the extent to which the associated behaviors persist within the organization after the implementation phase. It is believed that institutionalization occurs when two or more people consistently act in a certain way and their behavior becomes ingrained in the daily operations of the organization. In this context, project outcomes are individual behavioral responses to project outputs triggered by project implementation actions and mechanisms in a specific context (Buller

and Mcevoy 1989). Individual behavior and social interaction within an organization in relation to project intervention are thus critical aspects of the institutionalization process. Because internal project stakeholders are individuals or organizations that are affected by or can influence the project and its outcomes (PMI 2013), their beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors are important in the institutionalization of project outcomes. Project outcomes will be institutionalized in the organization if the internal stakeholders consistently engage in project-targeted behaviors to the point where they become "social facts" (Goodman and Dean 1982), rooted in social norms and shared values within the organization (Kotter 1996). These behavioral aspects, being important in the delivery of project outcomes, are conspicuously absent in the project management literature (Khan et al. 2017). For example, while Burgan and Burgan (2014) investigated the change beliefs associated with the adoption of project management practices as an approach to organizational management, and Purvis et al. (2015) investigated the role of self-valence in the direction and intensity of stakeholder participation in the implementation of systems and software technology projects, no study has been conducted for projects in the development cooperation context.

The current study explored the factors influencing the process of the institutionalization of development cooperation project change outcomes within the beneficiary organization. We incorporated internal project stakeholders' change-related beliefs into an institutionalization model (Buchanan et al. 2005) that considers organizational characteristics and intervention characteristics, aware that beliefs influence stakeholder attitudes toward the project. Positive attitudes toward a project's outcomes are likely to translate into commitment by stakeholders to maintain project-related behaviors. Hence, institutionalization can be viewed as involving deliberate steps to integrate project outcomes into the operations, processes, and culture of the organization, occurring concurrently throughout the project implementation phase rather than afterwards. Unfortunately, there has been little empirical research into what these institutionalization actions and processes involve.

The next section begins with a review of the relevant literature on change institutionalization and the development of the study hypotheses, followed by a description of the methods. Then, the study's empirical findings are presented and discussed, and conclusions are drawn.

#### **2. Literature Review and Hypothesis Development**

#### *2.1. Projects and Change Institutionalization*

The goal of projects is to change the behavior of beneficiaries in the medium term, rather than simply delivering planned project outputs (Lehtonen and Martinsuo 2009). In aid-based development projects, such changes are classified as the project's short- and medium-term effects on direct project beneficiaries (outcomes) or the project's long-term effects (impact) (Raetzell et al. 2018). To have the desired impact in the organization, the project's outcomes or targeted behavioral changes must be integrated into the organization's culture, structure, systems, and processes, which involves the change institutionalization process.

Studies on organizational change institutionalization are not only scarce but also context-dependent, relying primarily on Goodman and Dean's (1982) institutionalization framework and Ledford's (1985) process model of persistence. Despite their popularity, these foundational models have received little empirical support to explain how institutionalization occurs within organizations (Cummings and Worley 2009; Sillince et al. 2001). Subsequent studies treated change institutionalization as one of the stages, particularly the final stage, in an extended change implementation process (Brisson-Banks 2010; Buchanan et al. 2005; Stouten et al. 2018). According to these studies, before a change is institutionalized, it is associated with predictable elements grouped into three phases: mobilization, implementation, and institutionalization (Curry 1992; Kezar 2007). Beddewela et al. (2020) also proposed a six-stage model for change institutionalization that comprises the jolt, theorization, mobilization, sense-making, diffusion, and institutional establishment. According to these authors, the sixth stage, institutional establishment, entails complete diffusion

of changes across the organization and is concerned with formalizing and integrating the changes into the organization's formal policies. Reay et al. (2013) argued that the institutionalization process follows a linear path that begins with the destabilization of established practices and ends with the institutionalization of new practices in the organization. Other studies have looked at change institutionalization as a distinct process, delving into its various facets, antecedents, and outcomes (Cummings and Worley 2009; Curry 1992; Goodman and Dean 1982; Reay et al. 2013). Armenakis et al. (1999), for example, identified the role of individual commitment and argued that institutionalization is the process of building commitment to the changed state in an organization. The authors created a change institutionalization model that includes key elements such as the change message, change agent attributes, organizational member attributes, and reinforcing strategies. Cummings and Worley (2009) and Jacobs (2002) drew on Goodman and Dean's (1982) earlier work to identify five processes that determine the degree to which an intervention can be institutionalized in an organization: (1) socialization, or the transmission of information about beliefs, preferences, norms, and values about the intervention within the organization; (2) management commitment across all levels as a dimension binding people to intervention-related behaviors; (3) management commitment as a dimension that binds people to interventionrelated behaviors; (4) diffusion, or the transfer of changes from one subsystem to another in order to reinforce the changes; and (5) sensing and calibration, which entails detecting deviations from desired intervention behaviors and taking corrective action. Buchanan et al. (2005) categorized institutionalization factors into seven categories in their synthesis of factors influencing the sustainability of change in organizations, including substantial, individual, managerial, financial, leadership, organizational, cultural, political, processual, contextual, and temporal factors, and argued that these factors are dependent on the type and context of change. On the other hand, Reay et al. (2013), based on the micro-level perspective of the organization, identified habitualization as a key component of how ideas are transformed into new practices. Change institutionalization occurs when change-related actions and human interactions are frequently repeated and developed into patterns within an organization. Similarly, Yetano (2013) used the structuration model to add rules and routines, characteristics of social systems, and continuous interactions as key components of the institutionalization process. However, Stouten et al. (2018) further noted that, even though the focus of change institutionalization has always been on altering the organization's culture, not all changes require fundamental shifts in culture and beliefs and hence may only require managerial action to institutionalize.

To date, a number of studies have used current change institutionalization frameworks to investigate various change scenarios in diverse organizational contexts, with varying results and recommendations: for example, the institutionalization of project interventions in local governments (Waiswa 2020), responsible management education (Beddewela et al. 2020), natural resource-based innovations in universities (Cinar 2020), transdisciplinarity in university policy (Baptista et al. 2019; Riveros et al. 2022), responsible innovation (Owen et al. 2021), community engagement in higher education institutions (Murrah-Hanson and Sandmann 2021), and enterprise resource planning (ERP) (Pishdad and Haider 2013), to mention but a few. Our synthesis of these studies identifies a number of important elements and actions for change institutionalization in different contexts: (i) changes in organizational structure, reward or incentive systems, and behavioral norms; (ii) mandatory top leadership support and championship; (iii) alignment of the change intervention with the existing organizational structure; (iv) participation of internal and external stakeholders; (v) integration into organizational values; (vi) strategic and operational planning. In this study, we drew from the processual approach to change institutionalization based on the models by Armenakis et al. (1999), Beddewela et al. (2020); Buchanan et al. (2005), and Cummings and Worley (2009) to develop the study's conceptual framework. The processual approach is a useful lens for the examination of change institutionalization because it emphasizes the "flow of events in a wider spatial, temporal, and political context" (Buchanan et al. 2005). As a result, we investigated how broad organizational

factors and project characteristics (Cummings and Worley 2009; Jacobs 2002) as well as individual-level factors and internal stakeholder change-related beliefs (Armenakis et al. 1999; Reay et al. 2013) influence the change institutionalization process.

We examined the institutionalization process by the occurrence of positive perceptions towards project interventions, as evidenced by increased project favorable actions among internal stakeholders at the beneficiary organization's strategic, management, and operational levels. Based on the literature reviewed, we posit that institutionalization should be a praxis with actions in three categories: (1) *Explicit commitment*-*related actions*. These are unequivocal and routine actions by the organization's senior leadership to send a message throughout the organization that the administration is committed and fully supports, and advocates for, the project interventions (Murrah-Hanson and Sandmann 2021; Pishdad and Haider 2013). Examples of these actions include commitment of funds to support project interventions that are outside the donor funding limits but critical in sustaining the project, and communication that promotes the project's products by leaders at different levels within the organization. (2) *Integration-related actions*. These are actions geared towards embedding the project into the organization. These actions are related to the legitimacy dimension of institutionalization (Baptista et al. 2019). These actions may include integrating project management, project activities, and outputs in strategic and operational planning processes; active participation by internal stakeholders in project activities; standardization of language, policies, procedures, and communication that promotes project-targeted behavior changes; continuous monitoring and information gathering about project-targeted behavior and taking corrective action where deviations are detected. (3) *Implicit structuralrelated actions*. We argue that this category involves more subtle and indirect actions that and are linked to what Baptista et al. (2019) refer to as the formal set-up dimension of institutionalization. It may involve defining the project manager's position within the current organization, developing new project-related units, functions, and positions in the organizational structure, and establishing incentive structures that favor project-targeted behaviors. We view the institutionalization process as involving these three categories of actions occurring concurrently with project implementation. Thereby, we imply that institutionalization is not a post-implementation phase of the project. Processes, structures, policies, and operating procedures could simultaneously be put in place during project implementation to ensure that project-related behavior/practices, project-promoted values, and norms are incorporated into the host organization's culture (Baptista et al. 2019; Curry 1992; Riveros et al. 2022).
