Bottom-up-Wandel durch Issue Selling: Eine qualitative Fallstudie in der öffentlichen Verwaltung

Organizational change is often portrayed as a top-down process. However, bottom-up initiatives – originating from employees, teams, or middle management – play a vital role in driving innovation and renewal. This dissertation explores how such initiatives gain traction through issue selling, the strategic process of drawing attention to and legitimizing new concerns within organizations. The study investigates how bottom-up impulses in established organizations achieve
resonance and effect change through issue selling. Special emphasis is placed on the interaction between formal hierarchies and coalitions, which emerges as a key mechanism influencing the success or failure of such initiatives. To examine this, an embedded qualitative single-case study was conducted within an Austrian public administration, focusing on a project team tasked with implementing centralized facility management. The empirical dataset comprises 26 interviews, observations from 17 team meetings, over 150 pages of internal documentation, and eight debriefings with project leadership. Four contrasting episodes – representing both successful and failed issue-selling efforts – were analyzed inductively to develop dynamic process models. The findings reveal that (1) trust functions as a cross-episodic social resource, emerging from consistent behavior and repeated, positive interaction; (2) private and public arenas serve distinct yet complementary roles as strategic interaction spaces; and (3) change initiatives succeed when social dynamics (e.g., coalitions, relationships) and substantive contributions (e.g., problem-solving, expertise) reinforce one another. The study concludes that issue selling is best understood as a socially embedded, dynamic process that enables bottom-up change within structurally complex organizations. It offers practical implications for leadership, organizational development, and human resource management – highlighting the importance of strengthening individual issue-selling competencies, supporting strategic intermediaries, and fostering open communication and transparent decision-making structures.