Management of changes in business processes: an empirical study in Slovak enterprises

Constant change is typical of the current business environment. The ability to manage change is a highly appreciated managerial skill. Being adaptive has become a new competitive advantage of a company. Appropriately and successfully implemented changes can improve corporate performance. This paper aimed to evaluate how Slovak companies had been dealing with change in recent years; whether they had been prepared for it; what tools, methods and concepts they had used; and what ultimately had necessitated them from an economic point of view. The paper explored the current status of change management in the context of business processes particular to Slovak enterprises. A literature review concerning change and process management was provided in order to design appropriate research. The research focused on the level of process-oriented management of change in Slovak enterprises operating in different industrial sectors. The main research method was primary quantitative research via questionnaires. Outputs from the questionnaires were subsequently evaluated by contingency tables and the chi-square test which determined the level of significance via p-value. Research results presented in this paper confirmed a positive influence of business process change on process maturity and corporate performance. The paper contributed to the development of knowledge in the field of change management, namely, process-oriented change management. The creation of a change-based maturity model for enterprises was identified as a new direction for future work with practical implications.