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This paper aims to present a systematic literature review of 176 studies relating to change management in the context of process optimization and to investigate how companies effectively use change management to optimize processes across different industrial sectors.

Descriptive statistics are used to represent patterns, trends and correlations between change management strategies, research methods applied for processes optimization and industry field. A comprehensive analysis of the papers’ keywords, crossed with research methods and industrial sectors, allowed us to substantiate the results in analytic terms. For some selected studies, chosen on the basis of their significance to the research field, the contents were mapped and discussed in detail.

This study provides numerous insights into the various applications of change management across different industry fields. In general, change management appears to be no longer a theoretical discipline, showing instead practical relevance, which is reflected in testing theories through case studies and real implementations. The review emphasizes the need for careful and systemic planning by companies, effective communication, employee involvement and supportive organizational culture. These factors are crucial for enhancing process efficiency and employee acceptance of change. Digital technologies also prove to be valuable support for change management during process optimization.

The innovative contribution of this paper consists of the joint perspective taken when looking at process optimization and the application of change management strategies. Such a perspective favors an in-depth examination of the interactions between the two aspects and provides more comprehensive results compared to the existing literature.

This study aims to measure impact of several firm-specific factors on alternative measures of leverage. The authors also aim to study impact of the subprime crisis on such associations.

The authors utilized an unbalanced panel data of 973 firm-year observations on 47 UK listed non-financial firms for the years 1990–2019. Book-based and market-based long-term and total leverage measures have been used as explained variables. The explanatory variables are profitability, size, two measures of growth, asset tangibility, non-debt tax shields, firm age and product uniqueness. Fixed effect and random effect models with clustered robust standard errors have been utilized for data analysis. To find the effect of subprime crisis, original dataset was split to create pre-crisis and post-crisis datasets.

The authors find that profitability significantly reduces leverage while firms having more tangible assets use significantly more debt in capital structure. Firm size and non-debt tax shield have statistically insignificant positive impact on leverage. Having more unique products reduces use of external debt, albeit insignificantly. Growth, when measured as market-to-book ratio, has inconsistent impact, whereas capital expenditure insignificantly reduces leverage. Age is found to be an insignificant predictor of leverage. After the subprime crisis, firms started relying more on internal fund instead of external debt, more particularly short-term debt. Having more collateral is gradually becoming more important for availing external debt.

Data limitations restrict generalization of the findings.

This is one of the pioneering attempts to show how subprime crisis altered the theoretical domain of capital structure research in the UK.