# Burke-Litwin Model The Burke-Litwin model shows how leadership, culture, systems, and other factors connect in transformational and transactional change. **The question.** Which factors are driving this performance gap, and does the fix need transformational change or transactional change? ## When to use it - A turnaround or merger has produced a long list of problems and you need to separate causes from symptoms. - Diagnostic interviews have returned dozens of themes with no way to rank them. - The sponsor proposes a transactional fix, such as a new incentive plan or reporting line, for something that looks like a strategy or culture problem. - Executives need an explanation for why a restructuring changed the org chart and left behavior where it was. ## When to avoid it - The problem sits inside one process or team. A process map or a root-cause method gets there faster. - You need measurement. The factors are not defined operationally, so any score you assign is your own construction. - The client wants a light structure for a small unit. A lighter model such as the congruence model is easier to use. - The audience will take the diagram as a checklist, with a project assigned to each box. ## Overview Burke-Litwin is a diagnostic model with twelve organizational factors, arranged so that the factors that respond to the outside world sit above the ones that run daily work. It supports a sorting decision: whether the problem sits in the transformational factors (environment, mission and strategy, leadership, culture) or in the transactional ones (structure, systems, management practices, climate). The authors propose that transformational change starts with the environment, and that both groups of factors affect motivation, which in turn affects performance. In use, it works as a prompt for where to look, not as a form with twelve boxes to fill. Most cases turn on two or three links, and the useful work is finding which ones. ## The twelve factors ### External environment Customers, competitors, regulation, the economy, technology. In this model the outside world is where transformational change starts. ### Mission and strategy What the organization says it is for, and the intended way of achieving it, as top management understands it. A transformational factor. ### Leadership The behavior of the people who set direction and model it for others. A transformational factor. The model separates this from management practices, which is the day-to-day work of managers. ### Culture The explicit and implicit rules, values, and habits that guide behavior, mostly unwritten. A transformational factor, and the slowest to move. ### Structure, systems, and management practices Three transactional factors. Structure is the arrangement of functions, authority, and reporting lines. Systems are the policies and procedures that carry out the work, such as budgeting, rewards, and information systems. Management practices are how managers use the resources at hand to carry out the strategy. These respond to redesign faster than the transformational factors. ### Work unit climate How people in a local unit experience the way they are treated, including fairness, recognition, and clarity. A transactional factor, measured at the level of the local unit and not of the company. ### Task requirements and individual skills What the work demands and whether the people have the skills to meet it. Individual-level factors that feed into motivation. ### Individual needs and values What people want from work and what matters to them. Also individual-level, and also feeds into motivation. ### Motivation The drive to act toward goals. In the model, the transformational and transactional factors act on performance through motivation, not directly. ### Individual and organizational performance The outcomes, including productivity, satisfaction, and quality. The model proposes that feedback from results flows back up to the other factors. ## What it is not - A validated predictive model. The article proposes causal links and cites supporting work. It does not test the whole structure, and you cannot turn the diagram into a forecast. - A claim that transformational change is better than transactional change. Transactional change is the right tool for tuning a system or a process. The model helps you tell which kind you need. ## The steps 1. **Define the gap.** State the performance outcome that is off, in terms the sponsor already tracks. Name the time period and the unit. A gap such as "approval takes eleven days against a target of five" can be traced. "Performance is poor" cannot. What comes out is a one-sentence gap and its owner. 2. **Collect evidence by factor.** Use the twelve factors as a coverage list for interviews and document review, not as a scoring grid. Talk to people at several levels, since climate and motivation will not show up in executive interviews. What comes out is a set of findings tagged to factors. 3. **Sort the findings.** Sort them into environment, transformational factors, transactional factors, and individual factors. Mark each finding as a cause, a symptom, or unclear. Expect many items in the transactional group, because that is where problems are most visible. 4. **Trace the links that matter.** Pick the two or three causal chains that connect the gap to its origins, for example from a strategy that changed to a system that did not. Check each link with a specific example from the evidence. Drop the links you cannot support. What comes out is a short causal story. 5. **Choose the type and order of change.** Decide which parts of the story need transformational work, which are transactional fixes, and which should go first. Transformational changes in leadership and culture take longer. Cheap, reversible transactional changes can run alongside. What comes out is a sequenced set of changes with reasons. ## In practice Nine problems, each with an owner and a project, was how the chief executive of a regional bank described a stalled turnaround. They ranged from slow credit decisions to low branch morale. Placing them against the model showed that seven sat in structure, systems, and management practices: approval limits, a loan-origination system, and the way managers ran weekly reviews. Two sat higher up. Members of the leadership team gave different answers when asked what the bank was now for. The stated strategy was to grow small-business lending, but a culture that treated a declined loan as a safe outcome and an approved loan that went bad as a career risk was working against it. The consultant argued that the seven transactional projects would not hold until leadership and culture were addressed, and proposed alignment work with the top team first. Two of the transactional projects, approval limits and review cadence, kept going because they were cheap and reversible. The rest were paused. ## What you leave with - A one-sentence performance gap with a named owner. - Findings tagged to factors, each marked as cause, symptom, or unclear. - Two or three causal chains, each backed by an example from the evidence. - A split of the proposed changes into transformational and transactional, in sequence. - A list of factors you did not examine, and why. ## Failure points ### Scoring all twelve factors The team spends its effort filling every box evenly, and the finding becomes that everything is connected. The model has twelve factors so that you can choose among them. ### Transactional fixes for transformational problems A new structure or incentive plan is the visible, fundable response, so it gets chosen even when the cause is a strategy nobody agrees on. Behavior stays where it was, and the sponsor concludes the consultants were wrong. ### Leadership as the catch-all Leadership sits near the top, so it absorbs every unexplained finding. The remedy is to state which specific leader behaviors cause which specific effects. Otherwise the recommendation reduces to replacing people. ### Executive-only evidence Interviews with senior people capture mission, strategy, and leadership well. They say little about climate, motivation, and how systems work in practice. The diagnosis ends up describing intentions. ### Presenting the model before the case Showing the client the diagram first starts an argument about the model. Show the findings and the chain of causes, and bring the model out only if someone asks where the chain comes from. The failures above are usually [Presence](https://usefulconsultingframeworks.com/your-edge/#presence): the framework was sound, but the attention of the stakeholders was not held. ## Origin W. Warner Burke, then at Teachers College, Columbia University, and George Litwin published the model in the Journal of Management in 1992. They set out to join two lines of theory, organizational functioning and organizational change, and to go beyond description by proposing causal links among twelve factors. The article builds on earlier diagnostic models, including Nadler and Tushman's. The authors cite theory, research, and practice in support of the model's potential validity. It is a hypothesized causal model, not a tested equation. There is no trademark on the model. Survey instruments and training built on it are sold separately by others, and this note does not reproduce the standard diagram. ## Further reading - [A Causal Model of Organizational Performance and Change](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/014920639201800306). Burke and Litwin, Journal of Management, 1992. The original article. The abstract is free and the full text is behind a publisher paywall. - [Burke Litwin Model of Organisational Change (Toolshero)](https://www.toolshero.com/change-management/burke-litwin-model/). A plain-language summary of the twelve factors and their grouping. A secondary source, so check anything you plan to quote against the paper. ## Related frameworks - [Nadler-Tushman Congruence Model](https://usefulconsultingframeworks.com/frameworks/nadler-tushman/): An older and simpler diagnostic model built on fit among four components. Pick it when twelve factors are more than the case needs. - [Galbraith's Star Model](https://usefulconsultingframeworks.com/frameworks/galbraith-star/): Five design choices that have to line up. Pick it when the job is to design the organization, not to diagnose a gap. - [Competing Values Framework](https://usefulconsultingframeworks.com/frameworks/competing-values/): Looks only at culture, as a profile across four types. Pick it when culture is already the suspect and you need to know which kind. - [McKinsey Influence Model](https://usefulconsultingframeworks.com/frameworks/mckinsey-influence-model/): Covers what makes a change stick once you have decided on it. Pick it after the diagnosis, to plan the change. Last updated October 19, 2026.