Abstract
Employees’ attitudes towards organizational change are a critical determinant in the change process. Researchers have therefore tried to determine what underlying concepts that affect them. These extensive efforts have resulted in the identification of several antecedents. However, no studies have been conducted in a software engineering context and the research has provided little information on the relative impact and importance of the identified concepts. In this study, we have combined results from previous social science research with results from software engineering research, and thereby identified three underlying concepts with an expected significant impact on software engineers’ attitudes towards organizational change, i.e. their knowledge about the intended change outcome, their understanding of the need for change, and their feelings of participation in the change process. The result of two separate multiple regression analysis, where we used industrial questionnaire data (N=56), showed that the attitude concept openness to change is predicted by all three concepts, while the attitude concept readiness for change is predicted by need for change and participation. Our research provides an empirical baseline to an important area of software engineering and the result can be a starting-point for future organizational change research. In addition, the proposed model prescribes practical directions for software engineering organizations to adopt in improving employees’ responses to change and, thus, increase the probability of a successful change.
Highlights
In order to cope with a complex and changing environment, organizations seek to find new and more efficient ways to conduct their business (Platt 2007; Serour and Younessi 2006; Serour and Winder 2007; Greenwood and Hinings 1996)
Knowledge, need for change and participation were used in two separate standard multiple linear regression analysis (N=56) to predict openness to change (OTC) and readiness for change (RFC)
The result of two separate multiple regression analysis, where we used industrial data (N=56), showed that the attitude concept openness to change is predicted by all three concepts, while the attitude concept readiness for change is predicted by need for change and participation
Summary
In order to cope with a complex and changing environment, organizations seek to find new and more efficient ways to conduct their business (Platt 2007; Serour and Younessi 2006; Serour and Winder 2007; Greenwood and Hinings 1996). An organizational change cannot be considered successful without a change in the employees’ behavior (Kotter and Cohen 2002), which, according to social psychology researchers (Ajzen 2001), is controlled and predicted by attitudes. We briefly describe previous research that we have deemed relevant and that has affected our study. This includes software process improvement, work and organization psychology, behavioral software engineering, the attitude concept and, attitudes in relation to organizational change. Little attention has been paid to the effective implementation of the SPI models and standards, which has resulted in limited success for many SPI efforts (Herbsleb and Goldenson 1996; Niazi et al 2006). A review study (Lavallee and Robillard 2012) identified developers resistance towards SPI as one of seven factors that have an impact the implementation of SPI
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