Proposal of a temporality perspective for a successful organizational change project

Abstract

PurposeImprovements to health and safety at work constantly involve organizational changes (OCs). However, the OC initiatives often fail at achieving their intended goals despite efforts to draw knowledge from various disciplines, such as sociology, psychology and information sciences, to guide the change implementation. This paper proposes a temporality approach to manage the resistance during an OC project based on the capitalization of the actors' behaviors (i.e. alignment/resistance) for successful OC implementation.Design/methodology/approachEmployees in an industrial company (N = 186) undergoing an OC answered a questionnaire survey. The statistical analysis approach was used to measure the influence of the constructs of the proposed temporality capitalization approach on the OC conduct.FindingsResults indicate that the considered constructs have positive and significant correlations with OC development. It has also been found that the employees' alignment is highly correlated with the opportunities they might gain from the OC.Practical implicationsThe proposed temporality capitalization approach shows that providing the employees with clear objectives is not sufficient to support the change, and it is suggested that the change management has to move a step further and seek to target the perspectives of the employees to energize them around the OC and maximize their alignment.Originality/valueIn this paper, change management is approached through the temporality capitalization that confirms the importance of monitoring the change development through the alignment. In other terms, the curve of the adaptation of the change receivers matters and should attract more attention rather than the change implementation speed.