Understanding Employee Alignment During Organizational Change

Abstract

Despite the fact that employee alignment with an initiative is often considered a critical process of organizational change, few studies have examined processes where organizations change the individual to bring about alignment. This research aims to fill this gap by exploring whether changes in employee line of sight to the objectives and actions necessary to accomplish the objectives can improve alignment with a change initiative. To accomplish this, I examine the trajectories for line of sight objectives and line of sight actions and whether those trajectories can affect behavioral alignment. Through an intervention aimed at improving efficiency in a sample of 189 fast food employees, a change in line of sight objectives was found to influence both a change in line of sight actions and a change in behavioral alignment. A change in line of sight actions also predicted a change in behavioral alignment. Implications and future directions for research are discussed.