Change Recipients Research Articles

Development of the Attitudes Toward a Specific Organizational Change (ATSOC) Scale

The existing literature has frequently overlooked the possibility that change recipients may distinguish between general and specific attitudes to change. The present research aims to close this ga...

A Longitudinal Investigation of Change Recipients’ Behavior

One very common finding in the organizational change literature is that the members of an organization are the key source of energy for organizational change processes and for this reason their commitment and involvement is the crucial factor for successful organizational change Until now the majority of research studies on reactions to change do not investigate the duration and/or continuity of a behavior, assuming that once the reasons behind and the behaviors are formulated these will persist over time. This study analyzed the behavioral reactions of employees to change and their associated reasons for or against a large-scale technological change implemented in a bank. A total of 152 bank employees located in 40 bank branches participated two times in providing critical incidents regarding their initial and midcourse reactions to this change. Results showed that anticipated benefits associated with change initiate positive reactions to change. These reactions are maintained positive due to supervisory support. Resistance is activated by perceived high cost low benefit change at hand and it is shifted to active support when there is open communication and supervisory support.

The role of organizational politics, contextual resources, and formal communication on change recipients' commitment to change: A multilevel study

Over the past decade there has been an increased interest in studying the factors that affect people's commitment to change. Drawing from the Job Demands–Resources model, in this enquiry we explored the moderating role of two contextual resources (i.e., trust in top management, history of change) and formal communication in the relationship between perceived organizational politics and commitment to change. Data were collected from 2543 employees of 84 companies representing a wide variety of industry sectors. In a first survey we collected data about the work context. Two weeks after the first survey, in a second survey we captured data on people's commitment to change. Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) was used to analyse the multilevel character of the data. Consonant with our hypotheses, the findings indicate that the negative relationship between perceived organizational politics and commitment to change is moderated by “trust in top management”, “history of change”, and “formal communication”. As a group the Level 2 predictors account for 18%, 2.5%, and 10%, respectively, of the between-unit variance in continuance, normative, and affective commitment for change.

A Self-determination Perspective of Change Recipients' Attitudes toward Organizational Change

The Confucian ethic emphasizes a stable and hierarchic social order, suggesting that Chinese employees prefer to accept a top-down approach to organizational change. Despite this accepted wisdom, I employ the Western self-determination theory to conceptualize Chinese employees’ autonomous and controlled attitudes toward organizational change (AOC). In addition, I argue that the same change implementation may not have a uniform effect on all employees. I also propose a nomological network of autonomous/controlled AOC. In Whetten’s (2009) terms, I attempt to use novel insights generated by a ‘foreign’ organizational theory to inform ‘local’ organizational research (p. 37).

Reducing change management complexity: aligning change recipient sensemaking to change agent sensegiving

Implementation of change in an organisation through culture can elicit a wide array of reactions from organisational members, spanning from acceptance to resistance. Drawing on Hatch's cultural dynamics model and on Wegner's social theory of learning, this paper dwells on an underdeveloped area in the extant literature, namely understanding change from the perspective of the change recipient, and then analysing how this is linked to the broader framework of organisational change. It is suggested that in order to drive meaningful change strategy, change agents need to learn that sensegiving imparted by them needs to be closely aligned to the sensemaking of change recipients at three levels of analysis.

Microparticle‐associated nucleic acids mediate trait dominance in cancer

Drug resistance is a major cause of cancer treatment failure, with multidrug resistance (MDR) being the most serious, whereby cancer cells display cross-resistance to structurally and functionally unrelated drugs. MDR is caused by overexpression of the efflux transporters P-glycoprotein (P-gp) and multidrug resistance-associated protein 1 (MRP1). These transporters act to maintain sublethal intracellular drug concentrations within the cancer cell, making the population treatment unresponsive. Recently, we discovered a novel nongenetic basis to MDR whereby microparticles (MPs) transfer P-gp intercellularly from MDR donor cells to drug-sensitive recipient cells. MPs isolated from MDR leukemia and breast cancer cells were cocultured with their drug-sensitive counterparts. P-gp transfer was assessed by direct immunolabeling, and acquired transcripts and regulatory microRNAs by quantitative real-time PCR. We show that MDR MPs incorporate nucleic acids; MPs change recipient cells' transcriptional environment to reflect donor MDR phenotype, and distinct pathways exist among cancers of different origin that may be dependent on donor cells' ABCB1 overexpression. We demonstrate that this pathway exists for both hematological and nonhematological malignancies. By conferring MDR and "retemplating" the transcriptional landscape of recipient cells, MPs provide a novel pathway, having implications in the dissemination and acquisition of deleterious traits in clinical oncology.

Organizational Learning As a By-product of Justifications for Change

In this article, we develop and test a model that relates change management's justifications for organizational change to organizational learning. The main argument is as follows: by justifying change in specific ways, change managers instigate thought processes that generate new insights for change recipients (cognitive learning). Also, provision of justifications affects motivation, which in turn is hypothesized to foster learning. The hypotheses are tested using a multi-organization, multichange dataset from a sample of Norwegian work organizations. Empirically, a distinction is made between three types of learning outcomes: generative learning, distributive learning and process learning, i.e. the generation and dissemination of change relevant knowledge. Findings show that four types of justifications are positively related to learning. Some support was found for the hypothesis that the effect of justification is mediated by attitudes towards change and the change process (motivational path).

Readiness to Implement a National Quality Framework: Evidence from Irish Early Childhood Care and Education Centres

This study examined the factors associated with childcare staff members' readiness to implement quality standards in early childhood settings in Ireland. To coincide with a new government policy that provides every three-year-old child with access to a free preschool year, a framework designed to improve the quality of early childhood care and education centres (ECCECs) is being rolled out nationally. The new quality framework details the first national set of best practice standards for early childhood care and education in Ireland. This study measured support for this change in childcare practices in one pilot community, which introduced the framework prior to national roll-out. The study used the Organizational Change Recipients' Belief Scale to determine how readiness for change was associated with job satisfaction and the work environment in childcare settings. One hundred and twenty surveys were completed by childcare staff in nine pilot ECCECs. The surveys were distributed in 2009 and therefore capture staff attitudes towards the introduction of the new quality framework. The results show that individual staff characteristics had little association with support for the implementation of the quality framework, while factors related to group dynamics were significantly associated with readiness for change. Specifically, a positive work environment and greater job satisfaction were associated with a lower belief that there is a need for the national quality framework, but a higher belief that the childcare staff will be supported by management when the quality framework is introduced.

Change Recipients’ Reactions to Organizational Change

This study reviews quantitative empirical studies of change recipients’ reactions to organizational change. The authors reviewed studies published between 1948 and 2007, out of which 79 met the criteria of being quantitative studies of change recipients’ reactions to an organizational change. Through an inductive review, the authors unravel a model of (a) explicit reactions to change, in which these reactions are conceptualized as tridimensional attitudes; (b) reaction antecedents that comprise prechange antecedents (viz., change recipient characteristics and internal context) and change antecedents (viz., change process, perceived benefit/harm, and change content); and (c) change consequences, including work-related and personal consequences. On the basis of their review the authors conclude by proposing directions for future research and practical managerial implications.

Positioning Change Recipients’ Attitudes Toward Change in the Organizational Change Literature

This article reviews the literature on attitudes toward change. This narrative review of 58 journal articles published between 1993 and 2007 indicates that there is a need for a more complete typology of attitudes toward change that also fully captures the core essence of this concept. By means of content analysis we first examined the conceptual overlap between the eight attitude-related constructs included in this review and the working definition of attitudes toward change. Second, the concept “attitudes toward change” was described along four major theoretical lenses: (a) nature of change, (b) level of change, (c) positive—negative view on change, and (d) research perspective. This conceptual review not only summarizes the current state of research but also offers a more complete typology of attitudes toward change, and highlights directions for possible future inquiry.

UNCOVERING RELATIONSHIPS AND SHARED EMOTION BENEATH SENIOR MANAGERS' RESISTANCE TO STRATEGIC CHANGE.

Many approaches to organizational change assume that change recipients will resist and that this resistance is illegitimate and unfounded, as right sits with those initiating change. Working with data on senior managers, we challenge these assumptions developing a model that has implications for understanding of change and change agent practice.

Evaluation and Importance of a Pre-Change Stage in an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Implementation Perspective in India: A Conceptual Framework

Any technological development in an organization leads to great change at an individual and organizational level. The new demanding responsibilities during an information technology (IT) intervention tend to create mental unrest, fear, and friction in the workforce, more so in a developing country like India. The unique issues faced by India could be rooted in its history of information communication technology (ICT) development in purely Indian origin organizations. The IT growth in this context has been unbridled and too fast paced, taking the workforce by surprise in a short time span. From basic rudimentary IT systems in the country, these organizations have moved to sophisticated packages such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) to address the business pressures, information integration issues, and expectations arising from competition with multinationals operating in the same space. In this context it becomes important to test and evaluate the required elements in a change program to ensure better outcomes, keeping in mind the Indian context and its sociocultural differences. This article describes the evolution of evaluation framework, summarizes the relevant ERP literature, and attempts to choose the change factors that should be included in a multistage change program to achieve an individual impact level of outcome irrespective of the origin of the organization. This framework would need to be further tested in an Indian corporate scenario through a survey of change recipients with focus on any particular weak link in the stages of change, and the differences, if any, would need to be studied by comparison with Western origin organizations that have adopted robust multistage change programs resulting in high individual level change outcome.

Reflections: our Journey in Organizational Change Research and Practice

This commentary summarizes our research and practice on the topic of organizational change over the past 30 years. Our purpose in preparing this commentary is to explain how our efforts accumulated over this period to produce the questions we addressed, the answers our findings revealed, and the direction of our future efforts. We summarize our journey thus far relative to six signposts, namely: (a) the identification of five key beliefs underlying change recipient motivations to change; (b) an emphasis on change recipient active participation in the change effort; (c) the importance of diagnosis; (d) the importance of creating readiness for change; (e) the identification of strategies for influencing the five beliefs throughout the change process; and, (f) the assessment of reactions to organizational change. To give an idea of where our journeys will take us in the future, we identify five trips we plan to make: (a) examine the relative importance of the five key beliefs for influencing change recipient support; (b) expand our cognitive view of change motivation to include emotional reactions to change; (c) investigate the relationship between change recipient characteristics (such as regulatory focus) and reactions to organizational transformation; (d) explore the relationship between internal contextual variables (relations with local change agents and co-workers) during organizational change; and (e) focus on ethics in organizational change.

Resistance to Change: The Rest of the Story

Prevailing views of resistance to change tell a one-sided story that favors change agents by proposing that resistance is an irrational and dysfunctional reaction located “over there” in change recipients. We tell the rest of the story by proposing that change agents contribute to the occurrence of resistance through their own actions and inactions and that resistance can be a resource for change. We conclude by proposing how resistance might be restructured.

Implementation Activities and Organizational Sensemaking

Corporate change initiatives trigger a series of activities aimed at implementing change. It is often assumed that successful implementation requires consistent action based on a shared understanding of the changes among employees. This article examines how implementation activities affect individual and organizational sensemaking processes and thereby contribute to a shared understanding and consistent change action. Based on inductive analyses of longitudinal data, the study suggests that many implementation activities focus predominantly on further planning and creating a cognitive understanding among change recipients prior to any action. Although participation in planning activities facilitates sensemaking at the individual level, it neither ensures organizational sensemaking nor necessarily leads to collective action. The limitations of cognitively focused implementation activities are discussed, followed by suggestions on how change agents can supplement these with activities aimed at sensemaking through action.

Organizational Change Recipients' Beliefs Scale

Based on research conducted by organizational scientists dating to the 1940s, the authors identified five important precursors that determine the degree of buy-in by organizational change recipients. The authors assembled these independent precursors into a framework labeled organizational change recipients' beliefs and developed a psychometrically sound self-report questionnaire that can be used to gauge progress of organizational change efforts. The authors describe a series of four studies used to develop a 24-item assessment tool that can be administered at any stage of the change process. The information obtained can serve as (a) a barometer of the degree of buy-in among change recipients, (b) an assessment of deficiencies in specific beliefs that can adversely impact the success of an organizational change, and (c) a basis for planning and executing actions to enhance buy-in among organizational change recipients.

A Top Management Team's Reactions to Organizational Transformation: The Diagnostic Benefits of Five Key Change Sentiments

From research dating to the 1940s, we identified five precursor sentiments deemed important by organizational scientists studying reactions of organizational change recipients. Collectively, these sentiments constitute a framework for understanding reactions to change. We investigated the validity and utility of the framework for assessing the progress of an organizational change by using it to guide the analysis of qualitative interview data collected from a top management team as part of an assessment of a major organizational change. We demonstrate that the five-sentiment framework provides a useful and reliable tool for coding interview responses. In addition, the data, thus coded, provided very useful insight into the underlying concerns regarding the change. We suggest that the five sentiment framework is a useful guide for diagnosing change progress and planning measures to correct change shortcomings.

On the Receiving End

This study focuses on the interpretations and experiences of change recipients, those who carry out organizational interventions initiated by others. Based on the ways nurses experienced a shared governance initiative implemented in their hospital, the authors investigated change recipients’ sensemaking about organizational change through their ascribed meanings, emotional responses, and perceptions of its impacts on them. Survey data demonstrated how nurses subjectively assessed their gains and losses from the change initiative. Participation in the initiative increased the experience of gains, as did membership in a unit where change was implemented more fully. Textual analysis of open-ended responses to the survey indicated that gains were linked with interpretations of the change initiative and pleasant feelings and that there was considerable emotional contagion within work units. Such effects are particularly likely in employee empowerment initiatives as experiences are linked to interpretation and mood among change recipients.

Managing Change: Steering a Course between Intended Strategies and Unanticipated Outcomes

It is well known that managed change within an organisation can result in unpredictable outcomes. In this paper a sensemaking framework is developed to demonstrate how both intended and unintended outcomes can result from the way middle managers – who are usually the recipients of a change strategy devised at the top – make sense of the senior management initiatives. This framework highlights the significant impact of change recipients on the outcomes achieved and suggests we need to reconsider both what we mean by “managing” change, and the way senior managers lead change. A case study that looks at a privatised utility undergoing strategic change from a middle manager perspective illustrates how the framework can account for the phenomenon of unintended outcomes. As the implementation largely follows what could be described as a textbook, top-down approach to change, it illustrates the problems many organisations face when implementing such change programmes. The paper also draws out the implications for the practice of change management.

From Intended Strategies to Unintended Outcomes: The Impact of Change Recipient Sensemaking

The tendency for intended strategies to lead to unintended consequences is well documented. This longitudinal, real-time analysis of planned change implementation provides an explanation for this phenomenon. We focus on the social processes of interaction between middle managers as change recipients as they try to make sense of the change interventions. We show the extent to which lateral, informal processes of inter-recipient sensemaking contribute to both intended and unintended change outcomes, and therefore the unpredictable, emergent nature of strategic change. The findings raise the issue of the extent to which it is possible to manage evolving recipient interpretations during change implementation.