Change Experience And Employee Reaction

432 Words2 Pages
Change Experience and Employee Reactions: Developing capabilities for change The whole purpose of this journal is to explore how experience with organizational change influences employees’ reactions to change. While exposure to an increasingly frequent organizational change can lead to change fatigue and cynicism, it can also generate more positive reactions to change. They identify experience-based change capabilities and explore conditions for developing such capabilities. In this study, they address the influence of experience with previous organizational change on reactions to subsequent change initiatives. In particular, they are interested in examining whether individuals develop change capabilities or whether there is a link between exposure to repeated change processes and more negative outcomes. Previous literature has indicated that pursuing multiple change processes can create change fatigue cynicism, or even burn-out. However, experience with multiple change processes can also provide an arena for learning, in which there is the potential to transfer experiences. The empirical evidence indicating that experience with change processes can lead to more positive reactions to change is limited, and the findings are inconclusive. They examine the role of experience empirically based on inductive and comparative analyses of data from two studies which include a wide range of Scandinavian companies, some with change-experienced employees and others with employees who had less change experience. The findings suggest that there are indeed distinctive differences in general patterns of reactions among employees based on their level of experience with organizational change. Employees with limited change experience exhibit strong behavioral and emotional reactions, while employees with extensive change experience use less effort to resist change and show
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