Assessing Employees' Reactions to Organizational Change: An Integrative Framework of Change-Specific and Psychological Factors

Abstract

The importance of diagnostic assessments during the design, implementation, and evaluation of change management processes is increasingly emphasized in the change management literature, and in practice. However, evidence-based change management is challenged by the rather fragmented state of research on employees' reactions to change. Hence, this study proposes a theory-based framework for the design of change surveys that includes and links concrete classes of change management variables with specific employee reactions to change. The framework is applied and tested in the context of organizational changes following an international merger project (N = 240). Structural equation modeling revealed a good fit of the framework to empirical data and demonstrated the usefulness for the systematic and comprehensive identification of relationships between change management variables and employees' specific reactions to the change process. The results underscore the potential of the framework to guide researchers and practitioners alike in analyzing and optimizing organizational change processes.