Organizational change and work stress, attitudes, and cognitive load utilization: a natural experiment in a university restructuring

Abstract

Purpose

The authors present a quantitative analysis of the effect that organizational change has on work stress, work attitudes and perceptions, and cognitive utilization in a task.

Design/methodology/approach

First, the authors study the role organizational change has on work stress, attitudes and perceptions, including the role of attitudes toward change. The authors do so by examining differences across employees who are and are not undergoing change, as well as across two change phases. Second, the authors take advantage of the ongoing organizational change to study how people's anxiety about such change affects their cognitive utilization. They use an innovative approach to measure attention disengagement in a cognitive utilization task – a proxy for task-related performance – through a letter detection exercise. Third, the authors examine the role of work stress and change-related anxiety on attention disengagement among employees undergoing change. For this test, they use two organizational change-related texts to function as an anxiety-inducing and a calming-inducing prime.

Findings

Organization change is associated with higher work stress, lower job satisfaction and perceptions of institutional effectiveness and support. Further, organizational change-related anxiety adversely affects cognitive utilization, showing that employees undergoing change have higher attention disengagement relative to those not experiencing change. Among employees undergoing change, those receiving an anxiety-inducing prime show better cognitive utilization (lower attention disengagement) than those receiving the calming-inducing prime.

Originality/value

The rare merger of two public universities provides a natural experiment and a source of exogenous variation to examine the effects of radical organizational change on employees' attitudes, perceptions and task performance.

Citation

Contreras, S. and Gonzalez, J.A. (2021), "Organizational change and work stress, attitudes, and cognitive load utilization: a natural experiment in a university restructuring", Personnel Review, Vol. 50 No. 1, pp. 264-284. https://doi.org/10.1108/PR-06-2018-0231