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The purpose of this paper is to highlight the importance of developing the “right” attitudes toward change.

The viewpoint is based on more than 20 years of experience gained and insights developed through consulting projects and training conducted for numerous multinational companies and public sector organizations across Asia. An overview of international and national competency frameworks that include change management from Australia, United Kingdom, and Singapore is also presented.

A competent change manager requires a combination of knowledge, skills, and attitude to effect change. While knowledge and skills have traditionally been emphasized, there is a need to develop the “right” attitude as well.

This article is based on the author's personal viewpoint which may be subjective.

The paper provides researchers with an insight on the importance of attitudes as a key contributing factor to change management competency. For the practitioners, it provides another perspective for designing more effective education programs to train change managers with an emphasis on attitudes.

This paper contributes to the existing change management literature by providing insights on the importance of competency, in particular, the “right” attitude required of a change manager.

This article studies attitude change and its intention is to emphasise that management education has its impact through influencing attitudes as well as developing instrumental skills—skills in getting things done. The first part presents a research study and its conclusions, the second discusses some of the implications of these conclusions and some of the issues they raise.

Health policies often require individuals to limit behaviours deemed enjoyable or suffer other burdens. This leads to considerable and contested discourse often played out in the popular media. The aim of this study is to determine the effects of such contested media discourse on viewers' perceived attitude change towards the target behaviour.

Combining concepts from discourse analysis and marketing-psychology elaboration models, the authors undertook an online survey in which a large sample of the public (N = 855) watched parts of a real daytime news debate on the UK Sugar Tax. The authors then evaluated the effects of this discourse on the perceived understanding of the tax and perceived attitude change to the consumption of sugary drinks.

Participants differentiated between parts of the discourse related to facts and arguments (termed argument-related discourse devices) and parts related to the format and tone of the debate (termed debate-/speaker-related discourse devices). Contrary to what might be expected, debate-/speaker-related discourse devices, which might be thought of as subjective, appeared to effect positive perceived attitude change through a cognitive processing route that involved perceived improved understanding. The argument-related discourse devices, which may appear objective or rational, were not associated with perceived improved understanding but were directly associated with positive perceived attitude change.

Given the authors' interest in the relationship between discourse and perceived attitude change, the authors take the novel step of linking concepts from discourse analysis with models of attitude change taken from the marketing-psychology domain. Furthermore, the authors' large-scale survey “democratises” discourse analysis, allowing non-expert participants to reflect upon discourse.

Public service announcements (PSAs) are frequently used tools to try to change attitudes and behaviors on social issues, including texting and driving, which has been social problem for over a decade. However, the effectiveness of such PSA campaigns often meet with varying degrees of success, suggesting changes to current anti-texting and driving campaigns are needed. This study aims to examine how to design more effective anti-texting and driving PSA campaigns by identifying the elements of existing campaigns that have the strongest impact on attitude change.

In total, 682 respondents from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk participated in an online study in which they evaluated 162 real-world anti-texting and driving ads. Respondents evaluated the ads on various ad elements (i.e. type of appeal, source of emotion, discrete emotions and perceived creativity), as well as their attitudes toward the issue after seeing the ad.

PSAs that use emotional (vs rational) appeals, evoke emotion through imagery (vs text) and/or use fear (vs disgust, anger or guilt) result in the largest changes in attitude. In addition, more creative PSAs are more effective at changing attitudes.

Overall, the results provide useful information to social marketers on how to design more effective anti-texting and driving campaigns.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how the quality of change information influences employees’ attitude toward organizational change and turnover intention. Additionally, the role of engagement, psychological contract fulfillment and trust in the relationship between change information and attitude toward change is assessed.

In a technology services organization that was implementing a “new way of working,” questionnaire data of 669 employees were gathered. The organizational change in question sought to increase employees’ autonomy by increasing management support and improving IT support to facilitate working at other locations (e.g. at home) or at hours outside of regular working hours (e.g. in evening).

The results showed that change information was positively related to psychological contract fulfillment and attitude toward change. Engagement and psychological contract fulfillment were positively related to attitude toward change and negatively related to turnover intention. Contrary to what was expected, trust did not influence attitude toward change but was negatively related to turnover intention.

The study presents a model that can help management to foster positive affective, behavioral, and cognitive responses to change, as well as to reduce employee turnover. Fulfilling employees’ psychological contracts and cultivating engagement is important in this respect, as well as continuously considering whether information about the organizational change is received in good time, is useful, is adequate and satisfies employees’ questions about the change.

As one of the first studies in its field, attitude toward change was conceptualized and operationalized as a multidimensional construct, comprising an affective, a behavioral and a cognitive dimension.

This paper aims to investigate the impacts of a science-based environmental communication campaign at a university dining hall. The impacts are assessed in terms of student attitudes toward sustainability, food consumption choices and perceptions and understanding of the campaign and the information it communicated.

A communication campaign was designed to convey the water footprint of food entrées available at a university dining hall. This campaign was tested during a three-week field experiment in which students at the dining hall were exposed to information about the sustainability of their food. To measure behavior and attitude change, sales and production data were collected before, during and after the campaign, and pre- and post-test surveys were administered. To better understand perceptions, the authors conducted in-depth interviews with undergraduate students who frequented the dining hall.

Consumption patterns did not change significantly as a result of the campaign, and students’ attitude scores actually became slightly less positive toward choosing low water footprint foods. Interview data helped explain these results by showing that the ability and desire of students to choose sustainable food were overwhelmed by convenience and time pressures; other food attributes often outweighed sustainability; limited food source information could not verify the benefits of sustainable food; and the science of water footprints was disconnected from students’ subjective concepts of sustainability.

This paper empirically examines how students understand and interpret an environmental change campaign focused on sustainable food. It addresses an important gap in the literature by augmenting experimental and survey results with in-depth interview data, which help explain the often ineffective outcomes of behavior change campaigns. The research was conducted in the novel setting of a university dining hall.

Estonian companies have been in a continuous state of change for the past 15 years, and there is still a lot to be done to achieve welfare levels comparable with developed countries in the European Union. The crucial question is how to achieve employee commitment to organisational change. The aim of this research is to highlight employee attitudes toward organisational change and how organisational culture can influence these attitudes in a rapidly changing environment.

A model showing the connections between organisational culture and employee attitudes in the organisational change process has been developed as the theoretical conceptual frame for the study. The empirical study was conducted by the authors in 26 Estonian organisations with 412 respondents. A tool for measuring employee attitudes in the process of organisational change and a questionnaire for measuring organisational culture were developed by the authors.

Under the conditions of economic transition, employees with higher job satisfaction are more willing to participate in an organisational change process than employees with a lower level of job satisfaction. Employees who evaluated their organisational culture as being stronger were more willing to participate in implementing organisational changes and were more satisfied with their jobs and managers. The attitudes of those managers who were younger than 45 were more strongly related to a positive organisational culture than to a strong organisational culture.

The most significant finding was that in a transition economy a strong organisational culture influences attitudes to change in a positive way. This is different from countries with more stable economies, where a strong organisational culture is considered to promote stability.

Measuring attitudes of healthcare providers and managers toward change in health care organizations (HCOs) has been of widespread interest. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the psychometric characteristics and usability of an abbreviated German version of the Change Attitude Scale.

The Change Attitude Scale was used in a survey of healthcare providers and managers in German hospitals after the implementation of a breast cancer center concept. Reliability analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, structural equation modeling and bivariate analysis were conducted.

Data from 191 key persons in 82 hospitals were analyzed. The item-scale structure produced an acceptable model fit. Convergent validity was shown by significant correlations with measures of individuals’ general opinions of the breast center concept. A non-significant correlation with a scale measuring the hospital’s hierarchical structure of leadership verified discriminant validity. The interaction of key persons’ change attitude and hospitals’ change performance through change culture as a mediator supported the predictive validity.

The study found general support for the validity and usability of a short version of the German Change Attitude Scale.

Since attitudes toward change influence successful implementation, the survey may be used to tailor the design of implementation programs and to create a sustainable culture of high readiness for change.

This is the first study finding that a short instrument can be used to measure attitudes toward change among healthcare providers and managers in HCOs.

Although the role of organisational characteristics in the change process has been extensively analysed and discussed in the literature, individual characteristics, which are equally crucial for the success of change, have been neglected. Therefore, the purpose of the present study is to add a different way of looking and working with organisational change by focusing on individuals’ emotions and personality traits. This paper explores how emotional intelligence and the “big five” dimensions of personality can facilitate organisational change at an individual level by exploring the relationship between these attributes and attitudes toward organisational change. The sample consisted of 137 professionals who completed self‐report inventories assessing emotional intelligence, personality traits and attitudes towards organisational change. The results confirmed that there is a relationship between personality traits and employees’ attitudes toward change. Similarly, the contribution of emotional intelligence to the attitudes to change was found to be significant, indicating the added value of using an emotional intelligence measure above and beyond the effect of personality. The practical implications of these findings are discussed in relation to the phases of a change project.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationships between transformational leadership and post-acquisition performance, introducing into the analysis the mediating effect of employee attitudes toward changes, in the specific context of a transitional economy.

The data were collected from 208 employees (including 91 managers) from ten acquired companies in Serbia. Using exploratory factor analysis, two dimensions of transformational leadership were identified in the context of a transitional economy: the first one refers to inspiring and stimulating the employees, and the second dimension refers to responding to employee problems. Multiple regression analysis was used to test the research hypotheses.

The results of the analysis indicate that inspiring and stimulating employees has an indirect impact on post-acquisition performance through the mediating effect of employee attitudes toward changes, whereas responding to employee problems has both direct and indirect impacts on post-acquisition performance.

The results of study may be significant for managers involved in the processes of mergers and acquisitions and may aid them in obtaining adequate levels of employee commitment and trust, which are needed to achieve challenging goals and to improve post-acquisition performance.

The research of the mediating effect of employee attitudes on post-acquisition performance contributes to a better understanding of the relationships between transformational leadership and post-acquisition performance. Research in transitional economies related to subject matter is limited, while in Serbia in particular, there is no prior empirical work on the impact of transformational leadership on post-acquisition performance.