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This study aims to examine configurations of person-centered psychological change during organizational restructuring and downsizing in a public sector setting. Drawing on a social cognitive framework of organizational change the authors explore and identify the existence of different groups of employees who demonstrate varied responses (on commitment, engagement and anxiety) to restructuring and downsizing.

Surveys were collected from employees in three longitudinal waves (Time 1 N = 253; Time 2 N = 107; Time 3 N = 93, twelve months apart) at a UK public sector organization shortly before, during and after restructuring and downsizing.

Three classes of response emerged based on levels of and change in anxiety, organizational commitment and work engagement: a positive “Flourishers” profile was identified along with two relatively negative response profiles, labeled as “Recoverers” and “Ambivalents”. Higher levels of job control accounted for membership of the more positive response profile; higher structural uncertainty predicted membership of the most negative response group.

Using a person-centered approach, the authors form an understanding of different types of employee responses to downsizing; along with potential factors that help explain why groups of employees may exhibit certain psychological response patterns and may need to be managed differently during change. Thus, this approach provides greater understanding to researchers and managers of the varied impact that restructuring/downsizing has on the workforce.

To date there has been little research exploring employee responses to organizational restructuring and downsizing that has attempted to take a person-centered approach, which assumes population heterogeneity. Unlike variable centered approaches, this unique approach helps identify different patterns of employee responses to restructuring and downsizing.

The environment has become increasingly dynamic, characterised by hyper turbulence and high-velocity. While research has confirmed the influence of leadership on the effectiveness of change, the author knows less about how increased environmental dynamism influences the relationship. This study aims to investigate how this relationship is impacted under highly uncertain and dynamic external conditions.

To investigate the moderating effect of environmental dynamism on leadership practices and employees’ response to change, 1,536 employees’ survey responses were analysed from various organisations in South Africa. Moderator regression models were used to examine relationships.

Environmental dynamism has a slight significant strengthening effect on the relationship between leadership practices and response to change, with regard to commitment to the change; efficacy, that is, the belief in whether the change will lead to the efficacy of the organisation; and valence or attractiveness of the change. However, no significant positive moderator effect on the impact of leadership practices on active support for change. Tenure as control variable also did not have a significant influence on the model.

Organisations must take note that under dynamic conditions: employees’ belief about the efficacy of change is influenced by leadership practices, but not the active support for the change. Leadership must, thus, check whether employees’ positive responses are indeed going over in action to implement change.

This study contributes an important moderator effect: the more dynamic the environment, the greater the impact leadership practices have on employee response to change.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a model on how business managers perceive that an employee’s psychological contract influences his or her attitude toward an organizational change. More specifically, it aims to provide insight into the managerial views on: first, the affective, behavioral and cognitive responses of employees toward organizational change; second, the pre-change and change antecedents of these responses; and third, the role of the psychological contract as a pre-change antecedent.

Data were collected from in-depth interviews with 39 human resource directors, change managers and management consultants in eight European countries. Based on detailed grounded theory-driven analyses of the qualitative data, a conceptual model was developed.

Based on the grounded theory analysis, a model emerged that positions the individual change perception and individual answer to the “what’s in it for me?” question as central determinants of an employee’s attitude toward change. Moreover, the model distinguishes between “influencing” variables that shape the employees’ change perception, and “overruling” variables that can potentially reverse the change perceptions.

A strong emphasis on managing the employment relationship by fulfilling mutual obligations and by creating trust will yield more constructive responses to organizational change than focussing on managing an organizational change as an independent event.

As one of the first in its field, this study provides insight in the sense-making processes during organizational change, while adopting a managerial perspective. A grounded theory approach by means of interviewing, serves as a first step toward better understanding of the development of employees’ affective, behavioral and cognitive responses to organizational change.

To analyze lower level employees' retrospective views of their experience with organizational changes introduced by management; to provide a typology of change responses based on employees' interpretations.

Canadian bank employees' accounts of their experience with change were obtained in interviews and analyzed using established guidelines for qualitative data analysis. A typology of change responses (acceptance, resigned compliance, avoidance/opposition, and ambivalence) was derived from the data. Links are made to the literature on readiness for, compliance with and resistance to, change, and to the literatures on framing and on identity as they inform responses to change.

Among others, the findings indicate: that changes that are compatible with employees' role identity or that are viewed as enhancing organizational identity tend to be easily embraced; the extensive prevalence of the “resigned compliance” response; that lack of participation in change decisions may be a common expectation among employees of large bureaucratic organizations that seek uniformity across widely dispersed geographic units; and opposition to change may be functional from an organizational standpoint.

Several research implications are outlined including the need for theories to consider that change has been ubiquitous and that its pervasiveness can place its legitimacy beyond questioning. Research limitation includes the fact that the study focused on change survivors and did not have access to employees who had willingly left, or were asked to leave the organization as changes were being implemented.

The study provides an understanding of the dynamics that underlie different responses to change. Understanding such dynamics is essential for the performance of the change agent role.

Unlike much of the extant literature that tends to focus on the managerial view of change and on managerial framing, this study contributes the lower level employee perspective on, and framing of, change. In contrast with other studies of change that attend to a specific change situation, this article focuses on experiences with multiple changes and on the general view of change held by participants. The study also addresses a gap in the literature, as empirical studies have failed to tie responses to change to identity dynamics.

A theme emerging from research into the determinants, content and consequences of market orientation is that developing a market‐oriented culture exerts a profound influence on the organizational culture of a company. Explores and describes the manner and forms of front‐line employees’ responses to market‐oriented culture change initiatives. The paper begins with a brief overview of existing literature discussing the definition and components of a market orientation. Thereafter, extant research into the consequences of developing a market‐oriented culture is reviewed critically. After detailing the research design and methodology adopted in this study, the summary findings of two in‐depth case studies are presented. The findings indicate that front‐line employees respond differentially to market‐oriented culture change programmes. Concludes with a series of implications for both marketing and culture theorists and practitioners.

The paper aims to investigate the determinants of workplace innovation behavior of women employees in Pakistan. With a growing share of women's participation in the labor force in developing economies, it is crucial to understand their behavior. The authors looked into various practices that drive women's innovative behavior using social exchange theory (SET) as a theoretical framework.

This study is quantitative-based on the positivistic paradigm. Following the survey method technique, responses are collected from 317 female employees in the service industry. The authors used structural equation modeling for the data analysis.

The results indicate a significant impact of leader-member exchange (LMX) on employee empowerment; schedule flexibility was also a possible predictor of workplace innovation behavior through mediating roles of employee empowerment and response to change. The study findings are consistent with the prior literature and according to the developed hypothesis. Further, women's response to change partially mediates women employees' empowerment and workplace innovation behaviors. In addition, LMX significantly affects women's response to change through women employees' empowerment, leading to workplace innovation behavior.

The implication is that supervisors should be adaptable in working relationships with their women employees to bring positive workplace innovative behaviors. They create such exchanges with employees to make them feel that the organizations value them. The paper identifies the need to develop supportive supervisor-employee exchange relationships to encourage positive, innovative behavior in female employees.

This paper examines the workplace innovation behavior of women employees in Pakistani patriarchal society and a male-dominating workplace environment.

This study aims to examine the correspondence between the use and evaluation of management communication on the one hand and positive and negative responses to a planned organizational change on the other hand.

The study was conducted among employees of a Dutch branch of a large international organization which had survived a recent planned organizational change. In a survey, respondents were asked to report on their opinions about the organizational change at the time of the study, and retrospectively report on their opinions about the organizational change at the introduction of the organizational change.

It was found that positive responses to the planned organizational change increased and negative responses decreased in the due course of the organizational change. In addition, survivors were ambivalent in their attitude towards the organizational change, as positive responses existed next to negative ones. With respect to the role of management communication it was found that satisfaction with management communication is most strongly related to responses to the organizational change as survivors who are satisfied with management communication score high on positive responses and low on negative responses.

The study has methodological limitations as it employs a one point in time measurement.

This paper is a source for practitioners in the field of management communication as the results may guide them in focusing on maximizing employee satisfaction with management communication as this communication component is most strongly related to response to the organizational change.

This paper provides empirical evidence of the value of management communication for survivors of organizational change processes.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how career identity informs employees’ willingness to engage in organizational change initiatives.

The paper draws on the findings of a qualitative case study exploring the experiences of 29 employees involved in a planned “bottom-up” organizational change initiative. At the time of the study, all interviewees were employed in a Dutch non-profit organization.

Drawing on protean career theory and the literature on other-oriented work values, we show that career identity informs both how employees make sense of the respective organizational change and their willingness to engage in it. The authors found that proactive career behavior and a focus on other-oriented work values inform higher levels of employees’ engagement in the change, while passive career behavior and self-centered work values inform employees’ lower levels of involvement in the change initiative. Based on the findings, the authors conclude this paper with a conceptual model which captures the cyclical relationship between career identity and employees’ willingness to engage in organizational change initiatives.

Future research should consider both the individual characteristics of employees involved in change initiatives and content or contextual factors when exploring willingness to engage with change.

Organizational change consultants and managers need to be aware of the influence of career identity on employees’ willingness to engage in organizational change and use this information during the implementation of change initiatives.

The paper explores employees’ willingness to engage with organizational change initiatives through the lens of career identity.

The effective and successful transition of employees to an open work environment requires the facility manager to employ many skills. One skill, communication, is critical in order to engage employees’ support and enthusiasm for change. Utilising a process to lead change and a communication strategy to engage the responses of employees to the move will help support the facility manager’s success. This paper presents models for a change process and engages employees’ responses to change that was successfully applied to manage a move for a regional office of a corporation. Also presented are four practical tools to help the facility manager focus a communication strategy in support of a successful move to an open work environment.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a standardized, psychometrically sound instrument for the emerging construct of change recipient proactivity (CRP), using a deductive approach.

Using a systematic item-development framework as a guide (i.e. item generation, questionnaire administration, item reduction and scale evaluation) and based on a sample of 414 white-collar employees, this paper discusses the development and validation of an instrument that can be used to measure change recipient’s proactive behavioral responses to planned change efforts.

Results suggest that our proposed CRP scale is internally consistent (reliable) and valid in that it is conceptually distinct from, yet empirically correlated with neighboring constructs such as affective commitment to change, readiness for change and proactive personality.

The findings illustrate that change recipients can demonstrate proactive behaviors in response to change efforts. However, this study’s contribution is only a first step, requiring further theoretical and methodological refinement of the scale in different contexts.

The deductive nature of our study resulted in a comprehensive and domain-specific scale assessing recipients’ proactive responses to organizational change efforts. This opens doors to empirical studies on examining the conditions under which change recipients “may” step outside the boundaries of passivity to respond positively and proactivity to organizational change efforts.