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The purpose of this paper is to explain the rationale for designing and implementing an action learning and research process to significantly transform the work behaviour of tradition‐bound bakers to embrace leading ideas of a new workplace culture in order to diversify the product range of the moon cake and generally improve the competitive performance of the company.

Emphasis was placed on action learning and action research as the main vehicles for managing the organizational change process.

The project demonstrates how an action learning and change management strategy was designed and implemented with a Chinese workforce that had no prior experience of modern ideas on production technology and other aspects of the new workplace culture.

The project was confined to a single case study approach in the bakery department of a major food company in Hong Kong.

The project demonstrates a close correspondence between organizational learning and change management theory and the actual process and outcomes of a practical change agenda.

The special value of the paper lies in its insights into the work behaviour of Chinese factory workers.

The purpose of the study to explain employees' “perception of change” from the socio‐psychological and behavioural point of view, and the consequences of this for the employee's ability to adopt new environments.

This study is implemented using a three phase‐longitudinal approach which was conducted over a one‐and‐a‐half‐year period in order to monitor the process of place attachment (and detachment), starting two months before the relocation and ending four months after relocation. Interpretative phenomenological analysis is used for analysis and interpretation of the qualitative data.

The relationship between physical environment and social and environmental psychology has been the central issue. In workplace change, while the attachments that no longer work for people are broken, there is a need to build new connections, which can support people through this transition.

There are pragmatic and strategic resource management implications arising from the study. Further study of affective relationships that all employees have with their workplace will aid in appropriately designing and managing facilities (services and programme).

The previous studies indicate that the existing literature lacks a unifying framework for understanding the relationship between people and places and the emotional significance of the physical environment for regulating the employees' work behaviours. Having exposed the inadequacy of workplace change management approaches in explaining and understanding the employees' resistance to change in their experience of the move process, considering place attachments in workplaces proposes a reappraisal of both employees' experience and evaluation of the move process. It provides a comprehensive framework for understanding the significance of employees' attachments to their workplace and offers guidance on managing workplace change from procurement, design to provision of workplaces.

Looks at the 2000 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference held at the University of Cardiff in Wales on 6/7 September 2000. Spotlights the 76 or so presentations within and shows that these are in many, differing, areas across management research from: retail finance; precarious jobs and decisions; methodological lessons from feminism; call centre experience and disability discrimination. These and all points east and west are covered and laid out in a simple, abstract style, including, where applicable, references, endnotes and bibliography in an easy‐to‐follow manner. Summarizes each paper and also gives conclusions where needed, in a comfortable modern format.

Interest in older employees increases in times of population ageing. Previous research exploring the situation has underlined older employees' struggle with workplace changes. However, it has not explored their master narrative – the socially shared narrative about older employees that steers behaviour. This study explores this narrative and its differences across changing workplaces. It draws on Lyotard's suggestion that master narratives disintegrate in post-modern societies.

This study conducts focus groups among older Finnish employees of an airline, postal service and social care. These groups experienced different kinds of workplace changes, namely mass layoffs, digitalisation and restructuring. The focus groups highlight the individuals' shared narratives, thereby pinpointing the master narrative.

The master narrative describes how simultaneous changes at the workplace and in their health lead older employees to look for ways to exit their jobs. This narrative is largely stable across workplaces, showing no disintegration but some variation.

This is the first study on the master narrative of older employees and its disintegration. To the authors’ knowledge, it is also the first study to use focus groups to explore a master narrative.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the hitherto unexplored relationship between employees’ perceptions of informational injustice with respect to change and their negative workplace emotions, as well as how this relationship might be mitigated by structural and relational features of the organizational context.

The paper draws on quantitative data collected through the 2011 Workplace Employment Relations Survey. The hypotheses are tested with ordered probit analysis using random effects.

The findings show that informational injustice enhances the development of negative workplace emotions, yet this effect is attenuated at higher levels of job influence, reward interdependence, trust, and organizational commitment.

The findings contribute by identifying several contingencies that attenuate the harmful effect of informational injustice with respect to change on negative workplace emotions. The limitations of the study include the lack of data on change-specific outcomes and the reliance on the same respondents to assess the focal variables.

The study suggests that organizations facing the challenge of sharing complete information about internal changes can counter the employee stress that comes with limited information provision by creating appropriate internal environments.

The study adds to research on organizational change by providing a better understanding of an unexplored driver of negative workplace emotions (i.e. informational injustice with respect to change) and explicating when such informational injustice is more or less likely to enhance these emotions.

This study aims to examine the impact of a private jet company’s change of workplace on employees’ satisfaction using specific variables from a conceptual framework of workplace change appraisal. Another purpose of the study is to identify the relationships between staff characteristics and satisfied aspects of a work environment.

A case study was conducted at MJets – a company in the aviation and private jet sector. The research methods included field surveys, document analysis and a set of questionnaires on employee satisfaction, which were then analysed and discussed.

The findings show that organisational contexts, work processes and implementation processes have an impact on workplace change and employees’ needs and preferences, which affect their responses to the work environment. The most satisfied aspects of a work environment include the ceiling height of each floor, the square-metre area of buildings and the amount of light in the work area. Despite the new work environment, employees are scarcely satisfied with building accessibility, storage, archive facilities and privacy. The relationships between staff characteristics (i.e. working hours, job functions, mode of transport and duration of employment) and employee satisfaction with the work environment are statistically tested. The study shows statistically significant results including the following: mode of transport and satisfaction with parking spaces, job functions and satisfaction with building accessibility and job functions and satisfaction with storage and archive facilities.

According to a business type, the provision and arrangement of the work environment of a private jet company that is different from other office organisations affect both the generalisation and the generalisability of the study. This study was conducted in Thailand. The impact of the national culture may have also influenced the outcomes.

The findings and the reflections upon them help understand the complex relationships of variables influencing workplace change appraisal. The focus is on employee involvement; communication with employees in the preparation and implementation processes may be an effective way to promote workplace change objectives and help facility managers reduce negative impacts of workplace change.

This paper contributes to prior research on workplace change appraisal and provides evidence for both positive and negative impacts of workplace change on employee satisfaction with the work environment. Identifying the impact of workplace change on employee satisfaction through the conceptual framework contributes to the body of research on facilities management. In addition, the conceptual framework of workplace change appraisal can be applied by practitioners in the field of workplace design and management.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse employees' perception of a change at their workplaces and the requirements for learning, and factors supporting or inhibiting learning in the context of this change.

Data collection included personal face‐to‐face semi‐structured interviews with ten client advisors in the retail‐banking department of a German bank. The interviews took place during a time when the participants' workplaces were affected by a drastic change, namely the implementation of an integrated consulting concept. The data were analysed by a qualitative, content analysis approach, adapting Billett's framework for analysing workplace changes.

Challenges and requirements for learning as a consequence of the workplace change were analysed. The results show that the employees realised many affordances of the modification of work routines, especially concerning work performance, professional knowledge, and professional role. Thus, employees recognised the change as an opportunity for the acquisition of knowledge and competence development.

This paper contributes to the understanding of workplace change's effect on employees' knowledge, work routines and professional development.

The purpose of this study is to empirically examine the cause–effect relationships between workplace friendship and knowledge-sharing behavior, from a static perspective. Furthermore, it investigates the bi-directional relationship between the increase in both workplace friendship and knowledge-sharing behavior over same time periods, and also endeavors to identify whether there is a significant negative lagged effect of the increase in both workplace friendship on knowledge-sharing behavior, and vice versa, across time from a dynamic perspective.

The study conducts a three-wave questionnaire survey to test the research model. A latent change score approach was used to test the direct relationship between changes in workplace friendship and changes in knowledge-sharing behavior.

The findings reveal that knowledge-sharing behavior fosters workplace friendship and workplace friendship promotes the emergence of knowledge-sharing behavior. An increase in workplace friendship promotes an increase in knowledge-sharing behavior over same time periods. However, an increase in workplace friendship will lead to a lagged decrease of knowledge-sharing behavior across time, and vice versa.

The time interval in this study is a little short to capture the full changes in workplace friendship. Some important control factors and mediating mechanisms are not included in the research model.

This study guides managers to focus on various motivators to better strengthen workplace friendship and knowledge-sharing behavior and to consider and effectively respond to the negative side of workplace friendship and knowledge-sharing behavior across time.

This study emphasizes the predictivity of one important interaction patterns, namely, knowledge-sharing behavior on friendship at the workplace, from a static perspective. This study also shows the benefits of an increase in workplace friendship for the development of knowledge-sharing behavior in the same time period. Furthermore, the study presents a counterintuitive finding when taking the lag effect into consideration in exploring the relationship between changes both in workplace friendship and knowledge-sharing behavior, and identifies a negative side of both when viewed over longer periods.

This chapter examines the changing nature of frontline supervision in light of the supervisory training and development programme which was provided to shift-bosses in order to complement the workplace change processes that AfricaGold embarked on to improve operational efficiency, productivity and safety of its mining operations. Although the training course was an important workplace change initiative taken by top management to improve organisational, individual and team performance at the rock-face where it mattered most, lack of organisational and managerial support prevented frontline supervisors from effectively implementing what they learned on the training course. The chapter highlights the importance of not only providing organisational change-focused training, but also systematically and strategically involving frontline supervisors in the conceptualisation, design, execution and evaluation of workplace change initiatives. It is only when frontline supervisors are supported, managerially and organisationally, that they can be deal-makers rather than deal-breakers for a successful introduction and execution of change initiatives on the shop-floor.

The changes now being experienced in the workplace, driven by market pressures, changing demographics and new technologies, are real and accelerating. Since change remains the one constant when it comes to workplace planning, further transformations within the workplace over the next 20 or 30 years can be expected. Hence, this paper aims to demonstrate how to use a scenario planning futures approach in a changing, complex and uncertain workplace environment. As well as provoke thought and discussion about its long‐term future.

At the Futures Academy in Dublin Institute of Technology, a systematic methodology for exploring and shaping the future has been developed, called the “Prospective through scenario” process. Each stage of the process is discussed in detail throughout this paper, as well as how the process is applied in the Johnson Controls workplace of the future study.

The creative “futures studies” approach can deal effectively with change, uncertainty and complexity in the workplace environment, by allowing those concerned to think, plan and act proactively rather than reactively as well as provide effective facilities management and real estate strategies.

Real estate organisations need to take the long view, for the greatest risk of our time is being overtaken by inevitable surprises that could have been foreseen and for which we could have been prepared.

Discussion and debate about the future of the workplace is inevitable and futures tools and techniques can facilitate this process.