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Summary Literature Change and Human Factors
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Summary of all literature for the exam of the course Change and Human Factors of the master Business Administration: Change Management.
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Summary Change and Human Factors1. Smith, A.C.T., Graetz, F.M. 2011. The psychological philosophy: changing minds.
Chapter 7 from Philosophies of Organizational change, Edward Elgar Publishing,
Northhampton, pp. 105- 122.
2. Carter, M.Z., Armenakis, A.A., Feild, H.S., Mossholder, K. W. 2013. Transformational
leadership, relationship quality, and employee performance during continuous
incremental organizational change. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 34, 942–958.
3. Cawsey, T.F., Deszca, G., Ingols, C. 2016. Becoming a master change agent. Chapter
8 from Organizational Change. An Action-Oriented Toolkit. 3rd Edition. Sage, Los
Angeles, pp. 256-296.
4. Higgs, M., Rowland, D. 2011. What does it take to implement change successfully? A
study of the behaviors of successful change leaders. The Journal of Applied Behavioral
Science, 47(3), 309-335. Change Recipient
5. Cawsey, T.F., Deszca, G., Ingols, C. 2016. Managing recipients of change and
influencing internal stakeholders. Chapter 7 from Organizational Change. An Action-
Oriented Toolkit. 3rd Edition. Sage, Los Angeles, pp. 215-255.
6. Huy, Q.N., Corley, K.G., Kraatz, M.S. 2014. From support to mutiny: shifting
legitimacy judgments and emotional reactions impacting the implementation of radical
change. Academy of Management Journal, 57(6), 1650-1680.
7. Oreg, S., Bartunek, J. M., Lee, G., & Do, B. 2018. An affect-based model of recipients’
responses to organizational change events. Academy of Management Review, 43(1), 65-
86.
8. Thomas, R., Hardy, C. 2011. Reframing resistance to organizational change.
Scandinavian Journal of Management, 27(3), 322-331.
9. Balogun, J., Johnson, G. 2005. From intended strategies to unintended outcomes: the
impact of change recipient sensemaking. Organization Studies, 26(11): 1573-1601
10. Ford, J.D., Ford, L.W., D’Amelio A. 2008. Resistance to Change: the rest of the story.
Academy of Management Review, 33: 362-377.
11. Sonenshein, S. 2010. We’re changing-or are we? Untangling the role of progressive,
regressive, and stability narratives during strategic change implementation. Academy of
Management Journal, 53(3): 477-512
,Chapter 7. The psychological philosophy ‘changing minds’ (Smith & Graetz)
To any change agent, sympathetic to the psychological philosophy, a rational, top-down
approach will fail. Instead, change must emerge from the ground up through
collaboration and a willing desire for improvement.
Resistance-acceptance
Rational change management philosophies tend to ignore how individuals respond to
change. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross (1969) developed a renowned five-stage model describing
how people come to terms with serious loss:
1. Denial
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Depression
5. Acceptance
Bridges (1995) similarly describes three stages in the transition process: (1) endings, (2)
the neutral zone, and, (3) new beginnings.
The psychological philosophy of organizational change treats the impact of change as
complex, powerful and potentially severe. People become accustomed to performing
tasks in certain ways that make them feel comfortable and proficient. Changing tasks or
priorities undermines their sense of mastery and replaces it with fears about inadequate
performance, escalating workloads, ridicule and termination. The psychological
philosophy assumes that resistance commands the first instinct towards change. The key
motif throughout the psychological philosophy is minimizing the trauma and discomfort
associated with organizational change (through encouraging employee involvement and
empowerment).
Some philosophies approach acceptance and rejection of change separately, while the
psychological philosophy conceptualized acceptance and rejection as polar extremes of a
continuum: responses to change.
Common psychological solutions for overcoming negative but intuitive responses to
change include empowerment, participation, education, facilitation and negotiation, job
rotation, and job enrichment. More abstract enabling factors are emotional intelligence
and organizational spirituality.
Resistance often proves counterproductive and can be manifested actively (aggressive
challenge) or passively (indirectly undermining). Employee resistance is known to
accompany perceived unfairness, increases in workload, unclear role definitions,
uncertain managerial support and the absence of team support.
Resistance should diminish as employees take ownership of decisions in an inside-out, or
bottom-up, approach to change management (if employees drive change, success seems
more likely).
Be aware that in rationalist empowerment programs, morale is a means to an end, not
an end in itself (which it is within the psychological philosophy as it beliefs change
leaders need to counteract feelings of powerlessness as they present major impediments
to performance.
Organizational Development (OD)
OD explores the human side of change responses, in a change context; it converges on
the values, intentions and perceptions of employees, whose personal experiences of
change need to be positively managed. OD emphasizes that change managers must
integrate the developmental needs of employees with the strategic objectives of the
organization as psychologically-fulfilled employees create and adapt to change better
,than those who remain unfulfilled. OD commits to the premise that change must
emanate from a critical mass of engaged employees: better performance comes with
interested, valued and empowered employees. OD assumes that participation leads
to contribution, which in turn brings about learning as new approaches and insights find
voice through debate. OD practitioners assume that the way organizations manage and
structure operations are incompatible with the healthy fulfillment of employees’ potential
(hierarchies and centralization undermine personal expression). They think that change
leaders must find ways to introduce open, trusting and collaborative structures: the
change agent does not dictate or direct change; they instead act as facilitators to help
organizational members solve their own problems.
While intuitive, OD rarely appeals to change agents who prefer more tangible methods,
not reliant on goodwill and cooperation of large numbers of employees.
Organizational Learning (OL)
OL creates a psychological approach that emphasizes knowledge. For OL proponents,
open dialogue marks the essence of OL, the dialogue process shapes meanings and
experiences into a shared ‘schema’ or frame of reference. Change, from the OL
perspective, means challenging established ways of behaving, and transpires when
employees make sense of organizations, important issues, activities and events, and
then adapt accordingly.
Organizational learning is the key outcome from development. OL elegantly embed a
knowledge component in order to explain how employees respond and adapt to changing
demands.
Decisionmaking, reasoning and change
Systemic biases in predictions appear to be important to understanding the nature of
change responses.
• Impact biases refer to individuals’ tendencies to overestimate the effect of an
emotional event while overlooking the contextual circumstances. (e.g. euphoria
work promotion: afterwards workload increased, more stress)
• Prediction biases accompany skewed emotional arousal states. Current states get
projected into future imagined states, which reinforces why one should avoid food
shopping when hungry. Prediction biases might explain why managers so
frequently underestimate how difficult change will be, and how willing employees
will be to engage positively.
• Distinction biases occur in predictions made during different modes of evaluation
as well as emotional states. (e.g. people evaluate options differently before and
after the decision).
How past decisions worked out also affects the accuracy of future predictions. Memory
introduces a systematic bias disproportionately skewed in the direction of events that
involved high emotional levels.
More options can lead to worse experiences. Rather than choosing what they predict will
lead to greater happiness, people may select the option that offers the greatest
immediate appeal or that fits previous experience. Of all the variables affecting
predictions, psychologists refer to the most obvious as medium-maximization, when
individuals resolve to focus on something other than the target outcome.
, Carter et al. (2013): Transformational Leadership, Relationship Quality and
Employee Performance During Continuous Incremental Organizational Change.
A continuous incremental change context comprises frequent, purposeful adjustments
that are small but ongoing and cumulative in effect
Focus of the Study:
• Many studies have focused on change at the (higher) strategic level and its effects
• Research gap: fewer studies have considered change at lower hierarchical levels.
• Change at lower level often comprises frequent, small adjustments that are
ongoing
• Continuous incremental change calls for more informal communication and
employee participation = transformational leadership
• One goal in the present research is to investigate how team-focused
transformational leadership influences employee performance at lower
organization levels where change is an integral part of ongoing operations.
• Second goal is to examine whether the change context affects the influence of
relationship quality on change outcomes.
• Research Context: lower levels in the organisation, where change happens on a
day to day basis.
Transformational Leadership:
• Employees cope with change by integrating existing effective elements with more
efficient ones
• Difficulties arise which ask for appropriate leadership
• Transformational leaders acknowledge the need for change, transmit their vision
towards employees and enhance employees’ confidence in dealing with adaption
• Resulting in a more favourable employee response, both attitudinally and
behaviourally.
We propose that transformational leadership acts as a change antecedent, which
facilitates the development of quality relationships between leaders and their employees.
Transformational leadership leads to high-quality relationships which promote positive
employee change consequences. High relationship quality facilitates the exchange of
resources between managers and employees that are necessary for task
accomplishment.
Change context
In continuous incremental change contexts, the adaptation process is more iterative in
nature. Iterative change consists of a sequence of small-scale changes that allow the
work unit (i.e., work team) to move forward while maintaining coherency in purpose.
Theoretical Background:
Research objective: The examination of relations between; (1) transformational
leadership, (2) change reactions, and (2) change frequency and consequences, during
continuous incremental organizational change at lower hierarchical levels.
Transformational leaders transmit to employees a strong vision of the growth
opportunities in their team, encourage them to think critically about change initiatives,
enhance their confidence in dealing with adaptation, and emphasize the importance of
performance while transcending self-interests for the team’s sake. Because of the
influence of transformational leadership, employees are more likely to react favorably to
change. We argue that as transformational leaders devote more time to coaching and
guidance, relational ties with employees should grow.
Hypothesis 1(a-b): Relationship quality will mediate the association of transformational
leadership with employee (a) task performance and (b) OCB.
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