Subjective Perceptions of Organizational Change and Employee Resistance to Change: Direct and Mediated Relationships with Employee Well‐being

AuthorAlannah E. Rafferty,Nerina L. Jimmieson
Date01 April 2017
Published date01 April 2017
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8551.12200
British Journal of Management, Vol. 28, 248–264 (2017)
DOI: 10.1111/1467-8551.12200
Subjective Perceptions of Organizational
Change and Employee Resistance to
Change: Direct and Mediated Relationships
with Employee Well-being
Alannah E. Raerty and Nerina L. Jimmieson1
School of Management, UNSW Business School, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052,
Australia, and 1School of Management, Queensland University of Technology, GPO Box 2434, Brisbane,
QLD 4001, Australia
Corresponding author email: a.raerty@unsw.edu.au
Researchers have focused on linking objective measures of change exposure, such as
the number of downsizing activities implemented, with employee well-being. This has
meant that less attention has been paid to employees’ subjective experience of change.
The authors examine relationships between employees’ perceptions of the extent of
change and the frequency of change and insomnia and psychological well-being. They
propose direct and indirect relationships via resistance to change between employees’
subjective experience of change and well-being. Data were collected from 260 employees
from a range of dierent organizations and industries. Respondentscompleted surveys at
two time points, separated by four months. Results revealed significant indirect relation-
ships between subjective perceptionsof change and insomnia and employee well-being via
aective resistance to change at Time 1 and Time 2. In addition, employees’ subjective
reports that change was very frequent were initially positively associated with T1
behavioral resistance to change but also were negatively associated with T2 behavioral
resistance to change. Discussion focuses on the importance of managing employees’
perceptions of change. Practically,the authors consider the dicult choices that confront
managers when seeking to implement and ‘sell’ change within their organization.
Introduction
Large-scale organizational changes occur with
increasing regularity (Bughin, Hung Byers and
Chui, 2011; De Meuse, Marks and Dai, 2010), and
are an important antecedent of employee attitudes
(Conway et al., 2014; van den Heuvel et al., 2013;
Meyer et al., 2010) and behaviors (Conway et al.,
2014). A good deal of research also has found
that exposure to organizational change negatively
This study was supported by an Australian Research
Council Discovery Grant DP130101680 awarded to the
authors. We should like to thank Mirjana Sandoval for
her assistance with data collection.
influences well-being at workas assessed by a range
of indicators, including elevated risk of mental
health problems (Bamberger et al., 2012; Loretto,
Platt and Popham, 2010), increases in poor self-
rated health (Ferrie et al., 1998; Kivm¨
aki et al.,
2001), adverse sleep patterns (Ferrie et al., 1998),
minor psychiatric morbidity (Ferrie et al., 1998;
Greenglass and Burke, 2000; Loretto, Platt and
Popham, 2010), increases in sickness absence
(Vahtera, Kivimaki and Pentti, 1997; Westerlund
et al., 2004) and hospital admissions (Wester-
lund et al., 2004) and increases in stress-related
medicine prescriptions (Dahl, 2011; Kivim¨
aki
et al., 2007). Many studies have focused on
downsizing and restructuring (Kalimo, Taris and
© 2016 British Academy of Management. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4
2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA, 02148, USA.
Organizational Change and Well-being 249
Schaufeli, 2003; Kivim¨
aki et al., 2000a, 2000b,
2001, 2003, 2007; Vahtera, Kivimaki and Pentti,
1997). Overall, this body of work also suggests
that large-scale changes have negative eects on
a broad array of physical and psychological indi-
cators of well-being (Benach et al., 2014; Loretto,
Platt and Popham, 2010).
While researchers have established that or-
ganizational change events are associated with
reduced employee well-being (Bamberger et al.,
2012; Benach et al., 2014), much of this research
has focused on linking broad, objective measures
of organizational change events with indicators
of employee well-being. For example, researchers
haveexamined objective measures of change expo-
sure including classifying change into ‘major’ and
‘minor’ downsizing based on the percentage reduc-
tion in hours worked in a period of time (Vahtera,
Kivimaki and Pentti, 1997; Vahtera et al., 2004;
Westerlund et al., 2004). Other researchers have
placed employees into ‘change exposure’ groups
based on whether employees have objectively
experienced change, are anticipating change, or
have not experienced a specific change event
(Ferrie et al., 1998). Other studies have linked the
number of downsizing and restructuring activities
experienced with employee well-being (Greenglass
and Burke, 2000). While a focus on objective mea-
sures of change exposure has revealed important
findings, it has resulted in less attention being paid
to employees’ subjective experience of change
(Gover, Halinski and Duxbury, 2016; Michel
and Gonz´
alez-Morales, 2013). We suggest that a
focus on objective measures of change exposure
may result in an underestimation of the eects of
organizational change on employee well-being.
Recent theoretical and empirical work suggests
that an employee’s subjective experience of change
may not necessarily align with the objective classi-
fication to which they have been assigned (Loretto,
Platt and Popham, 2010). For example, Lorettore-
ported that greater perceived change was associ-
ated with poorer health, while an additive score of
the number of changes experienced (an objective
measure) was associated with better health. One
potential explanation for these conflicting findings
lies in the failure of objective measures to capture
employee sensemaking during change. Theorists
have acknowledged that the key to understand-
ing organizational change processes is the way
in which individuals acquire, organize and make
sense of change (George and Jones, 2001; Loretto,
Platt and Popham, 2010; Raerty and Grin,
2006; Weberand Manning, 2001). This perspective
suggests that the world does not consist of events
that are meaningful in themselves (Bartunek and
Moch, 1987; Weber and Manning, 2001). Rather,
organizational members interact with and arm
the existence of events, casting them in a par-
ticular light through the process of sensemaking
(Dutton, 1993). As such, individual sensemaking
processes are essential to understanding employ-
ees’ experience of and reactions to organizational
change. Therefore, one important contribution of
this study is our focus on employees’ subjective
experience of the degree of change and the fre-
quency with which change occurs as antecedents of
employee well-being. We hypothesize that subjec-
tive perceptions of change are indirectlyassociated
with employee well-being via resistance to change
(aective, behavioral and cognitive: Oreg, 2006).
The second contribution of this study is that
relatively little is known about the role of change
attitudes as psychological mediating mechanisms
linking organizational change events with em-
ployee well-being. Researchers have identified
increased job demands and reduced autonomy
(Bamberger et al., 2012; Kivim¨
aki et al., 2000b;
Moyle and Parkes, 1999), changes in social sup-
port (Bamberger et al., 2012; Kivim¨
aki et al.,
2000b) and increases in unhealthy coping be-
haviors (Kivim¨
aki et al., 2000b) as mechanisms
that explain why organizational change events
influence employee well-being. While these mech-
anisms are clearly important, research has not yet
explored the role of employees’change attitudes as
potential mediators of the relationships between
organizational change and well-being. However,
change theorists haveargued that, while the failure
successfully to implement planned change may
be attributed to many factors, few issues are as
critical as employees’ attitudes toward change
(Miller, Johnson and Grau, 1994). We hypothesize
that employee aective, behavioral and cognitive
resistance to change (Oreg, 2006) will act as the
psychological mechanisms by which employees’
subjective experience of organizational change
events influence well-being.
The third contribution of this research is that
we consider employees’ resistance to change atti-
tudes at two points in time – early on and later in
a change process. While research has tended to as-
sess change attitudes at a single point in time, em-
ployees’ interpretationsof change evolve over time.
© 2016 British Academy of Management.

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