Prerequisites for Healthy Organizational Change

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Lean has become an important element in production development, both in the private and the public sector, but it is also a controversial concept with strong sponsors – proponents as well as opposers. Does lean lead to intensification of work and increased stress or is it a new possibility for employee participation and improvement in the psychosocial work environment? A review of the literature does not give a clear answer. Both outcomes seem to be possible. However, the change process involved in the implementation of lean appears to be important for the outcome both in terms of productivity and in terms of the psychosocial work environment. Understanding the role of organizational social capital is crucial to the possibilities for a successful lean implementation, and it is necessary to have a simultaneous focus on the improvement of the management–employee collaboration and the application of lean tools and methods at the same time.

Trust is important for successful organizational change and, because change processes are accelerating in contemporary organizations, trust and distrust are becoming increasingly important. Furthermore, change events transform the established social relations and therefore they can become a challenge to trust. Trust or distrust might therefore be different outcomes of change processes that will affect how future organizational changes can be implemented. These issues have been explored in two manufacturing firms where trust relations played a major role in the outcome of initiatives intended to improve the psychosocial working environment. Change events initiated a decline in trust. The management in one firm succeeded in introducing actions that were interpreted as trustworthy, thereby stopping the decline in trust. The management and employees in the other firm were stuck in a stalemate of distrust. Power disparity and uncertainty in change processes seem to compel the employees to make perpetual interpretations of management actions to discover possible motives. Thereby, seemingly small issues can be imbued with strong symbolic meanings that might threaten trust and hamper organizational change. A theoretical model is presented that describes the relations between change, trust, and interpretation.

Organizations of today are often dealing with successive changes. Therefore we argue that organizations and employees would benefit from founding what we call organizational change competence. By organizational change competence, we mean the workers’ and organization’s ability to handle continuous successive change processes, due to the organization’s focus on the workers’ psychological reactions through these processes.We argue that by using Armenakis and Harris’s (2002) three strategies –management of information, persuasive communication, and active participation – in planned organizational changes, the organization can gradually develop change competence. Building this competence might also lead the organization into what Burns (2002) has called the ‘healthy zone’ between stability and randomness. Our idea here is that the people in the organization can handle quite a lot of change as long as they also have some kind of stability.

Although there has been a recurring interest in exploring the role played by employees` experiences, responses and actions in association with organizational change this paper agues that one still lacks an in-depth understanding of emotional change-experiences. The paper attempts illustrate how the subject of emotions has typically been dealt with in the organizational and change literature, and the assumptions that have been made, through adopting a critical perspective on the concept of resistance in particular. It is being argued that concepts such as resistance are too general and that the role of context is either underestimated or ignored through assuming that employees` only experience negative emotions in association with organizational change, that resistance is caused by innate tendencies in the individual, that resistance occur in stages and through the adoption of a top-down managerial perspective. Hence, it is suggested a more bottom-up and deeper insight into employees` change-experiences can be provided through exploring their specific emotional experiences, their causes and potential consequences. Furthermore, that the contextual emotions perspective of Lazarus and colleagues (Lazarus, 1991, Lazarus & Folkman, 1984) may contribute to and enhance our understanding of the relationship between employees` individual emotional experiences and events, situations and social relationships associated with organizational change.

Organizational change may involve an increase in work stressors and an impaired social working climate. This chapter presents a review of such potential negative effects, and proposes constructive conflict management to be a beneficial way of dealing with them. It is argued that a managerial focus on the ‘soft sides’ of the organization is an important prerequisite for a successful change process.

Norms are taken-for-granted beliefs about how people should think and behave. This chapter explains the role workplace norms play in organizational change projects. It presents an analysis of how norms emerge, are developed, and become institutionalized, describes the research that shows how norms determine behavior by shaping employees’ perceptions and interpretations of events, and explains how norms function to facilitate and retard the effects of organizational change.

The objective of the chapter is to explore how lower-level leaders, i.e., middle managers, deal with organizational change processes and to identify their behavior as in accordance with the claims of a new Work Environment Act in Norway, which defines an optimal and healthy organizational change process. The chapter builds on our own findings that healthy leader behavior in an organizational change context is characterized by the embracing of change. In this chapter, we present and discuss the context of change in Scandinavia and Norway, the impact of the change process, and the relation between change and leadership theories and perspectives. We also suggest a comprehensive model of healthy organizational change.

Individual differences in perception of organizational change are assumed to affect both the change process, and it’s results. Research indicates that some individuals seem to resist most organizational changes. This chapter presents a recent approach to dispositional resistance to change, and discusses the concept’s relation to other individual difference variables, as well as practical implications of focusing on dispositional resistance to change in an organizational change process.

It appears that quasi-experimental approaches to the evaluation of organizational stress management interventions do not adequately measure, or take account of, employees’ perceptions of the interventions themselves, or the way they are implemented. This is a problem because these perceptions may influence intervention outcomes. As a consequence, our understanding of the why these interventions succeed or fail is somewhat limited. In this chapter we present research that attempts to fill this gap in the literature. In the research we used measures of employees’ perceptions of process factors such as intervention quality and sustainability within a longitudinal intervention evaluation study. In 11 intervention projects in Denmark (n=376) three types of organizational stress management interventions were examined: individual-focused interventions, teambuilding activities and training activities. We then analysed the data using structural equation modelling to find out whether employees’ direct appraisals of the change processes and the intervention itself influenced the relationship between intervention exposure and intervention outcomes. We found that employees’ perceived influence on the content of teambuilding and training interventions was directly linked to participation in these interventions. More importantly, participants’ appraisals of the quality of activities within an intervention and / or their perception of the sustainability of an intervention’s impact were found to be important in the mechanisms driving intervention outcomes. These appraisals were shown to partially mediate the relationships between i) exposure to all types of intervention investigated and ii) interventions employee reports of behavioural stress and job satisfaction. We examine the implications of the findings of this research for future research and the implementation and evaluation of interventions in organisations.

The present chapter treats the subject of healthy change processes and investigates their role in organizational change. Based on observations in the research literature of the challenges inherent in organizational change and own empirical studies, a model is presented linking the comparative contributions of organizational change and change processes to parameters of the psychosocial work environment. The model takes as its point of departure that change can be treated as an overall force which is associated in a general way with certain effects for the psychosocial work environment, independent of the change content of any given change effort. Further, a conceptualization of the healthy change process is presented comprising five dimensions: Awareness of norms, awareness of diversity, leader availability, constructive conflicts, and role clarification. These different dimensions are then discussed in terms of their individual contributions to the psychosocial work environment of organizations undergoing change. The chapter concludes with some lessons as to what a healthy change process can – and cannot hope to provide.

During the last ten years, there has been a slow, but promising, increase in the number of studies that apply a multilevel, or cross-level, perspective when aiming to explain significant variations in employee behavior, such as job satisfaction and organizational commitment. These studies typically investigate their outcome variables by focusing on antecedents at both the individual and the organizational levels in the same methodological framework or research model. Within the subfield of organizational change studies, the picture seems to be somewhat less promising, and multilevel, or crosslevel, organizational change studies seem to be outnumbered by equivalent studies that are being conducted within subfields like leadership and occupational health. When addressing organizational change, researchers seem to agree that prerequisites for managing healthy or successful change initiatives may reside both in the employees and in the organization, but still they tend to limit their research to just one conceptual and analytical level, and do not often explore how phenomena may work together across these levels in order to ensure healthy change. The aim of this chapter is to demonstrate why and how organizational change should be studied within a methodological framework that takes into account the multilevel nature of organizational change. The chapter is structured around two main questions: a) why should organizational change be studied within a multilevel perspective?, and b) drawing on some of the most recent studies within organizational change, what issues related to organizational change could be studied within this methodological framework? The first part of the chapter discusses conceptual and methodological reasons why organizational change should be studied from a multilevel perspective, by providing a brief and easily accessible introduction to the philosophical and methodological literature that exists on the topic. The second part of the chapter presents change topics that might be particularly interesting to explore by means of a multilevel framework. The presentation is based on several empirical studies that have been published in the period from 1999 to 2008, and focuses on the relationship that may exist between the characteristics of the change effort, the individual or collective change capabilities in the organization, and two individual outcome variables that have been associated with successful change initiatives, namely job satisfaction and organizational commitment. The categories developed by Armenakis and Bedeian (1999) are used as an important framework in this discussion.

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