Employee Readiness To Change and Individual Intelligence
Employee Readiness To Change and Individual Intelligence
Employee Readiness To Change and Individual Intelligence
1. iNTRODUCTION
As per Roffey Parks annual cross-sector work place survey
between 2001 and 2005, over 90 percent of the respondents
indicated that their organization had undergone some change
programme, largely involving restructuring, in the previous
two years (Holbeche, 2006). In spite of substantial existing
literature on change management, most significant change
initiatives fail to meet expectations. According to Beer and
Nohria (2000), seven out of ten change efforts that are critical
to organizational success fail to achieve their intended results.
Studies show that in most organizations, two out of three
transformation initiatives fail. The more things change, the
more they stay the same (Sirkin, Keenan and Jackson, 2005).
According to research by the Gartner group (Holbeche, 2006),
the main reason why change initiatives fail is the inability of
people to adapt and become change-able.
Since organizations consist of people and are made by
people, organizational change is assumed to be mediated
through individual changes (Schein, 1980). Thus, members
of an organization must be the key source of energy for
organizational change processes, and for this reason, their
commitment and involvement are crucial factors for successful
organizational change. Inspite of this however, research
dealing with organizational change has been largely dominated
by a macro, system-oriented focus. Though researchers have
called for a more micro, person-oriented focus pertaining
to issues important in change (Bray, 1994), micro-level
research on organizational change remains limited. Several
studies have observed that management usually focuses on
technical elements of change with a tendency to neglect the
equally important human element (Beer and Nohria, 2000;
Bovey and Hede, 2001; George and Jones, 2001).Despite
the popularity of the technological change approach, several
studies demonstrated that adopting this perspective does
not always lead to successful change (Beer and Nohria,
2000).On the contrary, many organizational changes result
Devi Soumyaja - Department of Management Studies, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, India.
T. J. Kamalanabhan - Ph.D, Department of Management Studies, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, India.
3
Sanghamitra Bhattacharyya - Ph.D, Feedback Foundation, Delhi, India.
1
2
Employee Readiness to Change and Individual Intelligence:The Facilitating Role of Process and Contextual factors
Employee Readiness to Change and Individual Intelligence:The Facilitating Role of Process and Contextual factors
Commitment
to change
Readiness
to change
History of
change
Process factors
Participation
Quality of
communication
Employee Readiness to Change and Individual Intelligence:The Facilitating Role of Process and Contextual factors
to change.
4. METHODOLOGY
4.1 Research Design
The study uses a descriptive research design. Convenience
sampling is used for drawing samples from organizations which
have undergone transformational changes. Organizations from
both service sector and manufacturing sector are considered
for the study to get a representative picture.
Over time, a common language for describing organizational
change has been established, including change that is firstorder versus second order (Nadler and Tushman, 1980),
transformational, transitional or transactional (Burke, 1994),
incremental or transformative (Nadler, 1988), and episodic
versus continuous (Weick and Quinn, 1999). These terms
generally pertain to the scale, scope, or magnitude of change
and whether the change is superficial or substantive. Scholars
have suggested that transformational changes generally have
a detrimental effect on individuals as they involve a great
deal of conflict and often bring to the fore personality issues
and other differences that have previously been sublimated,
adding to the confusion and uncertainty within the organization
(Ashford, 1988). Large-scale changes such as organizational
mergers and acquisitions, restructurings and downsizing efforts
have become very common occurrences, and researchers
have found that changes of this type are often associated with
significant, negative consequences for individuals in terms of
their attitudes and well-being (George & Jones, 2001). Rafferty
and Simons (2006) reported different degrees of readiness for
fine tuning and corporate transformation changes. Specifically,
respondents reported higher change readiness for fine-tuning
changes as opposed to corporate transformation changes.
Since transactional changes have become common in
organizations, people show relatively high readiness for such
changes. Hence the present study is concentrating only on the
second order or transformational changes.
The organizational change dynamics of large sized
organizations is entirely different from that in small sized
organizations. The literature indicates that most of the studies
in change management have used large sized organizations
as their sample. Similarly, the present study intends to focus
only on large sized organizations, with employee strengths
of 2000 or above. Employees with a minimum of one year of
experience with their present organization are included in the
study as there is a need for employees to have experienced
No: of
items
Cronbachs
alpha
Creative behaviour
0.83
0.80
Quality of communication
0.83
0.71
History of change
0.81
Affective CTC
0.72
Continuance CTC
0.63
Normative CTC
0.61
Readiness to change
11
0.75
SD
1.
1.16
2.
Quality of Communication
3.35
0.998
0.669**
3.
Trust in management
3.13
0.931
0.581**
0.803**
4.
History of change
3.46
0.965
0.570**
0.700** 0.737**
5.
Creative behaviour
3.88
0.427
0.117
0.118
0.133
0.109
6.
Practical intelligence
2.70
1.082
0.236
0.178
0.231
0.309*
7.
Commitment to change
3.02
0.652
0.507**
0.180
8.
Readiness to change
2.44
0.517
0.463**
0.169
-0.215
0.395**
Employee Readiness to Change and Individual Intelligence:The Facilitating Role of Process and Contextual factors
The reliabilities for all the scales were above 0.60, which
represents good reliability measure (Hair et al., 1998).
However, one notable finding is the overall lower reliability
of the commitment to change scale and especially normative
commitment to change
5. ANALYSIS
5.1 Descriptive Statistics
The means, standard deviations and correlations for all the
constructs in this study are given in table 2.The highest
correlation was observed between trust in management
and quality of communication. Among the three types of
commitment, affective commitment is found to have the
highest mean value.
5.2 ANOVA
Since the pilot study was conducted among students enrolled
for management programme, demographic variables like
education, work experience and age were controlled. Out
of the 56 students, only four were females. Hence the only
demographic variables which were considered for analysis are
the industry sector and the type of change they have been
part of.
One way ANOVA was conducted to check whether there is
any significant difference between these two demographic
variables with respect to their readiness to change. Results
given in table 3 and 4 indicate that the industry sector and
type of change does not significantly influence readiness to
change.
Table 3: ANOVA results for Industry sector
Sector
Service
42
Manufacturing
14
0.261
Standardized
Coefficients
Beta
CREATIVE BEH
.139
1.817
PRACTINT
.337
2.144*
PART
.285
3.213*
QUALCOMM
.516
3.690**
TRUST
.161
.112
HIS OF CHANGE
.099
1.817
Variable
Readiness to change
Creative Behaviour
Practical intelligence
Participation
Quality of Communication
Trust
History of change
0.139
0.337**
0.285*
0.516**
0.161
0.099
Commitment to change
Creative Behaviour
Practical intelligence
Participation
Quality of Communication
Trust
History of change
-0.199
-0.328*
0.108
0.517**
0.417**
0.194
Readiness to change
Commitment to change
Creative Behaviour
Practical intelligence
Participation
Quality of Communication
Trust
History of change
0.088
0.153
0.332*
0.101
0.296*
-0.154
0.111
M&A
14
Technology change
12
14
0.925
R
squared
change
0.215
0.475
0.203
0.014
0.005
0.184
0.22
0.007
0.012
Employee Readiness to Change and Individual Intelligence:The Facilitating Role of Process and Contextual factors
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