Why Do Employees’ Perceptions of their Organization's Change History Matter? The Role of Change Appraisals

Abstract

In this article, we identify employees' change history in an organization as a key antecedent of their appraisals about organizational change (i.e., threat, harm, and challenge

Perceived human resource system strength and employee reactions toward change: Revisiting human resource's remit as change agent

“…g All factors combined into a single factor. ***p < 0.001 important role in influencing their reactions to change (Herold et al, 2007;Rafferty & Restubog, 2017). Specifically, we demonstrated that organizations which have developed and implemented a strong HR system create a framework that guides employees through the change.…”

“…Change management research focuses on change content and change implementation to assess employee reactions toward change and identify successful change management strategies (Armenakis & Bedeian, ). Our first contribution is therefore to the small but growing number of studies that have explored change by demonstrating that the context in which employees are embedded plays an important role in influencing their reactions to change (Herold et al, ; Rafferty & Restubog, ). Specifically, we demonstrated that organizations which have developed and implemented a strong HR system create a framework that guides employees through the change.…”

“…Although this body of research has brought us a long way in understanding how HR can contribute toward organizational change, one aspect that has largely been ignored is HR's role in managing the change context , that is, the internal or external circumstances that influence change effectiveness (Herold, Fedor, & Caldwell, ; Rafferty & Restubog, ; Self, Armenakis, & Schraeder, ). The lack of understanding of the change context is an important omission as recent studies suggest that, aside from change content and change implementation, the change context is a key factor influencing employee reactions toward change and is therefore a crucial determinant that influences whether change programs can be completed successfully (Choi, ; Rafferty & Restubog, ). Hence, understanding ways through which HR provides a context to orchestrate change is therefore of relevance for HR scholars and practitioners.…”

Are public organizations suffering from repetitive change injury? A panel study of the damaging effect of intense reform sequences

“…This is in line with a study by Moore et al (2004), who find support for a stress-accumulation model as employees encounter multiple downsizing events. Studies conducted by Allen, Freeman, Russell, Reizenstein, and Rentz (2001), Rafferty and Griffin (2006), and Rafferty and Restubog (2017), comes to the finding that higher scores on perceptual measures on the frequency of change lead to stronger feelings of uncertainty and increased turnover intention. Similarly, qualitative accounts of organizational change in settings such as the English NHS do suggest some degree of accumulation when reform is nearly constant (e.g., McMurray, 2010).…”

Just keep silent… Defensive silence as a reaction to successive structural reforms

“…Structural reforms have been found to have a large variety of intended and unintended effects on organizations, with many of the latter being related to perceptions of uncertainty that they produce (Bommer and Jalajas 1999;Amiot et al 2006;Pollitt 2007;Moore, Grunberg, and Greenberg 2004;Rafferty and Griffin 2006). Frequent changes in the makeup of an organization are accompanied by uncertainty regarding future structures, with employees wondering whether and how any changes will affect them and their position within an organization (Rafferty and Restubog 2017). As the rate of public sector restructuring increases to the point that some organizations experience it as continuous (MacCarthaigh 2012;Pollitt 2007), perceptions of uncertainty may become exacerbated due to a lack of a determinate end to the structural reform process (Rafferty and Griffin 2006;Rafferty and Restubog 2017).…”