مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد شش مرحله عاطفی تغییر سازمانی – امرالد ۲۰۱۷

Purpose: This work’s purpose was to define a model that both describes the evolution of the emotional stages of individuals during perceived negative organizational change and explains the evolution of their behavioural patterns and the effects on relationships with social environments (family, friends, co-workers, supervisor and organization). Design/Methodology/Approach: A qualitative methodological research design was adopted, using individual interviews as the primary method of qualitative data collection. Fifteen people who experienced perceived negative organizational changes participated. Findings: Through empirical qualitative research, an adapted Kübler-Ross (1969) model was used as a starting point. Co-occurrence analysis of the interviews led to the combination of the first two stages (denial and anger) of this model because they always appeared together. Two new stages (revising and deserting), based on the research of Schalk and Roe (2007), complete the model. Subsequently, the model comprised six emotional stages: denial and anger, bargaining, depression, revising, deserting and acceptance. Results show that individuals can move freely between the first four stages, but deserting and acceptance are always the final stages. Experiencing these emotional stages can influence relationships between individuals and their social environments. During denial and anger and bargaining, relationships with family, friends and co-workers improve, but during depression, relationships with family and friends deteriorate, but because co-workers become much more important, those relationships improve. Relationships with supervisors deteriorate during denial and anger and depression but remain stable during bargaining. Research limitations: Time’s passage became an inconvenience accounted for during data collection. Over time, separate events can be confused, and nuances that were once determinants can be eliminated. Longitudinal studies at various stages of the change process would complement these results. Practical implications: These results can guide managers in foreseeing and anticipating actions that would reduce the emotional impact of organizational change and mitigate the impact of individuals’ negative emotions on the organization. Originality: This paper extends existing theory about the strategies of coping and organizational changes.

Introduction

The purpose of organizational change is to improve the current state of the organization to achieve better adaptation to its environment or to adjust to changes in mission and objectives. Although organizational change should foster resource optimization and organizational adaptation, literature shows numerous examples where it produced the opposite effect, reducing productivity and shareholder value while increasing direct and indirect costs (Bowman and Singh, 1993; Bowman et al., 1999). Organizational managers might not consider the impact of organizational changes on morale, productivity (Cascio et al., 1997) and satisfaction (Wah, 1999) of employees because their future predictions are based solely on beliefs or past experiences (Kotter and Schlesinger, 2008). This planning error in the change process has serious consequences for the organization, such as desertion (Brennan and Skarlicki, 2004) or absenteeism (Martin et al., 2005). Currently the world economy is going through a period of economic and financial crisis that affects, among others, organizations. This situation sometimes forces them to make changes in order to overcome the difficulties, for example by delocalizing companies (Daly and Geyer, 1994), the employee’s wage freeze (Schaubroeck et al., 1994) and the destruction of employment (Burke and Cooper, 2004). Based on this last one, we can observe that in the year 2.012, when the crisis hit Spain the hardest, the employment regulation records (ERE, for its acronym in Spanish) increased by 56.3%, reaching 33.075 organizations (data base In the Bulletin of Labour Statistics of the Ministry of Employment and Social Security). While it is true that these data represent a problem, they are nothing compared to the long-term consequences.