Change Management

Ever wonder what REALLY keeps Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) up at night? According to a biennial Global CEO survey conducted by IBM, coping with change has ranked as the top business challenge for CEOs since 2004. How serious is the issue for CEOs and the organizations they lead? Serious enough that 31% of boards of directors cite the failure to effectively manage change as the top reason for firing CEOs. What are CEOs and their organizations to do considering that 70% oforganizational change initiatives fail 70% of the time regardless of the type, size and scale of the change and the change management model used? This high failure rate suggests that change management models and approaches are fundamentally flawed and missing something.

After pouring over hundreds of articles and a variety of books exploring this issue, I have noticed that existing change management models view change as a rationally controlled and orderly process that evolves over discrete steps and stages. As a result, they fail to account for and consider the psychological implications experienced by individuals and groups during an organizational change event. Failing to account for these psychological considerations from the perspective of those who are directly affected by the change seems like a considerable omission which may explain why change fails more than it succeeds. Organizational change, whether it’s intended purpose is to maximize economic value or develop organizational capabilities, is dependent upon those who are directly affected by the change experience it and their resulting feelings, beliefs and behaviors. Therefore, my current study investigates the relationship between the psychological construct of beliefs (behavioral, normative, control and organizational beliefs) and whether those beliefs are positively related to individual behavioral performance associated with an organizational change event.

If beliefs are indeed found to have a strong, positive relationship to individual performance, organizations would have a method for predicting whether or not an organizational change event will be successful. In addition, it also provides organizations with a method for assessing change readiness and capturing employee insights regarding the behavior associated with the change event that can be leveraged during the planning and implementation stages of the change.

Scott Leuchter

2013 Business Psychology Doctoral Candidate