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Looking Through Someone Else’s Eyes: Exploring Perceptions of Organizational Change

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Change Management and the Human Factor

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Abstract

Existing research on how individuals perceive organizational change is limited in that researchers tend view the change from an etic (i.e. outsider) view rather than an emic (i.e. insider view). This paper addresses this issue by employing a constructivist approach to: (1) Identify what types of organizational changes individuals perceive as significant, and (2) Understand how these perceptions compare to existing organizational change theory. Grounded theory data analysis techniques were used to analyze in-depth interviews with employees from a hospital that had recently undergone numerous changes. Findings showed that professional identity strength was related, in different ways, to how individuals viewed change and that the types of change identified by informants varied from the traditional types of change studied by researchers.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    RPN is a nursing designation in Canada. RNs tend to have higher education levels, increased responsibilities and higher salaries than RPNs.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sprott School of Business, Carleton University, 801 Dunton Tower, 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, ON, K1S5B6, Canada

    Laura Gover

  2. Sprott School of Business, Carleton University, 915 Dunton Tower, 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, ON, K1S5B6, Canada

    Linda Duxbury

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  1. Laura Gover
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Correspondence to Laura Gover .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Business School Lucerne, University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Lucerne, Switzerland

    Frank E. P. Dievernich

  2. Institute for Corporate Development, Bern University of Applied Sciences, Bern, Bern, Switzerland

    Kim Oliver Tokarski

  3. Business School Lucerne, University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Lucerne, Switzerland

    Jie Gong

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Gover, L., Duxbury, L. (2015). Looking Through Someone Else’s Eyes: Exploring Perceptions of Organizational Change. In: Dievernich, F., Tokarski, K., Gong, J. (eds) Change Management and the Human Factor. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07434-4_4

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