Employee reactions to planned organizational culture change

A configurational perspective

Bibliographic Data

ID9890573
AuthorsKonstantinos Tasoulis (0000-0003-4177-1955, The American College of Greece, corresponding author), Ilias O Pappas (0000-0001-7528-3488, University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway and Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway, corresponding author), Pavlos Vlachos (0000-0002-0885-7143, ALBA Graduate Business School, Greece, corresponding author), Emeka Smart Oruh (0000-0002-6634-9841, Brunel University of London, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume77
Issue9
Pages1272-1305
Publication date2024-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueHuman Relations (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0018-7267 • E-ISSN: 1741-282X
PublisherSAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/00187267231183305
OpenAlexW4384341718
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited68

Can organizational culture be intentionally changed? And if so, what are the pathways to success versus failure? We address these questions by employing a configurational perspective, which allows us to examine the impact of multiple combinations of employee perceptions and traits on planned organizational culture change. Although employees have long been the focus of culture change research, the complex interactions of factors affecting their reactions have been largely ignored. With such a focus, the study empirically identifies pathways to successful versus failed organizational culture change, drawing rare empirical evidence from 59 interviews and secondary data from one of the longest surviving examples of industrial democracy, John Lewis Partnership, which underwent change geared away from a ‘civil-service’ towards a high-performance culture. Applying a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), we identify multiple equifinal combinations of employee perceptions and traits (e.g., perceived organizational support, empowerment, and tenure) associated with successful or failed organizational culture change. Interestingly, we find more pathways leading to positive (i.e., ‘comparing’, ‘acquitting’, and ‘tolerating’) versus negative (i.e., ‘disillusioning’ and ‘dissociating’) reactions to culture change. We leverage these findings to show that employee reactions are more complex than currently considered, illustrating the value of a configurational perspective in such efforts

Culture change · General partnership · Leverage (statistics · Organizational commitment · Organizational culture · Perception · Planned change · Political science · Public relations · Qualitative comparative analysis · Social science · Sociology · Management and Organizational Studies · Psychology · Qualitative Comparative Analysis Research · Social Psychology