Enervative Change- The Impact of Change Initiatives on Employee Job Satisfaction

The primary purpose of this book was to research the impact of stressors related to continuous change and persistent change initiatives, hypothesized as enervative change, specifically on the employee's level of job stress and job satisfaction. A matrix was developed to identity "change groups." The matrix represents four potential states of an organization (business as usual, reactive, adaptive and enervative) related to their change profile and levels of stress. The findings support the concept of enervative change. The enervative change group had the highest level of change initiatives, the highest level of personal impact by the change initiatives and the lowest level of job satisfaction. Further, the study supported prior studies that had found a direct inverse relationship between change, job stress, and job satisfaction and the studies that have identified stress frequency as the larger contributor to employee stress. Utilizing U.S. Military research into combat stress and the research into the adaptive enterprise, a new change management framework (C5) is proposed as means to offset the debilitating impact of enervative change on employee job satisfaction.

Dr. Richard Dool is an educator, consultant and senior executive with more than 25 years of diverse senior management experience including 17 years as a CEO of both public and private companies. He is on the faculty at Seton Hall University in the graduate communication program where he focuses on leadership communication and change management.