Perceived Need for Change: A Test of Individual Emotion and Contextual Influences

By investigating organizational change as a change to the status quo as opposed to an explicit change program, this study explored antecedents of a perceived need for change, defined as in individual attitude to actively support a general change to the status quo within the context of a specfici process. This cross-sectional study investigated the individual attitudes of construction services providers (n=193) as their headquarters announced that a change to an existing process would soon be developed. Utilizing hiearchical regression, employees were found to recognize a perceived need for change when they experienced low levels of perceived organizational support, felt positive emotions towards the change to the staus quo, and believed that customers had a poor view of the organization's service quality. Among the managerial implications, first, it supports previous reasearch regarding the importance of emotion in the internalization of change programs. Second, the negative relationship between perceived organizational support and perceived need for change suggests that employees respond to the organization as a system, not necessarily to the stated desires of management. Lastly, it suggests that employees may be ready to act on feedback from customers if they were given an opportunity to do so.

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