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Surviving and Thriving Through Change: What the Research Says About Loss, Uncertainty and the People Who Steady the Room.
Updated: Oct 21
The calendar invitation lands at eight minutes to five on a Thursday. "All colleagues: an update on our structure", Monday at nine, no agenda, no attachment, and the organiser is someone from the executive office nobody on the floor has heard of. By ten past five, three people have wandered past your desk, each asking in their own way whether you know what it is. You do, a little. You have known for a fortnight, you have been booking the rooms for the conversations that produced it, and you are now doing the thing this role does better than almost any other: holding something you cannot say, while looking exactly as calm as you did on Tuesday.
Back in 2025 I wrote about how Executive Assistants and Chiefs of Staff can lead change together, drawing on Kotter's dual operating system and Herzberg's motivators. This is the other half of that story: what the research says about what change does to the people living through it, what they need to be told and when, and what it takes to be the person in the middle translating a decision into something the building can live with. Including you, because you are living through it too.
What you will get out of this
The four beliefs that decide whether people are ready for a change, from a scale tested with more than 900 people, and why being ready is different from being willing
Why a change you agree with can still feel like a loss, and what the research on identity at work says is actually going on
What to tell people and when, including the field experiment in which a merger was explained openly at one plant and barely at all at another
Why "resistance" is often the most useful information in the building, and when it turns into something worse
How much change is too much, from studies of more than 92,000 employees, and the finding that people who have been through a lot of it can come out more capable rather than more tired
How sense gets made in the middle of an organisation, and why the conversations in the corridor shape a change more than the announcement does
What the research says about coping, and the one kind of coping that backfires
The change check: a tool that reads a change landing on your team and tells you where the strain is likely to come from and what to do first
The Change Pages: three pages for translating a change, listening to the pushback and keeping yourself steady
Ready is not the same as willing
Most talk about change is about whether people are for it or against it. The research took a more useful turn in 1993, when a team of researchers argued that the thing to watch was readiness: the beliefs, attitudes and intentions people hold about a change before it arrives, which is when they can still be shaped. They also made a point that has held up well since. How ready people become depends heavily on how credible they find the person telling them.
Fourteen years later, the same group built a way of measuring readiness, testing it with more than 900 people in public and private organisations. Readiness turned out to rest on four separate beliefs, and each one answers a question the people around you are silently asking.
Can I do this? The belief that you are capable of working the new way. The researchers called it change-specific efficacy.
Is this right for us? The belief that the change is the right answer for the organisation.
Do they mean it? The belief that the leaders are committed to it and will not have moved on by spring.
What is in it for me? The belief that the change will be good for the person, or at least not bad.
The four need different fixes: nobody's doubts about using a new system were ever settled by a slide about strategy. A 2013 review added two things. Readiness is partly a feeling, not only a set of beliefs, and it exists in teams as well as individuals, which is why one department can be braced for a change that the one next door is dreading. A 2019 study of government workers bore out the first point: beliefs about the change and positive emotions about it were each associated with readiness, and both fed into whether people went on to support the change three months later.
Readiness matters because of what comes after it. In a longitudinal study of a reorganising workplace, the people who received information about the changes, felt able to cope with them and had some say in the decisions were more open to the change, and the people who accepted it least were less satisfied, more irritated at work and more likely to be thinking about leaving. In a study of 654 hospital staff, readiness at the start was among the best predictors of who took part in the redesign over the following year.
There is also a useful distinction about why people go along with a change. A 2002 set of studies separated three kinds of commitment to a change: going along because you believe in it, because you feel you ought to, and because opposing it would cost too much. The first two predicted real support for the change. The third predicted much less. A 2015 meta-analysis of seventeen studies found the three distinct enough to tell apart, and flagged that their links with actual support were less tidy than the original work suggested. If people are complying because they cannot afford not to, the change has not landed yet; it has only been announced.
Two counterweights belong here, because the popular story about change is gloomier than the evidence. The figure you have probably heard, that 70% of change initiatives fail, was traced through five published sources in 2011 and none rested on valid evidence. And the well-known step models, including Kotter's, have held up reasonably well step by step, although no study has yet tested a whole model. The models are a sensible map; the research fills in what is going on inside the people.
Try this. When a change lands, run the four questions on yourself first, candidly, and write down your own answers. Then ask them, in plain words, of one person on the team you trust to be candid. Where the answers are weak tells you which fix is needed: practice and support for "can I do this", the reasoning for "is it right", visible and repeated commitment from the top for "do they mean it", and a straight answer about personal impact for "what is in it for me".
The research behind this section
Armenakis, Harris and Mossholder (1993) distinguished readiness for change from resistance to change, described readiness in terms of organisational members' beliefs, attitudes and intentions, and set out a model of how change agents influence readiness in which the change agent's credibility and interpersonal and social dynamics matter. Holt, Armenakis, Feild and Harris (2007) developed an instrument to measure readiness for change at the individual level with more than 900 organisational members in the public and private sectors, and found readiness to be multidimensional, influenced by beliefs that one is capable of implementing the change (change-specific efficacy), that the change is appropriate for the organisation, that leaders are committed to it, and that it is beneficial to the individual (personal valence). Rafferty, Jimmieson and Armenakis (2013) reviewed the change readiness literature and argued for including affect in the definition of readiness and for a multilevel view spanning individuals, work groups and organisations. Rafferty and Minbashian (2019) studied 252 government workers and then 199 employees over three months and found that cognitive beliefs about change and positive emotions about change were each significantly associated with change readiness, with direct and indirect relationships with change-supportive behaviour. Wanberg and Banas (2000) found in a longitudinal study of a reorganising workplace that personal resilience related to higher change acceptance, that information about the changes, self-efficacy for coping and participation in the change decision process predicted openness, and that lower acceptance was associated with less job satisfaction, more work irritation and stronger intentions to quit. Cunningham, Woodward, Shannon, MacIntosh, Lendrum, Rosenbloom and Brown (2002) surveyed 654 hospital staff and found that active jobs, an active approach to job problem-solving and job-change self-efficacy each predicted readiness for change, and that initial readiness and active problem-solving best predicted participation in redesign activities during a year-long re-engineering programme. Vakola (2014) studied 183 employees in a restructuring and found that the perceived impact of the change mediated the relationships between pre-change conditions and individual readiness. Herscovitch and Meyer (2002) developed affective, normative and continuance commitment to change scales across three studies and found that commitment to a change predicted behavioural support better than organisational commitment did, and that affective and normative commitment to change were associated with higher support than continuance commitment. Bouckenooghe, Schwarz and Minbashian (2015) meta-analysed seventeen studies using the three-component model and examined the relationships among the components and with behavioural support. Oreg, Vakola and Armenakis (2011) reviewed 79 quantitative studies of change recipients' reactions published between 1948 and 2007 and organised them into reactions, pre-change and change antecedents, and consequences. Choi (2011) reviewed readiness, commitment, openness and cynicism as attitudes toward change and proposed that they are better understood as states than as personality traits. Hughes (2011) reviewed five published instances of a 70 per cent change failure rate and found no valid and reliable empirical evidence to support it. Appelbaum, Habashy, Malo and Shafiq (2012) reviewed the literature on each of the eight steps in Kotter's change model and found support for most of the steps, with no formal study covering the model as a whole. Stouten, Rousseau and De Cremer (2018) compared popular practitioner change models with scholarly research and set out ten evidence-based steps for managing planned change.
Why a change can feel like losing something
Here is the part of change that surprises people who are in favour of it. You can believe a restructure is right, you can have helped shape it, and you can still feel a real pull of loss on the day your team's name disappears from the org chart. That is one of the best-documented tendencies in the psychology of decisions, rather than any inconsistency on your part.
In a set of decision experiments published in 1988, people disproportionately stuck with whichever option was framed as the existing state of affairs, the status quo, even when the alternatives were at least as good. Later work found that the status quo has more going for it in our heads than simple habit. People treat existence itself as a sign that something is good, and the longer something has existed, the stronger that pull: in a set of studies with the pleasingly blunt title "Longer is better", practices described as long-established were judged more favourably than the same practices described as new. Nobody is being irrational about the old filing system. They are doing what minds do.
Then there is identity. A study of two organisational mergers found that whether people identified with the new organisation depended on whether they felt a sense of continuity with the old one, and that this was far easier for people from the dominant partner than the dominated one. For people whose organisation had been absorbed, differences between the two partners hurt their identification with the new one much more. A 2014 model of work-related identity loss describes the period after a change as an in-between state, in which people move back and forth between what has gone and what comes next.
Which brings up the five-stage curve, because somebody will put it on a slide. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance was never built from studying organisations, and when researchers have tested the idea that people move through fixed stages in a fixed order, the stages have not arrived in order. What the workplace evidence supports is narrower and more useful. Ongoing change really does come with difficult feelings, and a field study found those feelings running through three things people can name: whether the future feels secure, whether the working conditions are adequate, and whether they feel fairly treated. Negative feeling then predicted lower trust and more withdrawal, immediately and a month later. The fair conclusion is that change can carry a real sense of loss, that the three things above are where it actually bites, and that nobody moves through it in a tidy sequence you can plan a communications calendar around.
Being in favour of a change and feeling its loss are not opposites. Most people who live through a restructure do both, often in the same afternoon.
The feelings are not a side issue. A field study of ongoing change traced negative emotions back to three perceptions: an insecure future, worse working conditions, and being treated badly by the organisation along the way. Those emotions predicted lower trust in the organisation and more withdrawal from it, both immediately and a month later. A study of nurses living through a new way of governing their work found that taking part in it increased the gains people felt, and that feelings spread noticeably within work units. A study of changes in 32 organisations found that commitment depended on how good the change was for the unit, how much the unit changed and how much it touched the person's own job, taken together.
The timing of the loss is worth knowing too. A longitudinal study of public servants across the United Kingdom after a national budget announcement found that the announcement alone, before anything had actually changed, lowered people's well-being and attitudes at work. What followed then mattered a great deal: cutback-related changes had negative effects, while innovation-related changes had positive effects on well-being, satisfaction and engagement over time. Change is not one thing. Change that takes away and change that builds something are felt very differently.
Try this. For each group the change touches, write one line: what are they losing? Be specific. A team rarely loses "the old structure". It loses a manager they trusted, the right to decide their own rota, a name people outside the team recognised, or the feeling of being good at their job. Once the loss is named, it can be acknowledged out loud, and some of it can often be kept.
The research behind this section
Samuelson and Zeckhauser (1988) reported a series of decision-making experiments showing that individuals disproportionately stick with the status quo option. Eidelman and Crandall (2012) reviewed the psychological advantage of the status quo, including loss aversion, regret avoidance, repeated exposure and rationalisation, and argued that people treat existence and longevity as a prima facie case for goodness. Eidelman, Pattershall and Crandall (2010) studied how the duration of a practice affects judgements of it. Van Knippenberg, van Knippenberg, Monden and de Lima (2002) surveyed two merged organisations and found that pre-merger and post-merger identification were more positively related for members of the dominant than the dominated partner, and that perceived differences between the partners were more negatively related to post-merger identification for members of the dominated organisation, consistent with post-merger identification depending on a sense of continuity. Conroy and O'Leary-Kelly (2014) developed a model of work-related identity loss in which the transition is a period of liminality involving sensemaking and emotion regulation across loss-oriented and restoration-oriented processing. Kiefer (2005) found in a field study that ongoing changes were associated with negative emotions, that this relationship was mediated by perceptions of an insecure future, inadequate working conditions and inadequate treatment, and that negative emotions predicted lower trust and greater withdrawal immediately and one month later. Bartunek, Rousseau, Rudolph and DePalma (2006) studied nurses' experiences of a shared governance initiative and found that participation increased perceived gains, as did membership of units where the change was implemented more fully, and that there was considerable emotional contagion within work units. Fedor, Caldwell and Herold (2006) studied changes in 32 organisations and found that commitment to the change and to the organisation were best explained by a three-way interaction between the favourableness of the change for the work unit, the extent of work unit change and the impact on the individual's job, with the fairness of the change process also interacting with work unit change. Kiefer, Hartley, Conway and Briner (2015) followed employees across UK public sector organisations after a national budget announcement and found that the announcement itself negatively affected well-being and attitudes before any changes were implemented, that cutback-related changes had negative effects, and that innovation-related changes had positive effects on well-being, job satisfaction and engagement over time.
What to tell people, and when
If there is one thing the research on change agrees on, it is that uncertainty does a great deal of the damage, often more than the change itself.
A laboratory study published in 2016 showed how directly the body responds to it. Participants learned, through trial and error, which images tended to be followed by a mild electric shock. Their stress, measured by how they said they felt, by the size of their pupils and by the conductance of their skin, tracked how uncertain the situation was. Not knowing was the stressor.
The most useful work on this comes from a group of researchers who pulled change-related uncertainty apart into three kinds. There is strategic uncertainty (why is this happening and where is the organisation going), structural uncertainty (how will the place be organised, who reports to whom) and job-related uncertainty (what happens to me, my role, my security). In a public sector organisation going through change, communication from management reduced the strategic kind. Participation in decisions reduced the other two, and it did something extra: it gave people a sense of control, and it was the loss of control that carried the damage from uncertainty through to strain. A study at a psychiatric hospital being restructured found the same thing. Uncertainty raised strain partly through a feeling of lacking control, and once method effects were taken out, control carried all of it.
So the question of what to tell people is really three questions, and they need different answers from different people. A study that interviewed employees about how they handled change-related uncertainty found that people preferred to hear implementation and job-related information from their direct supervisor, and strategic information from senior management, and that trust decided which sources they sought out and how they judged what they heard.
Quality mattered more than quantity. In a study of implementation communication, the quality of the information people received was associated with seeing less resistance, while the mere frequency of communication, both receiving information and giving input, was unrelated to whether people thought the change was succeeding. A merger study found that the more formal information sessions people attended, the lower their anxiety, and that high-quality information both lowered anxiety and raised commitment to the change. A study of 589 government employees found that information helped mainly by raising people's confidence that they could cope.
Then there is the question of whether to tell people early, while things are still uncertain, or to wait until there is something definite to say. The best answer comes from a field experiment in 1991. After a merger was announced, employees at one plant received what the researchers called a realistic merger preview: honest, regular communication about what was happening and what it would mean. Employees at a second plant received the limited information that is usual in these situations. The preview reduced the damaging effects of the merger, the effects lasted for the length of the study, and on some measures the people at the preview plant returned to where they had been before the merger was announced.
Silence does not stay silent, either. A study of change-related rumours in a large public hospital sorted them into five kinds, from changes to jobs and working conditions to gossip, and found negative rumours far outnumbered positive ones and went with more change-related stress. The researchers suggested treating rumours as a signal of what people are worried about, which is a far more useful stance than trying to stamp them out. Interviews with management and communications staff at multinational corporations reached the same conclusion from the other side: the change communication that worked tended to reveal rather than conceal.
A survey of 1,034 employees who had been through planned change adds a note on the channel: both all-staff channels and face-to-face ones made communication feel more transparent, the face-to-face ones more so, and transparency lowered uncertainty and raised commitment.
For most people the hardest stretch is the middle. Interviews with 31 staff in a public health organisation found the transition phase the most stressful for most of them, because it brought job insecurity with too little information, consultation and support.
People can live with bad news far better than with no news. What they cannot live with for long is the feeling that decisions about them are happening in a room they cannot see into.
Try this. Write every update in three lines: what we know, what we do not know yet, and when we expect to know it. Send it on a rhythm people can rely on, even when the third line has not moved. A promised date gives people back a little of the control that uncertainty takes away.
The research behind this section
De Berker, Rutledge, Mathys, Marshall, Cross, Dolan and Bestmann (2016) had participants learn a probabilistic mapping between visual stimuli and electric shocks and found that subjective stress, pupil diameter and skin conductance all tracked the evolution of irreducible uncertainty, and that the uncertainty tuning of stress predicted task performance. Nelson, Cooper and Jackson (1995) followed 397 employees of a regional water authority in Great Britain across three stages of privatisation and reorganisation and found a decline in job satisfaction during the privatisation period and an upturn before and after it. Bordia, Hobman, Jones, Gallois and Callan (2004) classified change uncertainty into strategic, structural and job-related types in a public sector organisation and found that control mediated the effect of job-related uncertainty on psychological strain, that management communication was negatively related to strategic uncertainty, that participation in decision-making was negatively related to structural and job-related uncertainty, and that participation was associated with more control and less strain. Bordia, Hunt, Paulsen, Tourish and DiFonzo (2004) studied staff at a psychiatric hospital undergoing restructuring and found that uncertainty had direct and indirect relationships with strain through lack of control, with complete mediation by control once common method variance was partialled out. Allen, Jimmieson, Bordia and Irmer (2007) interviewed 25 employees and then surveyed a government department facing restructuring, and found that direct supervisors were preferred sources of implementation and job-relevant information and senior management of strategic information, that trust influenced which sources employees sought and how they appraised information, and that quality change communication was associated with openness to change through lower uncertainty. Lewis (2006) found that the quality of implementation information was associated with lower perceived resistance, that more forced implementation was associated with more perceived resistance, and that mere frequency of communication was unrelated to perceptions of success. Rafferty and Restubog (2010) conducted a longitudinal study of a merger and found that attending more formal change information sessions was associated with lower anxiety, that high-quality change information was associated with lower anxiety and higher affective commitment to change, and that a perceived poor change history was negatively associated with affective commitment to change. Miller, Johnson and Grau (1994) found in a national insurance company that employees who received quality information about a change and had a high need for achievement viewed it more favourably, and that anxiety about the change did not influence their attitude. Jimmieson, Terry and Callan (2004) studied 589 government employees through an eighteen-month regionalisation with a two-year follow-up and found that information related to adjustment indirectly through efficacy, and that efficacy was related to reduced stress appraisals. Schweiger and DeNisi (1991) ran a longitudinal field experiment in which employees at one plant received a realistic merger preview and those at another received limited information, and found that the preview reduced dysfunctional outcomes over the duration of the study, with some measures returning to pre-announcement levels. Bordia, Jones, Gallois, Callan and DiFonzo (2006) content-analysed rumours in a large public hospital undergoing change, developed a five-part typology, found negative rumours more prevalent than positive ones and associated with more change-related stress, and proposed treating rumours as expressions of employee concerns. DiFonzo and Bordia (1998) drew on fifteen field interviews with management and public relations staff at multinational corporations and found that effective change communication tended to reveal rather than conceal, reduce uncertainty through collective planning and proactively build trust. Men, Neill, Yue and Verghese (2026) surveyed 1,034 employees who had experienced planned change and found that mediated and interpersonal channels both increased perceived communication transparency, interpersonal channels more strongly, and that transparency lowered uncertainty and raised affective commitment to change. Li, Sun, Tao and Lee (2021) surveyed 490 full-time employees in April 2020 and found that transparent internal communication encouraged problem-focused control coping, reduced uncertainty and fostered employee-organisation relationships. Smollan (2015) interviewed 31 staff in a New Zealand public health organisation and found that the transition phase was the most stressful for most respondents, owing to job insecurity and insufficient information, consultation and support, while for the rest stress increased after the change.
Resistance is information
The word "resistance" does a lot of quiet damage. It turns anyone who raises a concern into an obstacle, and it lets whoever is running the change off the hook. The research has been gently dismantling it for more than twenty years.
The founding study of the field, from 1948, was about exactly this. In a clothing factory, groups whose work was being changed were given different degrees of say in designing the change. The groups who took part in shaping it adapted faster and more smoothly than the group who were simply told. The title of the paper was "Overcoming resistance to change", and the lesson it is remembered for is that people resist what is done to them far more than what they help to do. A study of a national telecommunications company's strategic reorientation found the same pattern more than fifty years later: participation was strongly associated with reaching the goals of the change, with commitment to the organisation, and with less resistance.
In 2008, three researchers set out what they called the rest of the story. The usual account, they said, treats resistance as an irrational reaction located "over there" in the people receiving the change. But the people running a change contribute to resistance through what they do and fail to do, and resistance can be a resource: a source of information about what the change has not accounted for. An earlier paper by two of the same authors added that people often respond less to the change itself than to the background conversation it arrives in: the history, the last three initiatives, the things that were promised before.
That history has been measured. A study of employees' beliefs about poor change management in their organisation's past found that those beliefs lowered trust, satisfaction and openness to change, raised cynicism and intentions to leave, and predicted people actually leaving over the following two years. Cynicism about change, a separate study found, was mostly learned: from past changes, ineffective leadership and being left out of decisions.
Then there is ambivalence, which is how most people actually feel. A 2000 paper argued that treating people's responses to change as simply for or against misses the fact that people can hold positive and negative views at once, in their thoughts, feelings and intentions. Field studies in 2011 bore this out: some employees held strong and conflicting views about an imposed change at the same time, and researchers who scored them as simply resistant had been misreading them.
The stereotypes about who resists are unreliable, too. A study of 177 employees going through a large change found that the organisational context mattered alongside personality, and a study of 2,981 employees found, against the common assumption, that older employees were less resistant to change than younger ones.
How a change is talked about can create resistance in real time. A study that coded conversations about a change found that when the person introducing it restricted the other person's autonomy, the reply was arguments for staying as things were, which prompted more restriction. The conversation was manufacturing the resistance. And a 2024 scale that separates four responses to change, accepting it, pushing it forward, disengaging from it and resisting it, found that how active people's responses were predicted how much feedback they gave, over and above whether they were for or against.
Here is the disagreement, and it matters. If resistance is information, it is tempting to conclude that it will sort itself out. A study of 40 health clinics over three years of significant change found the opposite. Resistance had an increasingly negative relationship over time with people's commitment to the organisation and with how effective they thought it was. It festered. The same study found that supportive leadership became more and more effective at reducing resistance as the change went on. The two findings fit together once you see that resistance is information that someone needs to act on. Heard and answered, it improves a change. Ignored, it grows.
A study of 68 change initiatives in the National Health Service found that a change agent's close relationships with influential people who were undecided, the fence-sitters, made the change more likely to be adopted. Close relationships with people who opposed the change outright helped only when the change departed little from established practice; with more radical changes those ties could become a liability. And a study of more than 300 middle managers in an Italian electricity company preparing for privatisation found that their resistance mostly took the form of quietly not doing the things that would support the change, rather than open dissent. The resistance most worth worrying about is often the kind that makes no noise at all.
Try this. Keep a short resistance log for the first month of a change. For each objection you hear, write down what was said, what it might be telling you (a practical flaw, a missing piece of information, a loss nobody has named, a history that has not been acknowledged) and who needs to hear it. Pass the useful ones upward with the names taken off. You will be surprised how often the loudest objection contains the most useful fact in the building.
The research behind this section
Coch and French (1948) studied groups in a clothing factory whose work was changed with different degrees of participation in designing the change. Lines (2004) studied a major strategic reorientation of a national telecommunications firm and found a strong positive relationship between participation and goal achievement and organisational commitment, and a strong negative relationship with resistance, moderated by the change's compatibility with organisational culture and recipients' personal goals. Ford, Ford and D'Amelio (2008) argued that prevailing views treat resistance as an irrational reaction located in change recipients, that change agents contribute to resistance through their own actions and inactions, and that resistance can be a resource for change. Ford, Ford and McNamara (2002) proposed that resistance is a function of the organisation's background conversations, which create the context for both the change and the responses to it. Bordia, Restubog, Jimmieson and Irmer (2011) found that poor change management history, through employees' beliefs about it, led to lower trust, job satisfaction and openness to change, higher cynicism and turnover intentions, and predicted turnover over two years. Wanous, Reichers and Austin (2000) developed a measure of cynicism about organisational change and found little support for dispositional roots in negative affectivity and more support for cynicism being learned from little previous change success, ineffective leadership and lack of participation in decisions. Piderit (2000) reviewed studies of resistance and proposed reconceptualising responses to change as multidimensional attitudes that can be ambivalent. Oreg and Sverdlik (2011) showed in a secondary analysis and two field studies that personal orientation toward change interacted with orientation toward the change agent to produce ambivalence toward imposed change, and suggested that researchers may have been misinterpreting employees' reactions. Oreg (2003) developed the Resistance to Change Scale with four factors: routine seeking, emotional reaction to imposed change, short-term focus and cognitive rigidity. Oreg (2006) studied 177 employees and found that both personality and context were significantly associated with attitudes toward a large-scale change, which in turn were associated with job satisfaction, organisational commitment and intention to leave. Kunze, Boehm and Bruch (2013) studied 2,981 employees and found, contrary to common stereotypes, that age was negatively related to resistance to change. Klonek, Lehmann-Willenbrock and Kauffeld (2014) used lag sequential analysis of 28 change conversations and found that autonomy-restrictive change agent behaviours evoked sustain talk, which in turn evoked further autonomy-restrictive behaviour. Oreg, Sverdlik, Paine and Seo (2024) developed and validated a scale for four responses to change (acceptance, proactivity, disengagement and resistance) across five studies, and showed the value of active responses beyond valence in predicting the amount and type of feedback recipients provide. Oreg, Bartunek, Lee and Do (2018) set out the affect-based model of recipients' responses on dimensions of valence and activation. Thomas and Hardy (2011) identified demonising and celebrating approaches to resistance and argued that both fail to address power relations. Jones and Van de Ven (2016) studied 40 health care clinics over three years of change and found that resistance had increasingly negative relationships over time with organisational commitment and perceived effectiveness, and that supportive leadership became increasingly effective in reducing resistance. Battilana and Casciaro (2013) analysed 68 change initiatives in the UK National Health Service and found that strong ties to influential fence-sitters increased the likelihood of adoption, while strong ties to resistors helped only when the change diverged little from institutionalised practice. Giangreco and Peccei (2005) surveyed more than 300 middle managers in the Italian national electricity company and found that perceived costs and benefits of change and participation both affected resistance, which mostly took the form of failing to engage in pro-change behaviour rather than open dissent.
When one change follows another
The change you are living through is rarely the only one. A new system is going in while the structure moves, the office is relocating, and the executive team has a new member who would like the board papers done differently. The research on this is the most sobering in the whole field, and also contains the most hopeful finding.
People notice three things about change, according to a 2006 study: how often it happens, how much it touches them, and how well it has been planned, and each had its own effect on how uncertain people felt. The load shows up in the numbers. A study of every stress-related prescription for 92,860 employees in 1,517 of Denmark's largest organisations found that the risk of receiving stress-related medication rose significantly for employees at organisations that changed, and especially at those that made broad changes on several fronts at once.
A Norwegian study followed 7,985 employees and asked who was in clinically relevant psychological distress two years later. Individually, a reorganisation, downsizing and layoffs were each associated with higher odds of distress. Being exposed to several changes at once, or to repeated change, went with higher odds again: 75% and 84% higher respectively. A survey of 53,295 German employees across twelve years found that organisational change was associated with more psychosocial risk at work, including being 1.66 times as likely to report working to the limits of one's capability, and with poorer mental health.
Researchers now call the cumulative effect change fatigue. It was associated with exhaustion, lower commitment and stronger intentions to leave in a 2011 study, and two 2022 studies found more of it where there was more change, along with strain, burnout and weaker performance. A study of repeated reorganisations in the Dutch public sector found fatigue arising through uncertainty and workload, and, strikingly, not softened by whether the previous reorganisation had succeeded, whether people had taken part in it, or by the leaders involved. Only satisfaction with the communication around the previous reorganisation softened it, and only slightly.
Now the disagreement. Some researchers find that experience of change builds something. Interviews from two studies of planned change found that experience gave people the chance to develop capabilities for change, which led to milder and more constructive reactions to the next one; the same research found that bad experiences could produce a kind of loyalty that rested on cynicism. A two-wave study of 260 employees found that perceiving change as very frequent was associated with more behavioural resistance at first, and with less four months later. And a study of 25 different changes found that the more simultaneous and overlapping change was going on around people, the more their confidence in their own ability decided whether they committed to a particular change.
My reading is that both are true, and that the difference lies in what the previous changes taught people. Where earlier changes were explained, finished and learned from, people build a capability. Where they were abandoned halfway or never acknowledged, the next one lands on scar tissue. The pace question follows from that. There is no universally right speed, and one early theoretical paper argued that different kinds of change need different rhythms of time. What the evidence does support is paying attention to the long middle. In a hospital studied 18 and 42 months into a strategic change, the benefits people expected from the change mattered less as time went on, and the quality of their relationship with the organisation mattered more. Being formally involved in the change helped at both points. A change is sold on its benefits and sustained by the relationship.
The team is tired of all the changes at once, and it is still carrying the ones nobody finished.
There is a limit to what a well-run process can do. A Norwegian study found that a healthy change process, with available managers, constructive handling of conflict and clear new roles, went with less stress but did not reduce the extra demands the change created. A kind process can make a heavy load bearable without making it light.
Try this. Put every change touching your team this year on one page: what it is, when it started, whether it is finished and who owns it. Show it to your executive. Most leaders see their own initiative clearly and the total load hardly at all, and the Danish findings suggest it is the total that matters. The page often produces a decision to pause, sequence or formally close something, which is one of the kindest things a leader can do in a busy year.
The research behind this section
Rafferty and Griffin (2006) identified the frequency, impact and planning of change as distinct perceptions and, using a stress and coping model, found that they related differently to appraisals of uncertainty and, through them, to job satisfaction and turnover intentions. Dahl (2011) analysed stress-related medicine prescriptions for 92,860 employees in 1,517 of the largest Danish organisations and found that the risk of receiving stress-related medication increased significantly for employees at organisations that changed, especially those undergoing broad simultaneous changes along several dimensions. Fløvik, Knardahl and Christensen (2019) followed 7,985 employees, 5,297 of whom took part at follow-up two years later, and found that company reorganisation (odds ratio 1.29), downsizing (1.51) and layoffs (1.46), exposure to multiple changes (1.75) and repeated change (1.84) were prospectively associated with clinically relevant mental distress. Backhaus, Lohmann-Haislah, Burr, Nielsen, di Tecco and Dragano (2024) analysed three waves of a German employment survey with 53,295 employees and found organisational change associated with psychosocial risks, including working to the limits of one's capability (prevalence ratio 1.66), and with poorer mental health. De Jong, Wiezer, de Weerd, Nielsen, Mattila-Holappa and Mockałło (2016) reviewed 39 longitudinal studies and found that restructuring, with and without staff reductions, mainly had a negative impact on employee well-being in the short and long term, with some groups reacting less negatively. Bernerth, Walker and Harris (2011) developed a six-item measure of change fatigue and found it positively associated with exhaustion, which was in turn negatively related to organisational commitment and positively related to turnover intentions. Cox, Gallegos, Pool, Gilley and Haight (2022) found in two cross-sectional studies that people in organisations experiencing more change reported greater change fatigue, which predicted strain, burnout, turnover intention and lower engagement, and had indirect effects on teamwork, turnover intention and performance through job satisfaction and organisational commitment. De Vries and de Vries (2023) found that repetitive reorganisations cause change fatigue through uncertainty and workload, not moderated by the perceived success of the prior reorganisation, participation or leadership, and only slightly moderated by satisfaction with communication. Stensaker and Meyer (2011) drew on interviews from two studies of planned change and found that experience provided opportunities to develop change capabilities, leading to milder and more constructive reactions, while negative experiences could lead to loyal behaviour based on cynical attitudes. Rafferty and Jimmieson (2017) surveyed 260 employees at two points four months apart and found indirect relationships between subjective perceptions of change and insomnia and well-being through affective resistance, and that very frequent change was positively associated with behavioural resistance at the first time point and negatively associated with it at the second. Herold, Fedor and Caldwell (2007) studied 25 changes and found that the positive relationship between self-efficacy and commitment to a change was stronger as the amount of simultaneous and overlapping change increased. Huy (2001) proposed that different kinds of planned change call for different temporal capabilities. Kim, Hornung and Rousseau (2011) studied 72 hospital employees 18 and 42 months into a strategic reorientation and found that formal involvement had stable positive effects on change-supportive behaviour, while anticipated benefits became less and the quality of the employment relationship more important as the change progressed. Tvedt, Saksvik and Nytrø (2009) found in a sample of 2,389 Norwegian workers that organisational change was related to stress through job demands, and in 561 employees of seven enterprises that a healthy change process index was related to lower stress and higher control and support but not to lower demands.
How sense gets made in the middle
Somewhere between the announcement and the new way of working, people decide what a change means. The researchers call it sensemaking, the process through which people work to understand events that are new, ambiguous or confusing, and the most consistent finding about it is that it does not happen where the announcement happens.
The classic study followed the first year of a strategic change at a large university and described the leader's role as making sense of the situation and then sensegiving: shaping how everybody else understood it. A longitudinal study of how organisations make sense of issues found that the way it happened of an issue depended on how much both the leaders and everybody else tried to give sense to it. When both were active, sensemaking was guided and rich. When leaders did it alone it was restricted, when only others did it the result was fragmented, and when neither did much it was minimal.
But the most striking work comes from studies of people in the middle. A longitudinal study of middle managers during an imposed move from a hierarchical to a decentralised structure found that they made sense of the change largely through informal, lateral conversations with each other, often in the absence of senior managers. A follow-up found that this inter-recipient sensemaking, the corridor conversations between the people receiving the change, produced both the intended outcomes of the change and a good share of the unintended ones. Its authors raised a fair question: to what extent can anyone manage the interpretations people build together once a change is under way?
A study of middle managers in a high-end clothing company named what they did day to day to make a change work, and the first item on the list was translating the orientation. It is exactly the right word for much of what an EA or a Chief of Staff does in the weeks after an announcement.
The middle also carries the emotional load. A three-year field study of radical change in a large firm found that the middle managers who helped their groups adapt did two seemingly opposite things at once. They committed emotionally to change projects they personally championed, and they attended to the emotions of the people receiving the change. Low commitment led to inertia. High commitment with little attention to people's feelings led to chaos. Doing both, which the researcher called emotional balancing, allowed change and continuity together. A later study by the same researcher found that when executives took a coolly task-focused approach, they stirred up middle managers' group loyalties, veterans against newcomers, and those feelings decided whether a strategy was supported or quietly dismissed.
The stories people are told matter as much as the facts. A study of a large retailer found that managers told interwoven stories about how the organisation was changing and how it was staying the same, and that employees embellished them to explain their own responses. And a study of 501 nurses in a hospital introducing empowerment found that many did not believe the reason management gave for the change. The reasons they did believe were shaped by their trust in management, their sense of the deal they had with the hospital, and what their colleagues believed.
The last finding in this section is one I would like every executive to read. A study of change in organisations looked at who started a change and who carried it out. Changes initiated at the top did not attract above-average support from employees. Changes initiated by middle managers did, and even more so when top managers then took responsibility for carrying them out.
Try this. Be the person who offers a first draft of what the change means. "Here is how I read this; tell me what I have got wrong." Say it to a small group of peers, then to your executive, and listen hard to where people push back. You are doing openly what will happen in the corridors anyway, and you are making it more likely that the meaning people settle on is the accurate one.
The research behind this section
Maitlis and Christianson (2014) reviewed the sensemaking literature and defined sensemaking as the process through which people work to understand issues or events that are novel, ambiguous, confusing or in some other way violate expectations. Gioia and Chittipeddi (1991) conducted an ethnographic study of the first year of strategic change at a large public university, tracked four phases (envisioning, signalling, re-visioning and energising), and proposed that the chief executive's role is best understood through sensemaking and sensegiving. Maitlis (2005) conducted a longitudinal study and found four forms of organisational sensemaking (guided, fragmented, restricted and minimal) resulting from the degree to which leaders and stakeholders engaged in sensegiving. Balogun and Johnson (2004) conducted a longitudinal, qualitative study of middle manager sensemaking during an imposed shift from a hierarchical to a decentralised organisation. Balogun and Johnson (2005) found that lateral, informal processes of inter-recipient sensemaking among middle managers contributed to both intended and unintended change outcomes. Rouleau (2005) studied middle managers in a clothing company implementing strategic change and identified four micro-practices of sensemaking and sensegiving: translating the orientation, overcoding the strategy, disciplining the client and justifying the change. Isabella (1990) interviewed 40 managers and developed a model of how interpretations of key organisational events evolve as a change unfolds. Huy (2002) conducted a three-year inductive field study of radical change in a large firm and found that middle managers who both committed emotionally to change projects and attended to recipients' emotions facilitated adaptation, while low commitment led to inertia and high commitment without attending to emotions led to chaos. Huy (2011) conducted a three-year field study of a large technology firm and found that top executives' affect-neutral approach activated middle managers' organisation-related social identities, generating group-focused emotions that led them to support or covertly dismiss a strategic initiative. Sonenshein (2010) found at a Fortune 500 retailer that managers told strategically ambiguous, interwoven narratives of change and stability, which employees embellished to narrate resisting, championing and accepting responses. Sonenshein and Dholakia (2012) found that meaning-making in the form of strategy worldview and benefits finding created psychological resources that helped frontline employees engage in change implementation. Rousseau and Tijoriwala (1999) studied 501 staff nurses in a hospital implementing empowerment and found that many did not believe management's stated reason for the change, and that trust in management, psychological contracts and co-workers' beliefs affected the reasons nurses cited. Lüscher and Lewis (2008) conducted action research at the Lego Company and developed a process for working through paradoxes of performing, belonging and organising that managers faced during restructuring. Heyden, Fourné, Koene, Werkman and Ansari (2017) found that change initiated by top managers did not engender above-average employee support, whereas change initiated by middle managers did, especially when top managers handled execution.
The translator and the steady hand
Put the last few sections together and a picture emerges of what this role is for when change is landing. People want job-level information from someone close to them, they make sense of change in corridor conversations, they are steadied by honest updates and unsettled by silence, and their feelings spread within teams. The people in the middle who hold commitment to the change and care for the people at once are the ones whose groups adapt. That describes, closely, the seat beside the executive.
It works in four directions.
Downward, you translate. You turn what the executive team has decided into what it means for Tuesday, in the three lines people need: what we know, what we do not know yet, and when we will know. You are not the source of strategy, and the research says people do not want you to be. They want someone close to them who will tell them the practical truth.
Upward, you carry the signal. You hear the objections, the rumours and the silences, and you pass the useful ones back with the names removed. This is the part of the role that turns resistance from a problem into information.
Across, you compare notes. The peer network of EAs and Chiefs of Staff is where much of the real sensemaking of a change happens, and where a mistaken reading can be corrected before it sets.
Inward, you steady yourself. The research on leaders' own attitudes makes this less optional than it sounds. A study of 75 school principals and 586 teachers found that teachers' intentions to resist a large change were lower when their principal was open to change and led in a transformational way, and higher when the principal was personally inclined to resist change. What the person in the middle privately thinks about a change leaks into the room.
The research on leadership during change supports the steady-hand part of this directly. A study of employees' commitment to specific changes found that the broad quality of someone's leadership mattered more for people's commitment to a change than any specific change-management technique, especially when the change affected people personally; for leaders who were not seen that way, good change-management practice still helped. A study that followed employees for a year found that how they felt at the start of a change predicted their commitment and behaviour twelve months later, and that their managers' leadership shaped those early feelings. And in 202 health care staff going through a large change, support from a supervisor softened the link between the stress of the change and both exhaustion and cynicism, while having some control over their own work protected their sense of being good at their jobs.
None of this means carrying the change on your own shoulders. It means being a reliable, honest point of contact when those are rare, and keeping what the top intends and what the floor experiences in conversation with each other.
Try this. For the next change, write down your four directions for the first month. Who you will update and how often (downward). Where you will collect the signal, and when you will pass it to your executive (upward). Which two or three peers you will compare notes with (across). And what you will do to keep yourself steady, including who you talk to when you cannot talk to the team (inward).
The research behind this section
Oreg and Berson (2011) conducted a multilevel study of 75 school principals and 586 teachers and found that teachers' intentions to resist a large-scale change were negatively related to their principals' openness to change values and transformational leadership behaviours and positively related to their principals' dispositional resistance to change, and that principals' transformational leadership moderated the relationship between teachers' dispositional resistance and intentions to resist. Herold, Fedor, Caldwell and Liu (2008) found that transformational leadership was more strongly related to followers' commitment to a change than change-specific leadership practices, especially when the change had significant personal impact, and that good change-management practices were associated with higher commitment for leaders who were not viewed as transformational. Seo, Taylor, Hill, Zhang, Tesluk and Lorinkova (2012) collected multilevel data at two points twelve months apart and found that employees' positive and negative affect at the start of a change predicted their commitment to change and supportive, resistant and creative behavioural responses later, and that workgroup managers' transformational leadership shaped employees' initial affective reactions and commitment. Day, Crown and Ivany (2017) studied 202 Canadian health care staff involved in a large-scale organisational change and found that supervisor support buffered the relationships between change stressors and both exhaustion and cynicism, and that job control moderated the relationship between change and professional efficacy. Oreg and Berson (2019) reviewed the literature on leadership and organisational change and set out the leadership functions and change processes through which leaders shape change and influence its recipients.
Coping, and what helps you through
There is a body of research on how people cope with change, and it carries a quiet warning along with its encouragement.
The encouragement first. A study of 514 managers in six organisations found that two broad dispositions predicted how well people coped with change, both by their own account and by independent assessments: a positive view of themselves and a tolerance for risk. Coping well was in turn related to career outcomes such as salary, job level and performance, and to satisfaction and commitment. In a study of 234 employees, psychological resilience and what the organisation offered people were both positively related to commitment to a change, through positive feelings and a sense of fair exchange.
Coping also changes shape over time, and not in straight lines, as a study that followed employees through four stages of a merger found. A later study traced a chain worth knowing: seeing the change as a threat went with less sense of control and more attempts to escape, then negative emotions, sick days and, in the end, people leaving. A study of 220 employees three months and two years after a merger found that confidence led people to take practical, problem-focused action, which went with higher satisfaction and a stronger sense of belonging to the new organisation, while avoidance went with weaker belonging.
The most practical findings come from a series of studies of police officers going through reorganisation, which looked at how people reshape their own jobs when change arrives. The researchers separated three moves: seeking resources (asking for help, feedback or information), seeking challenges (taking on new tasks or learning something new) and reducing demands (cutting back, avoiding, doing less). In 580 officers, seeking resources went with better performance and seeking challenges with less exhaustion. Reducing demands, which feels like the natural thing to do when you are overloaded, went with more exhaustion, not less. Later studies found the benefits of seeking resources and challenges held in cutback-driven change in Greece as well as ordinary reorganisation in the Netherlands.
Now the warning. The research on dispositions is easily turned into a message that the people who struggle with change simply lack resilience. The wider evidence does not support that reading. The review of attitudes to change concluded that they behave like states that shift with experience, not fixed traits. The study of 177 employees found context mattered alongside personality. The job insecurity research, pulled together in a 2002 meta-analysis, found insecurity damaging to attitudes and health across the board. And the study of healthy change processes found that a good process could reduce stress without reducing the extra work. Personal resilience helps. It is not a substitute for a well-run change, and nobody should be made to feel that their distress in a badly run one is a character flaw.
Resilience is less a personality you either have or lack than a set of things you do, and a set of things other people do for you.
Try this. When a change lands on you, pick one resource to seek and one challenge to take on in the first fortnight. Ask your executive the one question you most need answered, and volunteer for one piece of the change you would like to learn from. Resist the urge to get through it by shrinking the job to the minimum; the evidence says that route leaves you more tired, not less.
The research behind this section
Judge, Thoresen, Pucik and Welbourne (1999) studied 514 managers in six organisations and found that seven dispositional traits reduced to two factors, positive self-concept and risk tolerance, both of which predicted self-reports and independent assessments of coping with change, and that coping was related to extrinsic and intrinsic career outcomes. Shin, Taylor and Seo (2012) surveyed 234 employees and 45 managers and found that organisational inducements and psychological resilience were positively related to normative and affective commitment to change through positive affect and social exchange. Avey, Wernsing and Luthans (2008) surveyed 132 employees and found that psychological capital was related to positive emotions, which were related to engagement, cynicism, organisational citizenship and deviance, and that mindfulness interacted with psychological capital in predicting positive emotions. Fugate, Kinicki and Scheck (2002) followed employees through four stages of a merger and found that negative appraisal, social support, perceived control and emotion-focused coping changed significantly across stages, with linear, quadratic and cubic trends. Fugate, Kinicki and Prussia (2008) found in a longitudinal study that negative appraisal was associated with reduced control and increased escape coping, which related to positive and negative emotions, and that negative emotions predicted sick time and intentions to quit, which predicted voluntary turnover. Amiot, Terry, Jimmieson and Callan (2006) studied 220 employees three months and two years after a merger and found that self-efficacy predicted problem-focused coping, which predicted job satisfaction and identification with the merged organisation, while avoidance coping predicted lower identification. Petrou, Demerouti and Schaufeli (2015) studied 580 police officers undergoing organisational change and found that seeking resources was associated with high task performance and seeking challenges with low exhaustion, while reducing demands predicted exhaustion positively. Petrou, Demerouti and Schaufeli (2018) studied 368 police officers across three waves and found that change communication related to job crafting depending on regulatory focus, that seeking resources was positively associated with work engagement and seeking challenges with adaptivity. Petrou, Demerouti and Xanthopoulou (2017) compared cutback-related change in Greece with regular reorganisation in the Netherlands and found that seeking resources and seeking challenges were generally associated with better work-related well-being in both. Choi (2011) proposed that attitudes toward change are better conceptualised as states than as traits. Oreg (2006) found that both personality and context were associated with attitudes toward a large-scale change. Tvedt, Saksvik and Nytrø (2009) found that a healthy change process was related to lower stress but not to lower demands. Sverke, Hellgren and Näswall (2002) meta-analysed the consequences of job insecurity and found detrimental effects on job attitudes, organisational attitudes, health and, to some extent, behavioural relationships with the organisation. Vakola, Tsaousis and Nikolaou (2004) studied 137 professionals and found that personality traits were related to attitudes toward organisational change and that emotional intelligence contributed over and above personality.
The change check
Everything in this post comes down to one moment: a change is landing on a team you support, and you want to know where the strain will come from and what to do in the first fortnight.
Tell it what kind of change it is, how much people know, how many other changes are in flight, what you are hearing and how you are doing yourself. It will give you a reading of where the strain is most likely to sit, the three things to watch, the first steps the research points to, what to check after a month, and a three-line update to adapt and send.
Where to start
If you take one thing from all of this, make it the three-line update: what we know, what we do not know yet, and when we expect to know it. It restores a little of the control that uncertainty takes away, and it is the habit most likely to keep the corridor story close to the true one.
After that, there are three moves worth making.
Name the losses, specifically, for each group the change touches. Keep a resistance log and pass the useful signal upward. And put the whole year's change load on one page for your executive, so that somebody who can pause, sequence or finish things can see what the team is actually carrying.
I have put the three pages I would use into a download: a translation sheet for turning a decision into the update people need, a listening log for the pushback, and a load and steadiness page for the whole year's changes and for you.
Change will keep arriving, often on a Thursday at eight minutes to five. The research is kinder to the people in the middle of it than the popular story suggests: the pushback is usually information, the losses are real and can be named, and the person who tells the practical truth on a steady rhythm does more good than any slide. That person is very often you, and it is some of the most valuable work this role does.
The part of this that shows up in how you are seen at work sits inside what the Connected Leader Assessment calls Influence and Stakeholder Trust: whether people believe what you tell them when nothing is certain, whether the signal you carry upward is taken seriously, and whether the building still trusts the executive office when the change has landed. It is the dimension that decides whether you are the person people come to when the invitation with no agenda arrives.
The assessment is free, takes about twelve minutes and gives you a read across all five dimensions. If you want to go further on this one, the Skill Sprints are short, focused programmes on a single dimension, and the Irreplaceable Audit is the place to look at which parts of your work would be hardest to replace in a restructure, which is exactly the work worth making visible before the next one.
Stay savvy.
Meg ✌️
Free tools
The change check, the interactive tool in this post, free
The Change Pages, the download in this post, free
The Connected Leader Assessment, twelve minutes, free, with a read on Influence and Stakeholder Trust, the dimension this post sits in
P.S. Want to Go Deeper on Living Through Change?
If this resonated and you want to go further, here is the evidence the piece is built on. These are the papers that shaped my thinking on why change is felt as loss, what to tell people and when, and what steadies a room, and they are well worth your time.
Every DOI below has been checked. Where I could not confirm a figure from the paper itself, I have left the figure out rather than guess.
📃 Armenakis, Harris and Mossholder (1993) Readiness set apart from resistance: beliefs, attitudes and intentions, shaped by how credible the messenger is. https://doi.org/10.1177/001872679304600601
📃 Holt and colleagues (2007) More than 900 people. Readiness rested on four beliefs: I can, it is right, they mean it, it is good for me. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021886306295295
📃 Rafferty, Jimmieson and Armenakis (2013) Review. Readiness includes feelings as well as beliefs, and exists in teams and organisations as well as people. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206312457417
📃 Herscovitch and Meyer (2002) Believing in a change and feeling you ought to support it predicted support; staying because leaving costs did not. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.87.3.474
📃 Wanberg and Banas (2000) Information, confidence in coping and a say in decisions predicted openness; low acceptance went with wanting to leave. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.85.1.132
📃 Oreg, Vakola and Armenakis (2011) Review of 79 studies from 1948 to 2007 of how people react to organisational change. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021886310396550
📃 Oreg (2003) The Resistance to Change Scale: routine seeking, emotional reaction, short-term focus, rigidity. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.88.4.680
📃 Choi (2011) Review. Readiness, commitment, openness and cynicism behave like states that shift, not fixed traits. https://doi.org/10.1002/hrm.20434
📃 Kiefer (2005) Ongoing change brought negative emotions through insecurity and poor treatment, and lowered trust a month on. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.339
📃 Huy (2002) Three years of radical change. Middle managers who balanced commitment and care helped groups adapt. https://doi.org/10.2307/3094890
📃 Fugate, Kinicki and Scheck (2002) Coping across four stages of a merger changed shape, and not in straight lines. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2002.tb00134.x
📃 Fugate, Kinicki and Prussia (2008) Seeing change as a threat led, through escape coping, to sick days and leaving. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2008.00104.x
📃 Samuelson and Zeckhauser (1988) Decision experiments. People disproportionately stuck with the status quo option. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00055564
📃 Van Knippenberg and colleagues (2002) Two mergers. Identifying with the new organisation depended on a sense of continuity with the old. https://doi.org/10.1348/014466602760060228
📃 Bartunek and colleagues (2006) Nurses in a change initiative. Taking part raised the gains people felt, and feelings spread within units. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021886305285455
📃 Schweiger and DeNisi (1991) A field experiment. An honest merger preview at one plant reduced the damage the merger did. https://doi.org/10.2307/256304
📃 Miller, Johnson and Grau (1994) An insurance company. Quality information went with a more favourable view of a change. https://doi.org/10.1080/00909889409365387
📃 Jimmieson, Terry and Callan (2004) 589 government employees. Information helped mainly by raising confidence in coping. https://doi.org/10.1037/1076-8998.9.1.11
📃 Sverke, Hellgren and Näswall (2002) Meta-analysis. Job insecurity harmed attitudes and health. https://doi.org/10.1037/1076-8998.7.3.242
📃 De Berker and colleagues (2016) A laboratory study. Stress in body and mind tracked how uncertain the situation was. https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms10996
📃 Fedor, Caldwell and Herold (2006) 32 organisations. Commitment depended on how good the change was, how big, and how personal. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2006.00852.x
📃 Herold, Fedor and Caldwell (2007) 25 changes. Amid more simultaneous change, confidence mattered more for commitment. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.92.4.942
📃 Herold and colleagues (2008) Overall leadership mattered more for commitment to a change than change techniques. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.93.2.346
📃 Stensaker and Meyer (2011) Experience of change built capabilities for the next one, or cynical loyalty if it went badly. https://doi.org/10.1108/00483481211189974
📃 Wanous, Reichers and Austin (2000) Cynicism about change was learned from past change, weak leadership and exclusion. https://doi.org/10.1177/1059601100252003
📃 Smollan (2015) 31 health staff. The transition phase was the most stressful stretch for most. https://doi.org/10.1108/jocm-03-2014-0055
📃 De Jong and colleagues (2016) 39 longitudinal studies. Restructuring mainly harmed well-being, short and long term. https://doi.org/10.1080/02678373.2015.1136710
📃 Balogun and Johnson (2004) Middle managers made sense of a restructure largely with each other. https://doi.org/10.2307/20159600
📃 Balogun and Johnson (2005) Corridor sensemaking among middle managers shaped intended and unintended outcomes. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840605054624
📃 Gioia and Chittipeddi (1991) A university's first year of strategic change: sensemaking and sensegiving. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.4250120604
📃 Maitlis (2005) Four forms of organisational sensemaking, depending on who gives sense. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2005.15993111
📃 Maitlis and Christianson (2014) Review of sensemaking: how people understand events that are new, ambiguous or confusing. https://doi.org/10.5465/19416520.2014.873177
📃 Rouleau (2005) Middle managers translating, recoding and justifying a strategic change. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6486.2005.00549.x
📃 Lüscher and Lewis (2008) Action research at Lego: working through the paradoxes of a restructure. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2008.31767217
📃 Sonenshein (2010) Managers told stories of change and stability; employees embellished them. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2010.51467638
📃 Battilana and Casciaro (2013) 68 NHS changes. Close ties to undecided influencers helped a change be adopted. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.1120.1583
📃 Oreg and Berson (2019) Review of how leaders shape organisational change and its recipients. https://doi.org/10.5465/annals.2016.0138
📃 Hughes (2011) The 70% failure figure traced through five sources; none rested on valid evidence. https://doi.org/10.1080/14697017.2011.630506
📃 Appelbaum and colleagues (2012) Kotter's eight steps checked against the literature: most steps supported, the whole model untested. https://doi.org/10.1108/02621711211253231
📃 Stouten, Rousseau and De Cremer (2018) Popular change models set against the research, with ten evidence-based steps. https://doi.org/10.5465/annals.2016.0095
📃 Judge and colleagues (1999) 514 managers. A positive self-view and tolerance for risk predicted coping with change. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.84.1.107
📃 Cunningham and colleagues (2002) 654 hospital staff. Readiness at the start predicted who took part in the redesign over the next year. https://doi.org/10.1348/096317902321119637
📃 Shin, Taylor and Seo (2012) Resilience and what the organisation offered both raised commitment to a change. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2010.0325
📃 Amiot and colleagues (2006) 220 employees after a merger. Practical coping helped; avoidance weakened belonging. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206306287542
📃 Kunze, Boehm and Bruch (2013) 2,981 employees. Older employees were less resistant to change, not more. https://doi.org/10.1108/jmp-06-2013-0194
📃 Petrou, Demerouti and Schaufeli (2018) 368 police officers. How people reshaped their jobs during change, and what it did. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206315624961
📃 Petrou, Demerouti and Schaufeli (2015) 580 police officers. Seeking resources and challenges helped; cutting demands meant more exhaustion. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0039003
📃 Ford, Ford and D'Amelio (2008) Resistance: the rest of the story. Change agents help cause it, and it can be a resource. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2008.31193235
📃 Piderit (2000) Responses to change as mixed attitudes, not simply for or against. https://doi.org/10.2307/259206
📃 Oreg and Sverdlik (2011) Three studies. Many people held strong, conflicting views about an imposed change at once. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0021100
📃 Thomas and Hardy (2011) Demonising or celebrating resistance both miss the power relations underneath. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scaman.2011.05.004
📃 Oreg (2006) 177 employees. Personality and context both shaped attitudes to a large change. https://doi.org/10.1080/13594320500451247
📃 Klonek, Lehmann-Willenbrock and Kauffeld (2014) Restricting someone's autonomy in a change conversation drew arguments for the status quo. https://doi.org/10.1080/14697017.2014.896392
📃 Oreg and colleagues (2018) A model of responses to change by how positive and how active they are. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2014.0335
📃 Rafferty and Griffin (2006) How often, how much and how well planned: three perceptions of change with different effects. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.91.5.1154
📃 Bernerth, Walker and Harris (2011) A measure of change fatigue; fatigue went with exhaustion, lower commitment and intent to leave. https://doi.org/10.1080/02678373.2011.634280
📃 Dahl (2011) 92,860 Danish employees. Change, especially on several fronts at once, raised stress prescriptions. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.1100.1273
📃 Rafferty and Jimmieson (2017) 260 employees. Very frequent change meant more resistance at first and less four months later. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8551.12200
📃 Bordia and colleagues (2004) Three kinds of change uncertainty. Communication eased the strategic kind; participation eased the rest. https://doi.org/10.1023/b:jobu.0000028449.99127.f7
📃 Bordia and colleagues (2004) A hospital restructure. Uncertainty raised strain through a lost sense of control. https://doi.org/10.1080/13594320444000128
📃 Allen and colleagues (2007) People wanted job news from their supervisor and strategy from the top; trust decided whom they asked. https://doi.org/10.1080/14697010701563379
📃 DiFonzo and Bordia (1998) Change communication that worked revealed rather than concealed, and built trust early. https://doi.org/10.1002/(sici)1099-050x(199823/24)37:3/4<295::aid-hrm10>3.0.co;2-3
📃 Day, Crown and Ivany (2017) 202 health staff. Supervisor support softened the link between change stress and burnout. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2017.03.004
📃 Fløvik, Knardahl and Christensen (2019) 7,985 employees over two years. Multiple and repeated change raised the odds of distress most. https://doi.org/10.5271/sjweh.3777
📃 De Vries and de Vries (2023) Repeated reorganisations tired people through uncertainty and workload. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540962.2021.1905258
📃 Bordia and colleagues (2011) A poor history of change management lowered trust and openness and predicted leaving. https://doi.org/10.1177/1059601110392990
📃 Lines (2004) A telecoms reorientation. Participation went with goals met, commitment and less resistance. https://doi.org/10.1080/1469701042000221696
📃 Seo and colleagues (2012) Feelings at the start of a change predicted commitment and behaviour a year later. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2011.01240.x
📃 Rafferty and Restubog (2010) A merger. More information sessions and better information meant less anxiety and more commitment. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206309341480
📃 Kim, Hornung and Rousseau (2011) A hospital at 18 and 42 months. Expected benefits mattered less over time, the relationship more. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206310364243
📃 Vakola, Tsaousis and Nikolaou (2004) 137 professionals. Emotional intelligence related to attitudes to change beyond personality. https://doi.org/10.1108/02683940410526082
📃 Eidelman, Pattershall and Crandall (2010) Longer is better: how long a practice has existed shapes how good it seems. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2010.07.008
📃 Eidelman and Crandall (2012) Review. People treat existence and longevity as evidence that something is good. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2012.00427.x
📃 Conroy and O'Leary-Kelly (2014) A model of work-related identity loss, moving between what has gone and what comes next. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2011.0396
📃 Bouckenooghe, Schwarz and Minbashian (2015) Meta-analysis of seventeen studies of the three kinds of commitment to a change. https://doi.org/10.1080/1359432x.2014.963059
📃 Jones and Van de Ven (2016) 40 clinics over three years. Unaddressed resistance festered; supportive leadership helped more over time. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021886316671409
📃 Huy (2011) A task-only approach from the top stirred middle managers' group loyalties and decided support. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.961
📃 Heyden and colleagues (2017) Change started by middle managers won more support, especially when the top carried it out. https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12258
📃 Lewis (2006) Quality of information mattered; mere frequency of communication did not. https://doi.org/10.1080/10570310500506631
📃 Avey, Wernsing and Luthans (2008) Hope, confidence, optimism and resilience went with positive emotions during change. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021886307311470
📃 Huy (2001) Different kinds of planned change call for different rhythms of time. https://doi.org/10.2307/3560244
📃 Rousseau and Tijoriwala (1999) 501 nurses. Many did not believe management's reason for a change; trust shaped what they believed. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.84.4.514
📃 Rafferty and Minbashian (2019) Two studies. Beliefs and positive emotions about a change each went with readiness and later support. https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726718809154
📃 Oreg and Berson (2011) 75 principals, 586 teachers. The leader's own openness to change travelled to the staff. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2011.01221.x
📃 Kiefer and colleagues (2015) UK public servants. A budget announcement alone lowered well-being; innovation changes later raised it. https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/muu042
📃 Bordia and colleagues (2006) Change rumours in a hospital: mostly negative, tied to stress, and best read as concerns. https://doi.org/10.1177/1059601106286880
📃 Nelson, Cooper and Jackson (1995) 397 water authority employees. Job satisfaction fell during privatisation and rose either side of it. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8325.1995.tb00688.x
📃 Vakola (2014) 183 employees in a restructure. How much the change touched people shaped their readiness. https://doi.org/10.1108/lodj-05-2012-0064
📃 Sonenshein and Dholakia (2012) Meaning-making helped frontline employees implement strategic change. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1110.0651
📃 Giangreco and Peccei (2005) 300+ middle managers. Resistance was mostly quiet non-support rather than open dissent. https://doi.org/10.1080/09585190500298404
📃 Coch and French (1948) The founding study. Groups with a say in designing a change adapted better than those simply told. https://doi.org/10.1177/001872674800100408
📃 Tvedt, Saksvik and Nytrø (2009) A healthy change process meant less stress, but not fewer demands. https://doi.org/10.1080/02678370902857113
📃 Isabella (1990) 40 managers. How interpretations of a change evolve as it unfolds. https://doi.org/10.2307/256350
📃 Petrou, Demerouti and Xanthopoulou (2017) Greece and the Netherlands. Seeking resources and challenges helped in both kinds of change. https://doi.org/10.1037/str0000033
📃 Oreg and colleagues (2024) Five studies. Active responses to change, for or against, went with more feedback. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0001132
📃 Cox and colleagues (2022) Two studies. More change meant more fatigue, strain, burnout and weaker performance. https://doi.org/10.1108/jocm-12-2021-0369
📃 Backhaus and colleagues (2024) 53,295 German employees. Change went with more psychosocial risk and poorer mental health. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-024-19815-w
📃 Li and colleagues (2021) 490 employees in April 2020. Transparent communication eased uncertainty and helped people cope. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2020.101984
📃 Men and colleagues (2026) 1,034 employees. Face-to-face channels did most for transparency, which lowered uncertainty. https://doi.org/10.1177/10776990221100518
📃 Ford, Ford and McNamara (2002) Resistance as a response to the background conversations a change arrives in. https://doi.org/10.1108/09534810210422991
P.P.S. Why Do I Even Have the Nerve to Write This?
Fair question.
I am someone who has spent years working alongside remarkable executives, navigating chaos, translating vision into structure and figuring things out, sometimes beautifully and sometimes the very hard way. I have had the privilege of being the steady right hand to leaders who move fast, take risks and expect a lot. That environment has shaped me more than any classroom ever could.
I also happen to have an MBA, and I am studying psychology because people fascinate me. How we work. Why we disconnect. What actually holds us together when the pressure rises.
But really, none of that is the point.
I am here because I have lived the erosion and rebuilt from it. I have seen the cost of carrying too much and the relief that arrives when you finally stop disappearing inside your own competence.
So I share what I have learned in case it helps someone else. Take what is useful. Leave the rest. And remember this one truth that professionals like you often forget:
You are probably doing far better than you give yourself credit for.
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