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Article Excerpt
Effective communication is without doubt a key component of successful change initiatives (Covin & Kilmann, 1990; Lewis, 2000). As Lewis argues, "the empirical picture that is slowly emerging indicates that communication process and change implementation are inextricably linked processes" (1999, p. 44). Communication is critical in creating and articulating vision; channeling feedback between implementers, key decision-makers, and key users; providing social support; forestalling or making constructive use of resistance; and assessing and promoting results. Unfortunately, while the literature addressing planned organizational change is extensive, there is little agreement about what specific communicative actions implementers need to carry out to create desired change processes and outcomes. Even less is known about the preferences of employees who experience the implementation of planned changes in their workplaces or how they assess the success of implementation programs.
Consideration of assessments of "success" is important in examining employee perspectives on change communication. Employee perceptions of outcomes are most likely to predict their attitudes toward future change initiatives and the methods used to implement them. Whether their own evaluations of success align with those of other participants and observers is an interesting question, but of more immediate concern is the degree to which their own perceptions of change success are related to their experiences of implementers' communication practices. Success of change programs has been treated in the most general of ways (whatever the respondent interprets "success" to mean) in the empirical literature to date (cf. Covin & Kilmann, 1990; Young & Post, 1993). However, it is necessary to define change-implementation success more precisely. For the purposes of this research, evaluation of success is defined as respondents' own assessments of the degree to which the change has achieved intended outcomes and has produced a sense that success outweighs failure. The position taken here is that understanding where such assessments are generated is critical in unpacking the reactions employees have toward implementation communication efforts and, ultimately, their willingness to engage in future change initiatives.
Implementers are those empowered by organizations, through role responsibility or expertise, to introduce change. Implementers are typically individuals or teams whose expertise is a mix of knowledge of the change itself (e.g., a technology expert), the organizational personnel dynamics (e.g., a human resources team), or both. Advice to implementers about ways to enhance success in establishing change is prolific in the popular press (Lewis, Schmisseur, Stephens, & Weir, 2006) but leaves much unclear and unstated. Some of the advice is contradictory (e.g., "communicate from the top" versus "communicate from the lowest supervisory level"), and much of it is vague (e.g., "communicate well" and "communicate often"). Although researchers from various disciplines have devoted great attention to organizational change, they have yet to clarify the specifics of implementing planned change. In critiquing this literature, Lewis and Seibold (1998) suggest that much of the advice is underspecified: "... only a handful of the articles make any reference to specific tactics of implementation. For example, an author may suggest 'involving key stakeholders' without offering specific tactics for accomplishing this end" (p. 124). As Fox and Amichai-Hamburger (2002) describe the implementation literature, "Managers are encouraged to talk about the change as openly as possible, as early as possible, and as much as they can in order to minimize or eliminate resistance" (p. 86). However, little clarity is offered, and much less specific evidence, of the utility of specific channels for communicating, appropriateness of message-senders, methods and timing of feedback, and the like. Lewis et al. (2006) characterize the content of 28 recent trade books on change implementation they reviewed as follows:
[These books] tended to boil tactics for communication down to sound bites and general philosophy ... even where authors created grids for use in planning communication strategies for various purposes, there seemed to be scant detail in considering very basic problems that practitioners might have with communication. In short, these books come across as extremely sloganesque when specifying communicative strategies and advice. While occasionally pithy, and usually adamant, the advice described in these books often detail and appropriate qualification in many cases. (p. 20)
Although scholars have examined informal and naturally occurring talk about change (Fairhurst, 1993; Ford & Ford, 1995; Zorn, Page, & Cheney, 2000), communicative antecedents of innovativeness (Albrecht & Hall, 1991), communication related to organizational adoption of changes (Flanagin, 2000), and talk related to users' reactions to change (Lewis & Seibold, 1996; Miller & Monge, 1985; Miller, Johnson, & Grau, 1994), among other topics, comparatively little empirical or theoretical exploration of formal implementation communication exists. Formal communication involves the more strategic, planned campaigns of implementers and upperand mid-level managers to introduce change and garner expected cooperation from employees. Exceptions to this general trend include work examining announcement of change (Smeltzer, 1991, 1995), the "reframing" of meaning during change (Bartunek, 1988; Reger, Gustafson, Demarie, & Mullane, 1994), use of metaphors during change (Akin & Palmer, 2000; Sackmann, 1999), media selection by implementers of change initiatives (Timmerman, 2003), and some descriptive studies of implementers' self-reports of implementation communication (Lewis, 2000; Lewis, Hamel, & Richardson, 2001).
Lewis's (1999) study is most relevant to the current study. The former study examined patterns of implementer communication, and sought to describe how implementers differentially disseminated information to and solicited input from employees (and volunteers) in their organizations during change initiatives. It also sought to investigate the relationship between these communicative activities and the success of the change programs from the perspective of the implementers. Success was defined as a general degree of perceived success of the planned change effort. Results demonstrated that across the self-reported cases of change communication, implementers were significantly more devoted to disseminating information than to soliciting input. The results also showed that implementers associated use of a dissemination approach with success of change programs. Particularly, frequent use of general informational meetings to disseminate information about the change was positively associated with increases in implementers' perceptions of the success of change programs.
Although the Lewis (1999) study provides a generalizable description of implementer communication, we still lack a cross-organizational description of employee perceptions of formal communication during change initiatives. As Klein and Sorra (1996) note, "Although cross-organizational studies of the determinants of innovation adoption are abundant ... cross-organizational studies of innovation implementation are extremely rare" (p. 1056), and thus we have little ability to meaningfully compare findings across types of organizations, types of changes, environmental sectors, and types of implementers. Even among existing cross-organizational studies, it is rare to see any focus on communication aspects of implementation. We would gain a more meaningful basis for conceptual and theoretical development by adding a more generalizable and broader sample of employee perceptions of implementation communication.
Study Rationale
The purpose of the current study is to describe (1) how employees experience communication of change messages, (2) the types of channels they use to communicate with implementers, and (3) the qualities of implementers' change communication that employees associate with successful outcomes. This study is offered as an important initial step in developing a theory of effective implementation communication.
Employees likely perceive communication about change differently than do implementers. Usually implementers enjoy the benefit of a clear managerial picture of the goals of change programs, the plans for implementation, and a sense of how the process is going. Employees further in the hierarchy from the decision makers are less likely to have personal knowledge of change programs and formal goals and progress. They rely on supervisors, managers, coworkers, experts, and implementers for information. Current research has yet to provide a detailed description of how employees perceive the communication they receive from and provide to implementers concerning change programs. We know little, aside from a handful of case descriptions, about the channels they use, the importance they place on their own participation in change decision making, the importance of information they receive, and the degree to which "vision" is an important predictor of their reactions to change, among other questions.
It is commonly understood in the change literature that employees' cooperation during change initiatives is key to the success of most if not all planned organizational changes. Learning how those employees form attitudes and behaviors regarding the change initiatives is critical to predicting success of change programs. Furthermore, it is important to see whether lower level employees value certain communicative activities that implementers appear to see as paramount to change efforts. If, for example, implementers become convinced that dissemination of information is the most valuable communication activity during implementation (as appears from the 1999 Lewis study), and employees feel that information is useful only to a limited extent and place greater value on opportunities for providing input, a potential mismatch between implementers' communication strategies and employees' communication needs may develop. For practitioners to make good use of advice about when, how, and what to communicate to employees, they need to know how employees react to communication opportunities and how they associate those opportunities with the important outcomes for change programs. This study is a first step in closing this gap in current research.
Review of Literature
Outcomes to Change Programs
Employees make their own assessments about the success or failure of implementation efforts. The importance of employee assessment of success is at least twofold. First, employees are subjected to many changes during a career and during their tenure in a single organization. The degree to which they experience positive changes at one point in time likely affects their receptivity to other changes at later points in time. Understanding how they judge those...
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