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Creating Readiness for Organizational Change

Stanley G. Harris

Department of Management, College of Business, Auburn University, Alabama 36849-6126.

Kevin W. Mossholder

Louisiana State University.

The purpose of this article is to clarify the readiness for change concept and examine how change agents can influence employee readiness for organizational change. The article contributes to an improved understanding of change dynamics in four important ways. First, readiness for change is distinguished from resistance to change. Readiness is described in terms of the organizational members' beliefs, attitudes, and intentions. Second, a model is offered that describes the influence strategies as well as the importance of change agent credibility and interpersonal and social dynamics in the readiness creation process. Third, by combining urgency of, and employee readiness for, needed changes, a typology of readiness programs is offered. Fourth, a large multinational corporation's efforts to create readiness for large-scale change are described to provide a cogent illustration of the various readiness interventions described in the model.

Key Words: readiness • unfreezing • organizational change • interventions • resistance to change

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