Same pond, different frogs: How collective change readiness level and diversity associates with team performance

Abstract

Despite the critical importance of teams in organizational change processes, we still know little about how collective change readiness (CR) in teams associates to team outcomes. In this study, we take a multilevel approach to CR and investigate how collective CR associates with team performance. Specifically, we examine (a) how ambivalence between emotional and collective cognitive CR associates with collective intentional CR and (b) how both the level and diversity of collective intentional CR associate to team performance. We test our team-level hypotheses using 59 teams and 366 individual team members. The results show that the levels of collective emotional and cognitive CR interact in their association with intentional CR. Collective intentional CR is the highest when both collective emotional and cognitive CR are high and the lowest under a condition of high collective cognitive CR and low collective emotional CR. Moreover, diversity in collective intentional CR negatively associates to leader-rated team performance. Implications for theory and suggestions for practice are discussed.