Looking through someone else’s eyes: Exploring perceptions of organizational change

Abstract

Existing research on how individuals perceive organizational change is limited in that researchers tend view the change from an etic (i.e. outsider) view rather than an emic (i.e. insider view). This paper addresses this issue by employing a constructivist approach to: (1) Identify what types of organizational changes individuals perceive as significant, and (2) Understand how these perceptions compare to existing organizational change theory. Grounded theory data analysis techniques were used to analyze in-depth interviews with employees from a hospital that had recently undergone numerous changes. Findings showed that professional identity strength was related, in different ways, to how individuals viewed change and that the types of change identified by informants varied from the traditional types of change studied by researchers.