E.: The experience of pow-erlessness in organizations. W.: Creating Readiness for Organizational Change. G.: Organizational change: A review of theory and research in the 1990’s. O.: Survivor reactions to organizational downsizing: Does time ease the pain? Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 74, 145–164, 2001Īrmenakis, A. Limitations can be seen in the cross-sectional design of the study, which does not allow drawing causal conclusions.Īllen, T. Especially as the data basis is a large, and representative sample of employees in Germany, covering all branches, and a huge variety of occupations, and positions. Overall the study provides strong evidence for the health risks inherent in organizational change processes. Comparably, only an aggravating effect of lack of information for complaints but not for the other two health indicators was found. In particular the results provided the expected buffering effect of social support for health complaints but not for general health and days of sick leave. Moderated regression analyses indicated that social support, both from colleagues, and supervisors, as well as information policy moderate these relationships. by lack of information given to the employees. In contrast to that, the negative effect of a loss of continuity in one’s work environment by organizational change processes should be further intensified if transparency is missing in such a process, i.e. Following this, social support from the team (supervisors, colleagues) represents a social-based resource that should reduce negative effects of organizational changes on health of employees.
COR theory further suggests that gaining new resources becomes in particular important if other resources (here a stable work environment) is lost (Hobfoll 2001). The more features had changed the stronger was the effect on health of employees. As some of the covered changes at the workplace can be considered as rather minor events, when compared to larger organizational restructuring, the results underpins that change always bears risks. Logistic regression analyses revealed that already having experienced one change over the last two years increased significantly the risk of reporting health complaints. Guided by assumptions from COR theory, we expected organizational changes to be negatively related to affected employees’ mental and physical health. Based on representative data from the BiBB-BAuA-employee survey in 2005/2006 (N = 20.000) the relationship between experienced changes in the organization (e.g., internal restructurings, staff reduction, supervisory changes, implementation of new information technology), health complaints, general health and days of sick leave were analyzed. Prior research provided repeated evidence insofar that change leads to a drop in employees’ physical and mental health (e.g. According to Conservation of Resources (COR) theory, individuals strive to gain, conserve and protect resources - as a secure employment situation or a stable working environment, for example - indicating that changes per se, independent of their consequences, are perceived to be stressful (cf. Hence, processes of organizational change are also part of everyday experience of many contemporary employees.
Organizational changes are an ever-present element across all organizations (Todnem 2005) and they take place in an increasing closer succession.
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