Changes in the workplace are an important topic in today's dynamic world. The field of reorganisation focuses mainly on the employees’ acceptance of future changes. This is a scarcely researched topic, but increasingly more studies recognise its importance and see it as a key factor in the development of a positive attitude amongst employees with regards to organisational changes.
The challenge we faced while writing this thesis was the influence of various factors on the employees’ readiness regarding changes. We paid additional attention to the influence of the following factors: participation in the designing of changes, communication between stakeholders and the influence of past failed attempts to implement changes on the employees’ perception and acceptance of change. These three factors represented the core of our hypotheses. We furthermore analysed similar practices, as well as the importance of good communication and cooperation, in Austria in order to establish an international point of comparison. The purpose of this thesis is to add to the understanding of the term ‘reorganisation’ and of employees’ readiness towards changes. A further purpose of this thesis is to establish the link between the employees’ readiness towards change and the variables that effect individual people. These variables include the participation in the designing of change, communication with the planners of change and previous unsuccessful attempts at implementing change. To achieve this, we gathered data via a survey and analysed the results with a regression model.
Our analysis showed that if the planners of change would more actively include employees in the implementation of change and if they maintained better communication with them, the employees would be more accepting of change as a result. The survey from this study can serve as a starting point for further research in the field of public administration.
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