Haunted by the past

Abstract

Change management research has largely ignored the effects of organizational change history in shaping employee attitudes and behavior. Using schema theory, this paper develops and tests a model of the effects of poor change management history (PCMH) on employee attitudes (trust, job satisfaction, turnover intentions, cynicism and openness to change) and actual turnover. In two studies that relate employee attitudes to actual events in the organization, we found that PCMH, through PCMH-schema, led to lower trust, job satisfaction and openness to change, and higher cynicism and turnover intentions. Also, PCMH-schema predicted employee turnover over two years. Show more