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The purpose of this article is to clarify the readiness for change concept and examine how change agents can influence employee readiness for organizational change. The article contributes to an improved understanding of change dynamics in four important ways. First, readiness for change is distinguished from resistance to change. Readiness is described in terms of the organizational members' beliefs, attitudes, and intentions. Second, a model is offered that describes the influence strategies as well as the importance of change agent credibility and interpersonal and social dynamics in the readiness creation process. Third, by combining urgency of, and employee readiness for, needed changes, a typology of readiness programs is offered. Fourth, a large multinational corporation's efforts to create readiness for large-scale change are described to provide a cogent illustration of the various readiness interventions described in the model.
KEY WORDS: readiness; unfreezing; organizational change; interventions; resistance to change.
INTRODUCTION
Because of increasingly dynamic environments, organizations are continually confronted with the need to implement changes in strategy, structure, process, and culture. Many factors contribute to the effectiveness with which such organizational changes are implemented. One such factor is readiness for change. Readiness, which is similar to Lewin's (1951) concept of unfreezing, is reflected in organizational members' beliefs, attitudes, and intentions regarding the extent to which changes are needed and the organization's capacity to successfully make those changes. Readiness is the cognitive precursor to the behaviors of either resistance to, or support for, a change effort. Schein (1979) has argued " ... the reason so many change efforts run into resistance or outright failure is usually directly traceable to their not providing for an effective unfreezing process before attempting a change induction" (p. 144). Although some researchers have discussed the importance of readiness (cf. Beckhard & Harris, 1987; Beer & Walton, 1987; Turner, 1982), it has seldom been recognized as being distinct from resistance (cf. Coch & French, 1948; Kotter & Schlesinger, 1979; Lawrence, 1954). Specifically, creating readiness has been most often explained in conjunction with prescriptions for reducing resistance. For example, Kotter and Schlesinger (1979) discuss several strategies in dealing with resistance (e.g., education and communication, participation and involvement, facilitation and support, negotiation and agreement). Such prescriptions are effective in reducing resistance to the extent that they...