Background: Many change processes in organizations fail and efficient change management is therefore crucial for success. For successful change to be possible, an organization needs to be readied for that change. The growing demand on sustainable business practices leads organizations to embrace sustainable development and therefore go through change. Change readiness can be viewed on two levels; organizational and individual and there are different factors impacting each of these levels. Examples of such factors are Vision & Goals, Organizational structure and A sense of urgency. Purpose: The purpose of this research was to explore how ready Swedish organizations were for sustainability-oriented change, taking both organizational and individual change readiness into account. Method: 8 Swedish organizations were studied with the help of 15 factors that impact change readiness. By using mixed methods, qualitative data from interviews and quantitative data from surveys was collected, and the factors were evaluated. Findings: The organizations had an average of 67 % change readiness overall, with the factor A sense of urgency scoring the highest results indicating that Swedish organizations understand the importance of sustainability. The data suggested that the organizations were more change ready on the individual compared to the organizational change readiness level. The findings also showed that the factors Vision & Goals and Organizational structure had no positive impact on the organizations´ change readiness.

The University of Rhode Island Change Assessment Scale (URICA) is a widely used measure of readiness to change. To evaluate the URICA's ability to discriminate among alcohol abusers with and without co-occurring major depression, the authors administered it to 193 outpatients court-referred for alcohol treatment. Estimates of internal consistency suggest that scoring the URICA using its traditional factors, as well as using the newer Readiness to Change index, produced variable yet adequately reliable scores. Further, the URICA detected statistically significant differences in motivation to change an alcohol problem between an alcohol use disorder group (AD; n = 131) and an alcohol use disorder with co-occurring depression group (AD/D; n = 62) with the AD/D group showing greater readiness to change. For the AD/D group, separate URICAs were given for alcohol use and depressed mood. Confirming previous findings, results suggest the URICA may lack sensitivity to discriminate among two simultaneously occurring psychological disorders.

Background: There is an increasing importance of sustainable development in today’s society as a result of various social, environmental, and economic challenges facing the people and planet. To create the change needed to shift from unsustainable activities, everyone must participate, including business organizations. Here, the concept of change readiness is highly relevant as it helps prepare individuals and organizations to accept and not be resistant to change initiatives.  Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to investigate and explore (1) how change agents create change readiness to prepare employees for organizational change towards sustainability and (2) how these efforts are perceived and experienced by employees.   Method: This thesis uses a qualitative approach with an exploratory nature where two companies (case studies) are included. In total, five organizational members were interviewed to collect empirical data: two change agents and three employees.    Conclusion: The findings display that change agents use two strategies for spreading the change message (persuasive communication and active participation) and unintentionally use the five cognitive components of change readiness (discrepancy, appropriateness, efficacy, principal support and personal valence) to prepare employees for organizational change towards sustainability. In turn, these efforts are perceived and experienced by employees as enhancing their level of change readiness.

Extant information systems literature has viewed systems acceptance and adoption from a technocentric viewpoint that emphasizes post-implementation intentions and attitudes - mainly usefulness and ease of use. Further, the effects of organizational hierarchy and work-environment factors have not been adequately factored largely because the single level user-level perspective has dominated. This dissertation addresses this gap by incorporating work environment factors while focusing on users’ preliminary, pre-implementation attitudes, perceptions, and intentions. It thus employs a multilevel perspective that allows for deeper insights into the interplay between workgroup- and individual-level phenomena. The objectives herein are, first, to illuminate change readiness as a plausible lens through which system acceptance and adoption can be viewed. Although change readiness is predominantly studied in organizational behavior, it has not yet been applied in information systems research. Consequently, it presents a promising approach to explore users’ responses to new systems. Secondly, this dissertation aims to empirically explore the multilevel nature of the change readiness constructs as envisaged in the framework of the antecedents and outcomes of change readiness. The research model is adapted from the multilevel framework of the antecedents and outcomes of change readiness as propounded by Rafferty et al. (2013). Appropriate hypotheses are developed and a survey instrument established to test those hypotheses. To ensure validity, preliminary investigations are conducted after an expert panel review. Subsequently, data was collected and analyzed to assess the extent to which the proposed model and hypotheses are empirically supported. Results and findings from this dissertation have theoretical and practical implications. Extant literature notes the dearth of research that theorizes outcomes of change readiness in the organizational behavior domain. This dissertation theorizes intention to adopt as an outcome of change readiness. Practice benefits from the context-based empirical results which (1) examine whether change readiness has any significant impact on system adoption and (2) the effect of workgroup change readiness on individual’s intention to adopt the system.

Background: There is a growing consensus that our world is facing substantial global challenges which can have devastating consequences for both planet and people. The call for change is clear and to shift the unsustainable trends, there must be an involvement by everyone, including business. However, there is a high risk of change initiative’s failure and one of the main reasons have considered to be employee resistance. One solution to change resistance is suggested to be change readiness, which has not received as much academic attention. The question that remains is how businesses, which account for major negative impacts on both planet and people, can create change readiness.    Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to explore how change readiness is created in the context of changes initiated to develop more sustainable businesses.   Method: This thesis is a qualitative study with an exploratory nature where 21 interviews, representing 13 companies were conducted in order to collect the empirical data. Further, this thesis involves a comparative study of multiple case studies. Conclusion: The findings show that businesses are creating readiness for change towards becoming more sustainable by establishing various components including discrepancy, appropriateness, efficacy, principal support, personal valence and the affective component. These components are conveyed through the accompanying strategies, persuasive communication and active participation. Furthermore, education was found to be a strong influencer of change readiness for sustainable development. Nevertheless, change readiness as a concept is not consciously used by any of the companies represented in this thesis.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between teachers&rsquo / intentional, emotional, and cognitive readiness for change and perceived faculty trust in colleagues, in principal, and in clients (students and parents).The study was designed as a correlational study and the participants comprised of 603 teachers working at primary and secondary level public schools selected from the four school districts in Ankara via cluster sampling. For the data collection, newly developed Readiness for Change Scale and Turkish adaptation of Omnibus T-Scale were utilized. Both descriptive and inferential statistics techniques (Canonical Correlation) were used for the data analysis. Confirmatory factor analysis for Readiness for Change Scale and Omnibus T-Scale were also performed within the scope of this study. Descriptive and inferential statistical analyses were performed by the software PASW Statistics 18 while the confirmatory factor analysis was performed by the software AMOS 4. The results of the study revealed that teachers&rsquo / readiness for change and perceived organizational trust were significantly correlated with each other in a way that intentional, emotional, and cognitive readiness for change were all associated with teachers&rsquo / readiness for change and contributed significantly in perceived organizational trust. Conversely, the results indicated that perceived faculty trust in colleagues, in principal, and in clients (students and parents) are all correlated with perceived organizational trust, and contributed significantly in teachers&rsquo / readiness for change. Consequently, the results of this study revealed that organizational trust is an essential internal context variable, which is correlated with teachers&rsquo / readiness for change. In this respect, the decision-making body of educational organizations, MONE, and schools should undertake necessary precautions to empower trust-based relationship within the teacher, principal and client (students and parents) triangulation for effective implementation and desired outcomes of the change interventions.

Given the dynamic and unpredictable nature of modern business environment, organizations need to always be ready for change. It is essential for employees to be able to accept change initiatives at workplace and contribute to them constructively.  The authors of this research suggest that due to the similarities in the nature of their implementation process, projects are the most appropriate vehicle for implementing change initiatives. Change initiatives implemented through projects take characteristics of planned change and exclude emergent changes from the scope the scope of this research. The initiating phase of a change project is devoted to creating readiness for change, which is the main focus of the research. The purpose of this study is to investigate the role of organizational culture in creating readiness for a change project. The research looks at the process of creating change readiness. This provides a ground for identifying the importance of organizational culture and its interconnection with change management efforts. Further, the dimensions of organizational culture are identified in the relation to change readiness. The literature suggests that these dimensions create change readiness. If organizational culture does not incorporate the identified dimensions of organizational culture, change management efforts should be applied to reinforce or create them. Eight interviews were conducted with change leaders/ project managers. Each interview was conducted in the context of a change project experienced by the interviewee, in order to gain an insight in to the influence of organizational culture on creating change readiness. The study finds organizational culture as being pivotal in creating change readiness. The insight taken from the empirical data allows differentiating between organizational culture as a whole and organizational culture created within the project context by change management efforts. It was found that organizational culture in its exclusivity, does not lead to readiness for a change project. Organizational culture rather builds a foundation for implementing change and creates readiness for a change project through mediation of change management efforts.

The online delivery of higher education courses and programs continues to expand across academic disciplines at colleges and universities. This expansion of online education has been precipitated by, among other things, (a) the rise in personal computer ownership, (b) the ease of access to the Internet, (c) the availability and continuous improvement in technology for the delivery of online courses, and (d) the increase in demand for online courses by both traditional and nontraditional students. However, the proliferation of online education has not been enthusiastically supported by all constituents of higher education. Specifically, some faculty members remain resistant to the shift to online course delivery. This article applies the Transtheoretical Model of Change to the process of gaining faculty support for, and involvement in, online learning. After briefly reviewing current issues in online education and making a case for its adoption, we describe sources of faculty resistance and offer recommendations for interventions that may be applied to transforming faculty resistance to support and eventually to active participation.

The online delivery of higher education courses and programs continues to expand across academic disciplines at colleges and universities. This expansion of online education has been precipitated by, among other things, (a) the rise in personal computer ownership, (b) the ease of access to the Internet, (c) the availability and continuous improvement in technology for the delivery of online courses, and (d) the increase in demand for online courses by both traditional and nontraditional students. However, the proliferation of online education has not been enthusiastically supported by all constituents of higher education. Specifically, some faculty members remain resistant to the shift to online course delivery. This article applies the Transtheoretical Model of Change to the process of gaining faculty support for, and involvement in, online learning. After briefly reviewing current issues in online education and making a case for its adoption, we describe sources of faculty resistance and offer recommendations for interventions that may be applied to transforming faculty resistance to support and eventually to active participation.

The present research investigates three current debates in commitment research. In order to contribute to these debates and to provide novel insights, the present research consistently applies a differentiated multi-target approach by distinguishing between employees’ commitments to the organization and their commitments to its constituents top management, supervisors, and workgroups. In addition, it considers recent developments in the conceptual refinement of commitment and consistently aims to strongly build on established basic theoretical foundations of social psychology as well as on incorporating methodological advancements. The first study investigated the debated relationship between values and commitment. Specifically, it compared the relevance of employee values, commitment target values, and of their congruence for employee’s multiple commitments. Results indicate that targets’ values are most important for commitment, especially the targets’ people-centered values. In contrast, value congruence between targets and employees appears to play a less important role than implied in much previous research. The second study investigated the debated relationship between commitments and employees’ readiness for change. Again applying a multi-target perspective, results showed that the association was only positive when the different commitment targets were perceived to advocate changes. If the target’s change advocacy was low, the association between commitment and change readiness disappeared or even turned negative. Finally, the third study investigated the debated relationship between global commitment to the organization and specific commitments to its constituents. This research question again implied the use of a multitarget perspective and was investigated in a multi-cohort cross-lagged panel design to understand the influences between commitments. Results indicate that global commitment influences the specific commitments of low-tenured employees; however, in medium- and high-tenured employees the different commitments grow independent of each other. Taken together, the studies demonstrate that reassessing the debated associations with higher differentiation and a multi-target perspective can contribute to explaining the mixed findings in previous research. Moreover, moderations and conditions identified in the present research shed more light onto the processes that underlie commitment development and effects. Most importantly, the present research strongly encourages researchers and practitioners to consider the multiple targets of commitment and their values and goals in order to better understand and manage employee commitment.