Too often, “change readiness” gets treated as a quick pre-flight checklist: assess attitudes, confirm sponsorship, deliver communications, then launch. This article argues that readiness is better understood at the intersection of organizational psychology and management theory, where the “soft” realities of belief, emotion, and motivation meet the “hard” realities of structure, strategy, systems, and resources. When you integrate both lenses, readiness stops looking like a static prerequisite and starts looking like a dynamic, multilevel capability that develops (or erodes) over time.

The combination of organizational psychology and management theory significantly enhances our understanding of organizational change readiness by moving beyond siloed disciplinary approaches toward integrated perspectives that capture the complexity of change phenomena. This integration reveals change readiness not as a simple precondition, but as a complex, multilevel phenomenon that is simultaneously an individual psychological state and an organizational capability.

The integration of organizational psychology and management theory provides several distinctive insights that transcend single-discipline views. Organizational psychology contributes to understanding the individual and group psychological processes (the “soft elements”) related to change, such as beliefs, attitudes, intentions, motivation, and emotional responses. Management theory, on the other hand, provides perspectives on the structural, strategic, and process-oriented aspects of organizational functioning (the “hard elements”), including strategy, structure, systems, resources, and communication channels. Integrating these two reveals that change readiness cannot be reduced to either dimension alone; it is simultaneously a psychological state and a structural capability.

The concept of change readiness has undergone a significant conceptual evolution over several decades, moving from a simplistic prerequisite state to a complex, dynamic, and multilevel capability that requires cross-disciplinary theoretical synthesis.

Early Conceptualizations

In the early stages of its development, the concept of change readiness was heavily influenced by Kurt Lewin’s (1947) force field analysis and his three-step change model. During this time, conceptualizations focused primarily on “unfreezing“ as the necessary prerequisite for organizational change.

Defining Readiness

By the 1990s, scholars began to distinguish readiness for change as a distinct concept from resistance to change. Armenakis et al. (1993) provided a foundational definition, conceptualizing readiness as a cognitive precursor to behaviors that would either support or resist a change effort. The initial phase of cross-disciplinary work during the 1990s and early 2000s involved importing concepts from organizational psychology into management frameworks. However, these efforts lacked substantial theoretical integration, often treating psychological factors as additions to primarily structural models rather than equal theoretical components.

Multilevel and Integrated Models

The 2000s witnessed a shift toward more comprehensive and integrated views of the concept. Scholars, such as Weiner (2009), began building on earlier foundations to develop multi-level conceptualizations of change readiness, encompassing individual, group, and organizational factors. The mid-2000s marked a more deliberate attempt at theoretical integration. Holt et al. (2007) created an influential integrated model that explicitly combined psychological factors (like beliefs, attitudes, and intentions) with contextual factors (like organizational culture, leadership support, and structural flexibility). Frameworks during this period began positioning psychological and structural dimensions as complementary rather than competing explanations.

Theoretical Synthesis

In the most recent phase, the concept has evolved significantly toward a deeper theoretical synthesis. Researchers have moved beyond the idea of readiness as a static state that must be achieved before change. Instead, it is increasingly viewed as a dynamic capability that organizations can continuously develop over time (Heckmann et al., 2016; Jones & Van de Ven, 2016). This recent phase focuses on genuine theoretical synthesis aimed at explaining the mechanisms through which psychological and structural elements interact.

Multilevel frameworks, such as Rafferty et al.’s (2013) model, explicitly integrate psychological perspectives (cognitive, emotional, and intentional dimensions) with management perspectives (structural enablers and constraints). This sophisticated integration conceptualizes readiness as emerging from complex interactions between psychological and structural domains (Wee and Taylor, 2018).

Thus, the readiness concept evolved from viewing “unfreezing” as the primary requirement to recognizing readiness as a multi-dimensional psychological precursor, and finally, to understanding it as a dynamic, multilevel capability resulting from the continuous and complex interaction and alignment between an organization’s hard (structural) and soft (psychological) elements.

Readiness is increasingly viewed not as a static state achieved before change, but as a dynamic capability that organizations can develop over time. This capability refers to the capacity of an organization and its members to engage with and adapt to change initiatives successfully. The central insight from integrating the psychological and structural perspectives is that change readiness cannot be reduced to either dimension alone.

Optimal readiness is achieved when psychological states (motivation, commitment) align with structural capabilities (resources, processes). Interventions that target only psychological factors or only structural factors often fail to produce sustainable readiness. This integrated view confirms that change is inherently multilevel, existing simultaneously at individual, group, and organizational levels, and is influenced by both psychological development and structural evolution.

Sources:

Armenakis, A. A., Harris, S. G., & Mossholder, K. W. (1993), “Creating readiness for organizational change”, Human Relations, 46(6), 681-703.

Holt, D. T., Armenakis, A. A., Feild, H. S., & Harris, S. G. (2007), “Readiness for organizational change: The systematic development of a scale”, The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 43(2), 232-255.

Lewin, K. (1947), “Frontiers in group dynamics: Concept, method, and reality in social science; social equilibria and social change”, Human Relations, 1(1), 5-41.

Rafferty, A. E., Jimmieson, N. L., & Armenakis, A. A. (2013), “Change readiness: A multilevel review”, Journal of Management, 39(1), 110-135.

Wee, E. X., & Taylor, M. S. (2018), “Attention to change: A multilevel theory on the process of emergent continuous organizational change”, Journal of Applied Psychology, 103(1), 1-13.

Weiner, B. J. (2009), “A theory of organizational readiness for change”, Implementation Science, 4(1), 67.