Change recipients’ attitudes toward change: a review study

This paper reviewed the literature on attitudes toward change. Despite the increased interest into this topic, our review of 64 journal articles (1993-2007) indicates that the field is lacking robust theoretical frameworks. The shortage of meta-theories entailed the current situation where scholars are continuously mixing up meanings, labels and definitions of related but basically different constructs. To avoid further contributing to this conceptual fuzziness, we advocate that the boundaries of research into people’s attitudes toward change should be clearly delineated. Therefore, we highlight how the umbrella concept ‘attitudes toward change,’ is positioned in the OC literature. This is done by looking at four major theoretical perspectives on change: (1) the nature of change, (2) the level of change, (3) the underlying view of human function, and (4) the research perspective. By means of facet analysis we analyzed nine attitude related concepts along the four theoretical lenses used to describe the boundaries of attitudes toward change. We hope that the observations and conclusions drawn from this study will incite other scholars to do research that deals with the shortcomings that were identified.