Managing Successful Change Efforts in the Public Sector: An Employee’s Readiness for Change Perspective

• Author: Imran Hameed,Abdul Karim Khan,Ghulam Ali Arain,Meghna Sabharwal,Irfan Hameed
• DOI: 10.1177/0734371X17729869
• Date: 01 September 2019
• Published date: 01 September 2019
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0734371X17729869

Review of Public Personnel Administration

2019, Vol. 39(3) 398 –421

© The Author(s) 2017

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DOI: 10.1177/0734371X17729869

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Article

Managing Successful Change

Efforts in the Public Sector:

An Employee’s Readiness for

Change Perspective

Imran Hameed1, Abdul Karim Khan2,

Meghna Sabharwal3, Ghulam Ali Arain4,

and Irfan Hameed5

Abstract

This study brings together public and private sector research on change management

to highlight the important role of public servants as recipients of change, which is

underemphasized in the public management literature. In doing so, we identify and

operationalize factors of managing successful change—involved communication

and change recipients’ beliefs. The effect of involved communication on developing

employees’ readiness for change is explored. Data were collected from public sector

research and development organizations in Pakistan. The results of the structural

equation modeling support the positive role of involved communication in developing

employees’ readiness for change. Employees’ organizational identification and change

recipients’ beliefs also exhibit a significant mediating role in the above-stated relationship.

This study significantly contributes to the existing literature of change management in

the public sector by focusing on employees as key players in an organization’s change

process. Practical implications and future research directions are also discussed.

Keywords

involved communication, change recipients’ beliefs, readiness for change, organizational

identification

1The University of Lahore, Pakistan

2United Arab Emirates University, Al Ain, UAE

3The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, USA

4Effat University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

5Iqra University, Karachi, Pakistan

Corresponding Author:

Abdul Karim Khan, Assistant Professor, College of Business and Economics, Office # 2051, UAE

University, Al-Ain, UAE.

Email: abdul.karim@uaeu.ac.ae

729869ROPXXX10.1177/0734371X17729869Review of Public Personnel AdministrationHameed et al.

research-article2017

Hameed et al. 399

Change in public sector organizations is on the rise in the contemporary world. This

change is driven by the fluctuating financial markets (Hendriks & Tops, 2003), legisla-

tion, information technology (Dunleavy, Margetts, Bastow, & Tinkler, 2006), safety

standards (Thomas, 2006), and central government decisions (Kuipers et al., 2014).

During the last three decades, these changes have been instituted by many govern-

ments around the globe through public administration reforms to enhance the effi-

ciency and effectiveness of public services (García-Morales, Jiménez-Barrionuevo, &

Gutiérrez-Gutiérrez, 2012). Most of these reforms are inspired by new public manage-

ment (NPM) with the goal of making public organizations more flexible and adaptive

(García-Morales et al., 2012) similar to their private sector counterparts.

One of the major factors leading to failure of public sector change initiatives is

related to the behavioral resistance by the civil servants (Kuipers et al., 2014).

Resistance to change is a typical problem that public sector organizations have to deal

with due to job security and other legal protections being enjoyed by the employees,

who are often the recipients of change (Devos & Bouckenooghe, 2006). Existing pub-

lic management literature offers very limited suggestions to overcome resistance to

change behavior. Thus, the main objective of this study is to explore factors that

account for readiness for change behavior—the opposite of resistance behavior. To

answer this question, we build upon the factors identified by Armenakis, Harris, and

Feild (1999) which we explain in the “Literature Review” section.

While answering our main question, another objective of the current study is to

investigate the underlying mechanisms through which employees can move toward a

readiness for change mode. The current literature has proposed several mechanisms of

dealing with resistance such as public service motivation (Campbell & Im, 2015),

organizational commitment (Meyer, Stanley, Herscovitch, & Topolnytsky, 2002), and

organizational identification (Hameed, Roques, & Ali Arain, 2013). A careful analysis

of the public organization literature reveals that the concept of public servants’ identi-

fication with an organization and change beliefs has been given very little attention,

whereas more focus has been given in contemporary management research during the

last decade (e.g., Ashforth, Harrison, & Corley, 2008; Hameed et al., 2013).

This current study contributes to the body of public sector change research in three

ways. First, it integrates the literature on public and private sector organizations and

offers a new framework for readiness for change behavior among public sector

employees. Second, this study operationalizes factors for managing organizational

change in actual field research by providing empirical evidence of the proposed rela-

tionships between these factors and employees’ readiness for change. Third, it enriches

the literature by integrating the concept of organizational identification and change

beliefs as mediating mechanisms between readiness for change-enhancing interven-

tions and actual readiness for change.

Literature Review

Changes in the business world during the last decade—primarily due to the economic

downturn, technological advancements, employee shortages, and downsizing—have