The Effects of Opinion Leaders and Change Messages on Organization Member Change Attitudes: A Field Experiment

Abstract

The extent to which three change introduction strategies (i.e., opinion leadership, edict, and change message) influenced readiness for change were tested at four locations as part of a quasi-field experiment with three groups receiving an enriched change message and one control group. Readiness was measured before and after change implementation where it was hypothesized that change readiness would be most improved within the groups that heard the most persuasive and rich change messages. These hypotheses were not supported and data indicated that the differing treatments were never received by the majority of the change recipients, rendering the results of the experiment questionable. Despite this, the findings provide a solid, theoretically grounded framework that can guide future projects.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Mar 01, 2010
Accession Number
ADA522355

Entities

People

  • Ryan L. Leblanc

Organizations

  • Air Force Institute of Technology

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Biomedical
  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Force
  • Applied Psychology
  • Behavioral Sciences
  • Civil Engineering
  • Computers
  • Control Systems
  • Customer Services
  • Education
  • Engineering
  • Fighter Aircraft
  • Group Dynamics
  • Hypotheses
  • Leadership
  • Psychology
  • Training
  • United States
  • War Colleges

Fields of Study

  • Psychology

Readers

  • Agent-Based Social Robotics and Mobile-Assisted Learning in Virtual Environments.
  • Organizational Psychology.
  • Systems Analysis and Design