How the Change Recipients’ Temporal Experiences Influence Planned Organizational Change

Implementing planned organizational change (POC) often requires organizational members to accept new practices. Scant empirical research has investigated how members navigate the temporal dimensions of practice adoption during change implementation when the temporal need for continuity is prevalent. Based on a real-time, longitudinal study, we investigated how change recipients experienced and responded to the temporal tensions the implementation of a change initiative elicited within a multi-divisional engineering company. Our analysis revealed that the ways in which employee (as change recipients and practice adopters) responded to the reallocation of their time – required adopt the new practice– reflected different ways in which they (and their organization) valued time in economic and symbolic terms. Tensions among the temporal demands of change implementation and the valuation of time explain variations in the motives allocating their worktime to the initiative, and more or less influenced change implementation.