How the Change Recipients’ Temporal Experiences Influence Planned Organizational Change

Scant empirical research has investigated how change recipients navigate the temporal dimensions of planned organizational change during 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 variations in how change recipients reallocated their work time to the initiative reflected their perceived incongruence between the organization’s and the change initiative’s temporal controls. The gradual realization of this incongruence triggered conflict among change recipients in how they valued and allocated work time to change implementation. In turn, high variance in change recipients’ time allocation actions caused change implementation delays and lack of synchronization. Our study contributes to the planned change literature by revealing the temporal underpinnings of change recipients’ responses to change implementation.