Understanding and managing cynicism about organizational change

Academy of Management Executive

Volumn 11, Issue 1, 1997, Pages 48-57

  Reichers, Arnon E ^a   Wanous, John P ^a   Austin, James T ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0003153131     PISSN: 10795545     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5465/ame.1997.9707100659     Document Type: Article

References (19)

1. John Kotter has written an interesting article entitled "Leading change' Why transformation efforts fail," that highlights the pattern that many changes exhibit. Harvard Business Review, 59-67, 1995.
2. Kotter, J.P. and Schlesinger, L.A. (1979). Choosing strategies for change, Harvard Business Review, 106-113.
3. Kanter, D.L. and Mirvis, P.H. (1989). The cynical Americans: Living and walking in an age of discontent and disillusion. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
4. Brooks, S.M. and Vance, R.J. (1991) Organizational cynicism: Initial investigation of α construct. Unpublished manuscript, the Ohio State University.
5. Niederhoffer, A. (1967). Behind the shield: The police in urban society. Garden City, NJ: Anchor.
6. Newsweek, Feb. 26, 1996.
7. The interested reader is directed to Jones, E.E. & Davis, K.E. (1965). From acts to dispositions: The attribution process in person perception. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 2). New York: Academic Press for an extensive treatment of attribution theory.
8. McGuire, W.J. (1985). Attitudes and Attitude Change. In G. Lindzey and E. Aronson (Eds.) The handbook of social psychology, third ed. New York: Random House.
9. Katz, D. (1967). The functional approach to the study of attitudes. In M. Fishbein (Ed.), Headings in attitude theory and measurement. New York: Wiley.
10. Reichers, A.E. (1987). A symbolic interactionist perspective on newcomer socialization rates. Academy of Management Review, 12, 278-287;
11. Zalesny, M.D. & Ford, J.K. (1990). Extending the social information processing perspective: New links to attitudes, behaviors, and perceptions, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 47, 205-246.
12. Confirmatory factor analysis of the cynicism scale items shown in Figure 1 was conducted using the RAMONA program developed by Browne & Mels (1993, The Ohio State University).
13. Louis, M.R. (1980). Surprise and sense making: What newcomers experience in entering unfamiliar organizational settings, Administrative Science Quarterly, 25, 226-251.
14. Two schools of thought on attitude change are best represented by Hovland and his colleagues on the one hand (Hovland, C.I., Janis, I.L. & Kelly, H.H. (1953) Communication and persuasion. New Haven: Yale University Press.)
15. and Petty and his colleagues on the other (Petty, R.E. & Cacioppo, J.T. (1986). Communication and persuasion: Central and peripheral routes to attitude change. New York: Springer-Verlag.).
16. Lewicki and Bunker have written a highly-readable and informative chapter on various kinds of trust, their development and decline. See Lewicki, R.J. & Bunker, B.B. (1995) Trust in relationships: A model of trust development and decline, in J. Rubin and B.B. Bunker (Eds.), Conflict, Cooperation, & Justice, San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 1995.
17. Kouzes and Posner have written extensively about leadership for change for the practitioner audience. See their most recent work: Kouzes, J.M. & Posner, B.Z. (1993) Credibility. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass for a highly recommended book.
18. Both Denise Rousseau and John Wanous have made important contributions to what is known about the effects of broken psychological contracts (Rousseau) and unmet expectations (Wanous). See Rousseau, D.M. (1995) Psychological Contracts in Organizations: Understanding Written and Unwritten Agreements, Thousand Oaks, California, Sage Publications
19. and Wanous, J.P. (1992) Organizational entry: flecruifmenf selection, orientation and socialization of newcomers, Second ed. New York: Addison Wesley.