The Field Guide › Paper
Most research on organisational change is written from the perspective of the people who initiate it. Bartunek and colleagues deliberately invert that, and study the change recipients, the people who have to live inside an intervention that someone else decided on. Their setting is a shared governance initiative in a hospital, and their subject is how the nurses on the receiving end made sense of it: the meanings they ascribed to the change, the emotions it produced in them, and their own reckoning of what they had gained and lost by it. The findings are quietly pointed. Recipients' assessments were not a simple function of the change's objective merits but of their interpretation of it, and of the feelings that interpretation carried, with gains linked to favourable meanings and pleasant emotions and losses to the reverse. Crucially, two things predicted the experience of gain: being in a unit where the change was actually implemented rather than merely announced, and participating in the initiative oneself. Having a hand in the thing done to you changes what it is. For a corpus about psychological safety this fills a real gap. The literature is dominated by accounts of what leaders can do to create safety, and is comparatively thin on the phenomenology of being on the receiving end of what leaders do, which is where most people in most organisations actually stand. The paper supplies exactly that view, and it supports the argument, made elsewhere in this map on more political grounds, that participation is not a nicety appended to change but part of what determines whether people experience it as something done with them or to them, and therefore whether they will speak candidly about it afterwards. Its limits are those of a single-site study in one hospital, with a specific intervention and a professional group whose relationship to voice is distinctive, so the mechanisms travel further than the magnitudes do. (Text drawn from the 2006 Journal of Applied Behavioral Science paper, 42(2), pp. 182-206.)