Wavering Between Readiness and Resistance: How Do Organizational Members in a Swedish Municipality Respond to an Ambiguous Change Initiative?

We aim to generate new knowledge about the responses of organizational members facing ambiguous change initiatives (i.e. initiatives not only featuring unclear outcomes after being launched, but also unclear goals, resources and interventions before being launched). Ambiguous change initiatives have often been studied throughout industries where ad hoc decisions abound, whereas such initiatives have seldom been studied within centralized and bureaucratic organizations where ex ante routines and procedures instead abound. This abundance of routines and procedures can make ambiguous change initiatives particularly difficult to implement. Utilizing rich qualitative data from a municipal care unit in Sweden where managers launched an ambiguous change initiative depending on bottom-up implementation efforts, we find that few employees were fully ready for or fully resistant to the initiative; instead, most of them responded by dynamically wavering between readying and resisting. Wavering employees ascribed ambivalent meanings to what they regarded as a highly agreeable – yet also a loosely formulated and, in terms of routines and procedures, potentially inconceivable – initiative. Our findings advance extant change management literature by highlighting how wavering moves beyond a traditional readiness-or-resistance dichotomy, and by foregrounding how ambiguous change initiatives can become especially significant sources of wavering within centralized and bureaucratic organizations.