Understanding collective change attitudes: A diversity and faultline perspective

Although implementing organizational change involves attitudinal support from both individuals and groups, researchers typically examine individual change attitudes as key drivers of change success. In this paper, we focus on collective change attitudes – defined as a group's overall evaluation of a proposed organizational change – to challenge and extend this developing construct. To do so, we adopt a diversity and faultline perspective to identify four distinct patterns of collective change attitudes: convergent, minority belief, fragmented, and bimodal patterns. We offer a theoretical model that explains the influence of group faultlines and change event characteristics on the emergence of the four patterns of collective change attitudes and their temporal trajectories over time. In addition, we theorize the influence of collective change attitudes on change implementation effectiveness. Our work offers implications for research and practice in organizational change and human resource management. • We identify distinct patterns and temporal trajectories of collective change attitudes • Organizational change and group characteristics explain the emergence of collective change attitude patterns and trajectories • We theorize the influence of collective change attitudes on change implementation effectiveness