The Impact of Organizational Change on Employee Morale

Change is often difficult for large companies and individual employees. Experiencing multiple changes in a short time period may impact an employee’s sense of stability and commitment to a company. We determined the number of manager changes, as a proxy for organizational change, during a 10-month period and compared employee survey scores for employees experiencing no change to those experiencing one or more changes. We found that employees who experienced one change in a 10- month period had less favorable survey responses than employees experiencing no changes during the same time period. While our findings were statistically significant, the effect sizes were relatively small. Our findings may be at least partially explained by the demographics of our sample, who were relatively older and longer-tenured employees. This group of employees might be more accustomed to experiencing multiple manager changes in a short period of time and therefore less vulnerable to the undesirable effects of organizational...