Readiness for Change: A Literature Review

The advancement in market environment complexities has led to the rise of significant awareness amongst the organisations on the need for change. This paper thus reviews these employees' readiness for change within the organisation, where readiness is defined as the organisational members' belief, attitudes and intentions regarding the extent to which changes are needed and the organisations' capacity to successfully make those changes. It is crucial for an organisation to understand the employees' readiness for the organisational change instead of focusing merely on resistance to change since it can be more useful for implementing effective human resource practices and organisation development interventions. Therefore, via content analysis, the concept of individual readiness for organisational change as well as its relationship with the four categories of antecedents, which are internal context, change-specific content, process and individual attributes are critically reviewed. This paper also highlights some of the issues on readiness for change and research areas that can be considered for future studies. It is hoped that this paper can be an eye-opener for the organisations in Malaysia to start embarking on the change management amongst their employees towards becoming a globally competitive nation by 2020.