Twenty-third International Conference on Knowledge, Culture, and Change in Organizations

Abstract

Grounded in a process philosophical approach, this paper concerns change as an everyday phenomenon. When employees and leaders are asked what organizational changes are the most distinctive and stressful, this empirical study shows that they point at micro changes. Thus, changes that are part of everyday activities in the organization are the ones they point out. Examples are physical moves such as getting a new desk or office. Or social changes such as getting new colleagues or a new leader. The argument is that to support and ensure that employees and leaders thrive in organizations, we need a new change vocabulary, moving away from more classic change terms such as change management and change resistance to, for example, change facilitation. By this, the paper argues that micro changes matter more to employees than recent organizational transformation.