Being “in the Know”: the Effectiveness of Organizational Instruments in Enhancing Employees’ Attention and Affective Commitment to Major Change

For a firm’s change initiative to succeed, its employees must be committed to its implementation. Yet managers struggle to attain or enhance this commitment, particularly in the case of a major change program. Building on the attention-based view and a 2019 survey of employees of a leading German multinational corporation that had recently implemented a major change program, we examine how three organizational instruments influence employees’ attention, and thereby their affective commitment to change: information about the change initiative, participation in its implementation, and financial benefit from its outcome. While each organizational instrument improves employees’ affective commitment to change, we find that information, which allows employees to be “in the know”, has by far the greatest effect. Our observation that the organizational instrument demanding the fewest resources from management seems the most effective suggests that more resources do not always lead to better results, as the attention-based view often assumes.