Abstract
Shaul Oreg contributes to contemporary thinking in organizational change research in significant ways. In his early research, Shaul established the construct of dispositional resistance to change, which captures affective, cognitive, and behavioral aspects of individuals’ personal orientation toward change. Building on this work, Shaul shows that dispositional resistance to change predicts reactions to specific change, which are subsequently related to individual- and work-related outcomes. Overall, his research provides an in-depth view of reactions to change and an integrative approach to understanding the antecedents and consequences of these reactions. Through the holistic approach that characterizes his research, Shaul is able to uncover nuances at play in the interactions between individual and contextual factors and, thus, contributes to a better understanding of the complexity involved in recipients’ responses to change. This chapter describes Shaul’s personal background and motivation for this line of research, discusses the key contributions of his research and how it impacted other scholars, and outlines his future research trajectory.
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Further Reading
Oreg, S. (2003). Resistance to change: Developing an individual differences measure. Journal of Applied Psychology, 88(4), 680. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.88.4.680.
Oreg, S. (2006). Personality, context, and resistance to organizational change. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 15(1), 73–101. https://doi.org/10.1080/13594320500451247.
Oreg, S., Bartunek, J., Lee, G., & Do, B. (2018). An affect-based model of recipients’ responses to organizational change events. Academy of Management Review, 43(1), 65–86. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2014.0335.
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Walk, M. (2021). Oreg, Shaul: Disentangling the Complexity of Recipients’ Responses to Change. In: Szabla, D.B. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Organizational Change Thinkers. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38324-4_86
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