2081: Fostering Creative Support for Change: Insights from Temporal Shifts in Employee Benefit Appraisals (16140)

Creative support for change—the extent to which employees actively bring in ideas to solve problems to facilitate change initiatives—can greatly contribute to the effectiveness of organizational change efforts. Despite organizational change being an inherently dynamic phenomenon, the study of employee change support has taken a largely static view with little attention to the role of temporal development in responses to change. Integrating appraisal theory and social judgment theory, we provide a unique perspective and theorize the varied impact of shifts (increase vs. decrease) and stability (consistently high vs. low) in work-related benefits appraisals on creative support for change. We use two-wave employee survey data from two data collections within one technology firm working on a cultural change initiative. In Study 1 (n = 267), we use cross-level polynomial regression and find that shifts compared to stability in appraisals of work-related benefits of change over time (Time 1 to 2) matter for later creative support for change. In Study 2 (n = 145), we replicate a similar pattern of shifting appraisals impacting creative support. Moreover, we leverage a quasi-experimental design and find that participating in a peer-exchange intervention (compared to not) is associated with increasing benefit appraisals over time—showing that such interventions can facilitate positive shifts in change appraisals. Our work highlights the important role of temporal shifts in appraisals for creative change support and provides insights into what organizations can do to foster it.

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