Individual-level change readiness in middle management

Abstract

Organisations are facing increasingly challenging landscapes, one of the most recent being the Covid-19 pandemic. This has placed pressure on organisations to adapt and be agile in response to the change in the external and internal environments that they operate in. The constant change in organisational landscapes has driven organisations to change to remain competitive, improve their business process, and adopt new methods of doing ordinary business. This has emphasized that organisations be ready for change when it happens. Readiness takes place on two levels, namely organisational readiness and individual level readiness. Though it is important for organisations to demonstrate high readiness levels, the concept is often misunderstood and fails to address a fundamental cause of failure in organisational change initiatives called resistance. In the centre of the organisational structure, middle managers find themselves responsible for instituting change initiatives and are also subject to the change themselves. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to uncover the readiness levels of middle-level managers across three industries to determine their overall readiness levels in response to change. The study followed a quantitative approach to gain a deeper insight into the readiness levels of middle-level managers. A quantitative study was conducted, and the findings indicated that there were high overall levels of individual-level readiness in middle management but that there was no significant relationship between the middle management readiness levels of individuals and the industry they worked in.