How tensions in valorizing time influence planned organizational change

Despite the importance of organizational members’ worktime for the implementation of organizational change, studies of how organizational members’ worktime is valued and reallocated during change remain rare. To illuminate this important but underexplored issue, we investigated how members responded to the time requirements of a change initiative in a multidivisional engineering company. Our analysis revealed that the ways in which members responded to the reallocation of their time – required to implement organizational change – reflected the different ways in which they (and their organization) valued the reallocated time. In particular, three types of value became salient: economic value, social-symbolic value, and personal-symbolic value. Tensions among the time requirements and these three types of values explain variation in the degree to which members felt energized and allocated their worktime to the initiative, and more or less actively resisted the process. This variation significantly influenced the evolution of planned organizational change, in particular its time-delivery goals and pace. Our theoretical insights have significant implications for understanding the valuation and use of organizational members’ worktime during a planned change process.