Bio:

Rouven Kanitz is Professor and Head of the Institute of Leadership and Strategic Change (ILSC). Prior to joining WU Vienna, he served as Assistant Professor of Organizational Change at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, and held a postdoctoral position at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, where he also earned his Doctoral Degree. Before entering academia, Rouven worked in the medical technology industry and in management consultancy, gaining experience with strategic change projects across a wide range of organizations.

His teaching and research focus on helping leaders understand and navigate change in organizations and society. He enjoys engaging with the scholarly community studying organizational change at the intersection of leadership, strategy, and psychology. His work has been published in academic journals such as the Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Management, Journal of International Business Studies, and Organization Science.

Link to personal website

Abstract:

How employees respond to organizational change is critical to the success of change initiatives. Scholars from diverse research communities have developed a wide range of theories to explain why some employees support while others resist change. However, making sense of this theoretical diversity remains a key challenge for researchers aiming to advance both theory and practice across research communities. In the first part of my talk, I will present a current review paper based on 215 empirical articles published. Through this review, we identified eight overarching theoretical themes that structure existing explanations: (1) motivational–attitudinal, (2) relational, (3) sensemaking and discourse, (4) work environment, (5) emotion, (6) morality and justice, (7) individual characteristics, and (8) learning. These themes provide a pluralistic map of the field’s theoretical landscape, making visible the distinct perspectives and explanatory logics that characterize different research communities. Building on this framework, we outline how scholars can use our framework to advance research in key areas. Building on this foundation, the second part of the talk turns to an empirical working paper in which we examine one of the central underdeveloped themes emerging from our review: the temporal dynamics of responses to organizational change. Drawing on a seven-wave longitudinal study conducted over 13 months in an organization undergoing large-scale restructuring, we analyze employees’ affective trajectories using latent growth curve modeling. Our findings show that both positive and negative affect follow nonlinear trajectories. Moreover, employees differ in their affective response patterns, and pre-change organizational identification predicts these inter-individual differences. Finally, elements of positive and negative affect trajectories are linked to outcomes such as change support and turnover intentions in the later stabilization phase. Taken together, these findings challenge some assumptions of popularized universal ‘change curve’ models.