Are they loyal rebels? Change recipients’ role taking reflected in storied experiences

Successful organizational change requires substantial efforts from both the leaders and recipients of change. After a long tradition of focusing on change leaders, academics now increasingly focus on the role of change recipients. The current literature on change recipients, however, offers mostly binary categorizations of their responses (e.g., supportive vs unsupportive) obtained from questionnaires. Such an approach cannot reveal how events can cause shifts in change recipients’ role taking during a change initiative. To better capture such complexity, we adopted a narrative approach where 80 informants were asked to tell the retrospective story of their experience of, and role taking in, a top-down change initiative as if they were crafting chapters of a book. Based on analysis of this data, we induced five composite narratives (i.e., Loyal Rebel-, Redeemed Recipient-, Easy-going Optimist-, Wannabe Hero-, and Bystander-Journey), each of which represent typical dynamics of momentary role taking by change recipients during a change initiative. This study additionally highlights how experiences of top-down change initiatives are (1) diverse and (2) variable yet seem grounded in institutionalized beliefs. Moreover, from two induced dilemmas of role taking, we developed a framework that helps interpret five examples of variation and shifts in role taking processes.