A Systematic Literature Review on Readiness for Change in Business Contexts

Abstract

Change in business organizations often leads to suffering individuals. For organizations it remains difficult to find guidance on how to reduce this pain. Readiness for Change (RfC) in business contexts is a topic that is been gaining importance during the last decade, thus the purpose of this paper is to provide a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) on this topic, by collecting and listing all antecedents of RfC. Starting with data collected from the Web of Science, a search protocol, validated by two independent researchers, is applied. This procedure returned 79 articles which are analyzed per year, journal, author, country, and area. The review articles are exported to NVivo for full content analysis and coding. This article presents a structured categorization of the published reviewed papers and an overview of all antecedents of RfC. It also includes empirical evidence on the state-of-the-art in RfC including a list of antecedents of change. One key antecedent of RfC recognized is knowledge transfer. This work has policy-setting implications for understanding the RfC process and its antecedents. It can also help organizations prepare, anticipate, and minimize the impact of negative organizational change.