Encouraging employees’ active feedback & participation when rolling out major changes

When managers and other leaders of organizational change (change agents) introduce and implement major changes, responses from other members of the organization can fall along both passive-active and positive-negative dimensions. Change agents usually treat positive (approving) responses as good and negative (disapproving) responses as bad. They often ignore the passive-active dimension—that is, the degree of energy with which organizational members affected by change (change recipients) respond to the initiative. We suggest that change agents instead focus more on this passive-active dimension and work to elicit active responses to change even when these responses are negative, because active responses can lead to valuable improvements in the initiative. We provide three recommendations for assisting organizational leaders in encouraging and learning from the active feedback of change recipients.