1. INTRODUCTION Change is undoubtedly unavoidable for today’s organizations and likely to appear in increasing rates in the future (Tetenbaum, 1998, Armenakis & Harris, 2009). Therefore it is not surprising that organizational research has addressed this topic repeatedly over the last decades, trying to find ways that help organizations in overcoming the obstacles during the change process. Still, looking at the success rate of organizational change reveals a sad picture. In 2000, Beer and Nohria estimated that out of all change initiatives, 70% are bound to fail, thereby mostly attributing failure to the rush, in which organizations want to make change happen. A more recent study by McKinsey on a global scale shows, however, that even though the average planning time was six month, again only 30% considered the change to be a success (Meaney & Pung, 2008; Armenakis et al.2009). Klein and Sorra (1996) argue that, in the context of innovation implementation, the organizational climate and the fit to the employee’s values play a major role in the implementation’s effectiveness. This leads to the assumption that the individual is a vital component of successfully organizing change, a theory that has gained increasing attention in recent literature (Shin, Taylor, & Seo, 2012). Findings in this field point to the conclusion that the employee “is a key to the successful …show more content…
IMPORTANT DEFINITIONS AND CONCEPTS In order to find out, whether resilience has an effect on coping with and supporting future organizational change, I have to define the concepts of change and resilience. This means that I will at first evaluate whether the merger qualifies as organizational change and therefore a professional challenge that has an impact on resilience. Additionally, I have to take a look at what makes individuals supportive or averse when confronted with change and if this can be linked to the outcomes of my research. 2.1. Organizational change as professional