Organizational Change Adoption Within the AEC Industry: Change Management Practices and Employee Reactions to Change

In today's rapidly evolving market, effective organizational change adoption has become a core competency for architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) firms to maintain their competitive advantage. Firms that more effectively manage organizational change can position themselves as early adopters and are able to expend fewer resources in making the transition. On the topic of organizational change adoption, previous studies within the AEC industry are generally limited to datasets of a single or a small number of organizational change initiatives. To address this gap, this study has collected a dataset of 237 unique organizational change initiative within separate AEC firms. There were several research objectives of this study. First, leading change management strategies and their relationship with successful change adoption in AEC firms was investigated. The change management strategies documented within this study were identified from the organizational behavior literature, which contributed an interdisciplinary approach to the study. Second, this study sought to measure how AEC employee firms react to the implementation of organizational changes in their companies. This contributes an understanding of the extent that the AEC industry reacts in a favorable (or unfavorable) manner towards organizational change initiatives in comparison with other industry sectors. Finally, an analysis was conducted to determine whether employee reactions moderates the effect between effective change management practices and successful change adoption. Overall contributions of this study include the collection of a global dataset, which is meaningful to the AEC literature that has primarily consisted of case-based research methods and limited sample sizes. This study contributes practical change management practices for industry professionals to more effectively manage the adoption of change within their companies. Another contribution is that the employees within the AEC industry display an overall favorable response to organizational change that is comparable with 4 other industry sectors. This is encouraging given this study's finding that AEC firms who more effectively fostered favorable employee reactions were able to achieve greater success in change adoption.