Perception is Reality: Employee Task Performance During Organizational Change

Organizational change disrupts routines and standard ways of executing tasks, precipitating an interpretive process in which change recipients make sense of how to function in this uncertain environment. This paper proposes that this interpretive process plays a pivotal role in change recipient task performance. With insights derived from a social information processing perspective, we specifically contend that how change recipients perceive the quality of the organization’s change communication is critical to their task performance. We further suggest that in an effort to make sense of how to perform in the face of this uncertainty, change recipients rely upon social and historical context as feedstock for these perceptions. Drawing on a study of nurses undergoing a significant change to their work practices, our analysis finds general support for this theorizing. The findings demonstrate that perceptions of the quality of the organization’s change communication influence task performance directly, and serve as a conduit through which social and historical influence become manifest. More broadly, this paper advances theory on the importance of interpretive processes in change recipient behaviors.