In previous articles discussing the Friction Factors® I’ve argued that Fear in a change context isn’t really about the change itself. It’s about the uncertainty that comes with it, and particularly about threats to what’s termed the ‘SCARF categories’: Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness. I suggested some practical responses aimed at the individual:
- reduce uncertainty before talking about benefits
- account for the negativity bias
- build agency and self-efficacy
- consider personal identity impacts, and
- make psychological safety a precondition for honest engagement.
All of that still stands, but it’s only part of the picture, because the conditions that make Fear easier or harder to manage aren’t all inside someone’s head. Most of them are set between people, within teams, or by the wider organisation and the world outside it.
The easiest way to see this is to ask why two people facing the same change can have such very different levels of anxiety. Some of that is personality, but a great deal of it is context. Someone whose manager has kept every promise about change over the last five years starts from a very different place than someone whose manager hasn’t. A team that’s been through two failed restructures in three years starts somewhere different from a team that’s been through two that worked. Fear is partly a learned response.
The organisational justice climate
‘Organisational justice’ is a useful lens for thinking about the Fairness part of SCARF. The research, pulled together by Colquitt and colleagues, picks apart three kinds of fairness people perceive at work1:
- Distributive justice – are outcomes fair?
- Procedural justice – is the process by which outcomes are decided fair?
- Interactional justice – am I treated fairly – with dignity and respect? There’s a sub-component here called ‘informational justice’, which is about whether decisions are communicated honestly and openly.
All three matter, but the procedural and interactional ones – that is, fairness around how a decision ismade and communicated, irrespective of the decision itself – have the biggest impact on people’s feelings throughout change. Bernerth and colleagues found that the justice climate around a change predicts people’s commitment to it, regardless of how good or bad the change itself works out for them personally2.
That’s a big opportunity for change practitioners. We usually have no say over the change itself – a restructure will disrupt people’s working relationships, a cost-cutting exercise may mean redundancies, an AI initiative might strip out the bits of the job people enjoy. But we can nearly always improve the process and the conversation around it, and the evidence says that makes a real difference to how things will be perceived. It reduced the fear response directly. What this means in practice supports advice I’ve given elsewhere:
- consult people early
- explain the reasoning (not just the decision)
- treat individuals with dignity even when delivering bad news
- be honest about what is and is not negotiable.
What’s new is recognising these as justice practices rather than just good communications practice, with measurable consequences for how the change is received.
That said, while you can shift some of the justice context on a single project, this is really a systemic thing, and it needs to come from the very top. I’ve lost count of the managers who want to be honest and open but feel hemmed in by a culture of secrecy. Understandably, they’ll worry about getting into trouble for saying too much; and frequently they don’t know what’s happening themselves until senior leadership tells them. On procedural justice, I keep hearing, anecdotally, about a fading sense of duty towards employees in large corporates. My hunch is that organisations are making decisions with very little thought for fairness, and that’s putting them in a dangerous position. The consequences are the hidden costs: low engagement, poor productivity and ‘quiet quitting’.
Trust in leadership and the shadow of past change
Trust sits very closely to fairness. Dirks and Ferrin’s meta-analysis found that trust in leadership is strongly related to all sorts of outcomes: satisfaction, commitment, performance, and, crucially for us, whether people accept a change their leaders have initiated3. But trust isn’t something you can manufacture by being charismatic at a town hall (though that doesn’t hurt). It gets built, and broken, through small repeated actions: does this leader say what they’ll do and then do it? Do they admit when they don’t know? Do they own the bad news? Do they behave the same way in every room?
This is where the shadow of past change starts to matter. There’s an accumulation as each new initiative lands on top of the ones before it. If the last transformations promised efficiencies that never showed up – maybe there was a restructure that hurt but delivered nothing, and before that, an AI pilot that generated a mountain of work before being quietly dropped – then the next change isn’t going to get a warm welcome!
Schein reframed Conner’s ‘burning platform’ idea rather usefully here. People only engage with change, he argued, when their ‘survival anxiety’, the worry about staying as they are, outweighs their ‘learning anxiety’, ie, the worry about trying something new and looking daft while they do it4. Sticking with the status quo has to feel worse than the discomfort of changing. Where trust is low, neither anxiety can be dealt with honestly: people don’t believe leadership’s version of the threat, and they don’t believe they’ll be supported up the learning curve. So they’re left just being anxious.
Trust is slow to earn and quick to lose, so there’s no shortcut.This is exactly why leaders should be working on it all the time, not only when a change initiative makes them need it. The best leaders bring learning anxiety down during a change by showing, in small and credible ways, that people will be properly supported while they learn. For technology change, that might mean bringing in learning specialists rather than relying on out-of-the-box technical training. For other kinds of change, it means a proper learning workstream so people understand what’s expected and know where to get help. Then they need to find early opportunities to ‘walk the talk’, and prove they can be trusted rather than just saying so.
Practical example
What to do when the news is bad
This one isn’t mine, but it has stuck with me as a counter-intuitive and rather powerful way of building trust and credibility while getting both procedural and interactional justice right. The company was struggling, and it became clear that redundancies were needed alongside a significant restructure. Of course this was hugely disruptive and distressing for everyone involved, both for those leaving and those staying.
Instead of hiding it or making vague promises they couldn’t keep, the leadership team spoke honestly to staff and committed firmly to everyone’s job being safe for the next 12 months, while being clear there were no guarantees beyond that. The effect on morale was transformational.
People went from fearful speculation to feeling respected by those in charge, with reliable information they could actually plan around. Note that the outcome was not fair in distributive justice terms – some kept their jobs and some didn’t – but by treating staff like adults, the leadership team got an adult response back.
Checklist
- How decisions get made and communicated predicts commitment to a change, whatever the change objectively means for the person. That’s a relief for change practitioners, who rarely have any control over the change itself
- Trust in leadership strongly predicts how well people react to change.
- Leaders should look for early chances to show how they’ll support people, which keeps learning anxiety down.
Footnotes
- Colquitt, J. A., Conlon, D. E., Wesson, M. J., Porter, C. O. L. H. & Ng, K. Y. (2001) ‘Justice at the millennium: A meta-analytic review of 25 years of organizational justice research’, Journal of Applied Psychology, 86(3), pp. 425–445. ↩︎
- Bernerth, J. B., Armenakis, A. A., Feild, H. S. & Walker, H. J. (2007) ‘Justice, cynicism, and commitment’, Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 43(3), pp. 303–326. ↩︎
- Dirks, K. T. & Ferrin, D. L. (2002) ‘Trust in leadership: Meta-analytic findings and implications for research and practice’, Journal of Applied Psychology, 87(4), pp. 611–628. ↩︎
- Schein, E. H. (1996) ‘Kurt Lewin’s change theory in the field and in the classroom’, Systems Practice, 9(1), pp. 27–47. ↩︎
