Appendix 1b.

	Empirical/case studies	Summary	Best Practices from Field /Empirical Research
8	BurnettS, BennJ, PintoA, ParandA, IskanderS, Vincent C. Organisational readiness: exploring the preconditions for success in organization-wide patient safety improvement programmes. BMJ Quality & Safety2010 Aug;19(4):313–7.	This article presents a case study that identifies perceptions of readiness prior to a change effort related to safety in healthcare. In terms of measures and conceptual details, the authors differentiated between preconditions for workplace improvements (Table 4), and organizational readiness and stability (Table 3). Though disparate, both themes had similar critical determinants: culture/attitudes, and history of change efforts.	Overall, two strong readiness attributes emerged across all organizations in this mixed-methods study: (1) culture and attitudes—having a culture that supports change and improvement and not needing a lot of convincing to adopt a change; and (2) the organization’s history of change—having a successful track record of change efforts and not having too many at once. Financial stability was also important (but less so than the previous two mentioned) as well as the absence of serious failures to meet other targets (i.e. government standards).
9	JonesRA, Jimmieson, NL, GriffithsA. The impact of organizational culture and reshaping capabilities on change implementation success: The mediating role of readiness for change. Journal of Management Studies. 2005 Mar;42(2):361–86.	The authors adopt a competing-values framework to set the stage for understanding the types of work-based cultures that lend themselves to more or less readiness for change.	Employees who perceived higher human relations (e.g. cohesion and morale, training and development, open communication, participative decision-making) reported higher levels of readiness for change at pre-implementation. Interestingly, employees who perceived an ‘open systems’ culture at work (innovation and development, adaptability and visionary communication) also scored higher in readiness for change, and resulted in higher usability of changes.
10	CunninghamCE, WoodwardCA, ShannonHS, MacIntoshJ, LendrumB, RosenbloomD, et al. Readiness for organizational change: A longitudinal study of workplace, psychological and behavioural correlates. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology. 2002 Dec;75(4):377–92.	This longitudinal study randomly selected hospital staff from two sites to participate in a survey before the change (but after it was mentioned), and then after the change. The authors collected data on a large number of variables and regressed a select few on organizational readiness. The readiness measure used was created by the authors and was modeled to represent the 5 stages of change by Prochaska (1994).	For work-related variables: Employees in active roles with more demanding tasks and high decision latitude reported higher readiness for organizational change, and were more likely to participate in organizational redesign. For individual variables: Employees with an active approach to work problems and who scored higher on job change self-efficacy also contributed to increased organizational readiness.
11	Barrett JH, Haslam RA, Lee KG, Ellis MJ. Assessing attitudes and beliefs using the stage of change paradigm—case study of health and safety appraisal within a manufacturing company. International Journal of Industrial Ergonomics. 2005 Oct;35(10):871–87.	The authors demonstrate that The Stage of Change model is a useful framework through which individuals’ receptiveness to change can be evaluated. Their case studydemonstrates that the model can provide a more structured approach to tailoring ergonomics (or health and safety) interventions by assessing individuals’ knowledge, attitudes and beliefs at all levels of the organization.	The authors provide a table that summarizes the purpose and action items of each stage-specific intervention focus (p. 875). The six stages each require unique actions in order to help the individual complete that stage and move on to the next stage, or maintain a given stage, if needed. Overall, this paper makes an argument that individuals are on their own timing when it comes to change acceptance and this could be facilitated or helped.
12	WanbergCR, Banas JT. Predictors and outcomes of openness to changes in a reorganizing workplace. Journal of Applied Psychology. 2000 Feb;85(1):132.	This study explores predictors and outcomes of openness to organizational change. The unique aspect of this paper is that it considers both individual difference variables as well as contextual variables. It is also a longitudinal study from an actual organization in the middle of a series of grand-scale changes.	The authors conceptually divided readiness into two buckets: (1) change acceptance and (2) positive view of changes. Personal resilience (self-esteem, perceived control and optimism) predicted change acceptance. Participation (input toward the change) predicted a positive view of changes. Also, change-specific self-efficacy, and information about the changes predicted more change acceptance.
13	MillerVD, JohnsonJR, Grau J. Antecedents to willingness to participate in a planned organizational change. Journal of Applied Communication Research. 1994;22(1):59–80.	Field study that investigated predictors of openness to participate in a planned change. The authors specifically look at job characteristics and social information processing to see how they contribute to attitudes.	Results of this study indicate that employees who received ample information in a timely and appropriate fashion and who had a high need for achievement were willing to participate in an organizational change.
14	Abdinnour-Helm S, Lengnick-Hall ML, Lengnick-Hall CA. Pre-implementation attitudes and organizational readiness for implementing an enterprise resource planning system. European Journal of Operational Research. 2003 Apr;146(2):258–73.	This paper focuses on the pre-implementation phase of an IT system by investigating factors that influence attitudes toward towards the change (to happen in the future). Theauthors specifically examine the effects of 1) level of involvement, 2) job tenure, and 3) job type on the following attitudes: expected capability, expected value, degree to which the timing is good/bad, and acceptance of system.	The results of their cross-sectional/anonymous survey study suggest that lower-tenured employees rather than higher-tenured employees tend to have more positive attitudes (in terms of capability, value and acceptance) toward the forthcoming IT change. Also, managers tended to have more positive attitudes than other employees (supervisors and production workers) in terms of the same attitudes as above. Their findings imply that job type and job tenure are both facilitators and sources of resistance for an IT change.
15	Simard M, Marchand A. A multilevel analysis of organisational factors related to the taking of safety initiatives by work groups. Safety Science. 1995 Dec;21(2):113–29.	This article is about the tendency of workgroups to adopt safety initiatives and various organizational factors that may impact employees’ safety behaviors.	Supervision style that encourages participative approach (for safety management) is a very important predictor of workers’ propensity to adopt safety initiatives. Other important predictors are: group cohesiveness, and cooperative relationships between group members and their supervisor. Finally, management commitment to safety also emerged as a predictor of workers’ propensity to adopt safety initiatives.
16	Cherniack M, Morse T, Henning R, Seidner A, Punnett L. Health promotion site selection blues: barriers to participation and implementation. Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. 2010 Jun;52(6):626–34.	This research team aimed to carefully select sites that were deemed as “ready” through qualitative and quantitative means (through a checklist). They found that their deliberate and time-intensive efforts actually yielded contradictory results. Their study highlights the challenges of assessing readiness, even when a study-specific standardized instrument is developed and administered.	This study did not successfully identify indicators of readiness. However, the authors did find that assessing readiness through middle-management resulted in “scores” that were largely discrepant from senior management. In essence, middle managers reflected a lot of enthusiasm, and senior managers withdrew participation due to the several factors. One of the common reasons mentioned was an excessivelyhigh a demand for multiple resources across a 4-year time span.
17	Vakola M, Nikolaou I. Attitudes towards organizational change: What is the role of employees’ stress and commitment? Employee Relations. 2005 Apr;27(2):160–74.	The authors investigate the associations between organizational stress, organizational commitment, and attitudes toward organizational change. They also test the moderating effect of organizational commitment on the relationship between stress and attitudes toward change.	The main finding in this study is that occupational stressors as a whole predict worse attitudes toward organizational change. Specifically, across 5 stressors, poor work relationships (i.e. low social support) significantly predicted negative attitudes toward change.
18	Armenakis AA, Harris SG, Mossholder KW. Creating readiness for organizational change.vHuman Relations. 1993 Jun;46(6), 681–703.	The authors distinguish between organizational readiness and resistance to change as two distinct phenomena that generally treated as one of the same. They argue that reducing resistance to change is important but does not necessarily lead to increased readiness, and that these must be pursued differentially and the reasons for why people might be low on these must be understood.	This paper offers a case study with Whirpool’s readiness efforts. They emphasized active participation, provoking a deep sense of need for change, persuasive communication about the need for change, and future vision of the company as important determinants of change readiness.
19	Goldberg, AI, Dar-El, EM, RubinAH. Threat perception and the readiness to participate in safety programs. Journal of Organizational Behavior. 1991 Mar;12(2):109–22.	This empirical study speaks to the idea of motivation to change through threat perceptions. The authors found that when employees experienced threat perceptions of safety hazards, they were likely to participate in changes to improve that hazard.	This is a great example of why participatory research and practice is necessary. It was found that in 8 industrial plants, awareness of safety hazards was much higher in frontline workers and much lower for safety professionals who survey the area for hazards.
20	Herold DM, Farmer, SM, Mobley MI. Pre-implementation attitudes toward the introduction of robots in a unionized environment. Journal of Engineering and Technology Management. 1995 Dec;12(3):155–73.	This empirical study found that attitudes toward new technology, such as robotics, exist before any first-hand experience with the technology or actual implementation. Interestingly, they found that these preexisting attitudes are largely bucketed into positive and negative (mental shortcuts) rather than well thought-out reasons for their attitudes.	The belief that change is necessary was a big determinant for resistance/ lack of resistance for change. Also, anxiety about one’s ability to deal with the technology change (self-efficacy) was predictive of negative pre-adoption attitudes, and this suggests that information/support regarding the change should occur early on.
21	Coch L, French JR. Overcoming resistance to change. Human Relations. 1948 Nov; 1(4):512–32.	In this landmark study, the authors explain that changes in the workplace often elicit resistance from workers despite best efforts to garnish cooperation. The study seeks to understand why people resist changes so strongly and what can be done to help this resistance/overcome it.	The results from the studies showed evidence that resistance to change can be greatly reduced. The two important pieces are: group meetings in which (1) management effectively communicates the need for change and (2) stimulates group participation in planning for the changes.
22	Weiner B, Amick H, Lee SY.Conceptualization and measurement of organizational readiness for change: a review of the literature in health services research and other fields. Medical Care Research and Review. 2008 Aug;65(4):379–436.	This article assesses how organizational readiness for change has been defined and measured in health services and other fields. It outlines conceptual and methodological issues that need to be addressed for practical application specific to health care practitioners.	The authors explain that there is conceptual ambiguity in the term “organizational readiness.” Their review leads to the fact that the term, largely, has two dimensions. Namely, organizational members’ 1) motivation and 2) capability to implement intentional organizational change. In other words, being willing and able to do perform a change.
23	Henning, A, Reeves DW, and CPH-NEW Research Team. An integrated health protection/promotion program supporting participatory ergonomics and salutogenic approaches in the design of workplace interventions. In, Bauer G, Jenny G, editors. Salutogenic organizations and change. Dordrecht: Springer, 2013. p. 307–25.	This book chapter describes a programmatic approach for how a small group of front-line employees work as a team to identify and prioritize health/safety issues/concerns, use participatory ergonomics to design and plan workplace interventions, and collaborate with management during intervention implementation and evaluation. A structured toolkit-based approach for assessing organizational readiness and designing workplace interventions is discussed	To evaluate organizational readiness for a participatory program, the authors present the use of a readiness survey which can provide feedback reports in order to build readiness in the organization to support interventions. Later, the survey can help to focus the intervention planning efforts for high priority health/safety issues/concerns. The participatory ergonomics readiness survey consists of four major areas: available resources and time; current policies toward participation; current programs in safety, ergonomics, wellness and quality; and ease of team building.
24	DeJoy DM, Wilson MG, Vandenberg RJ, McGrath-Higgins A. L, Griffin-Blake CS. Assessing the impact of healthy work organization intervention. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology. 2010 Mar;83(1):139–65.	The purpose of this empirical study was to evaluate the effectiveness of a participatory, problem-solving intervention which was designed to promote healthy work organization in a retail setting. Their study was unique in that it was longitudinal with three time points. There were 11 intervention retail stores and 10 control retail stores.	The intervention sites fared better despite difficult economic times. Given the challenging external pressures, the intervention sites were better able to preserve protective aspects of their sites (e.g. job satisfaction, organizational commitment), rather than experiencing decline in those variables as observed with the control sites. Similarly, levels of stress were more pronounced for control sites and intervention sites perceived higher levels of health safety.
25	Nielsen K, Randall R. Opening the black box: presenting a model for evaluating organizational-level interventions. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology. 2013 Oct;22(5):601–17.	The argument in this paper states that the traditional way of assessing whether occupational health interventions have succeeded or failed misses the target because process evaluation is just as informative, and should be integrated with effect evaluation. As such, the authors provide a three-level process evaluation model to assess process from: context, content and mental model perspectives.	The framework provided by the authors spans three levels (at which there are opportunities or constraints for all processes): The context (legislation, technology advances), the intervention (risk assessment, action plan), and mental models (readiness for change, perception of intervention). The framework includes specific questions at each level of the intervention processes that are needed in order to have process evaluation data.