A study on the ‘readiness to change’ among public sector employees

‘Readiness to change’ is considered as one of the major impediments in implementing change effectively. It has been defined as preparing mentally and physically for an experience or action. Various factors such as discrepancy, appropriateness, efficacy, principal support, and valence had been identified as factors affecting readiness to change. The present study has been conducted among Public Sector Undertakings (PSU) employees looking into their readiness to change. This assumes greater significance in the current context where we consider the economy as a global one and the cushion of government support to Public sector undertakings is slowly decreasing. The Public sector Undertakings have to be on their heels to meet the external changes in the environment, and there in lies the need for getting employees ready to change. The study shows that out of the various factors affecting readiness to change, only appropriateness showed strong correlation with employee readiness to change. Appropriateness is defined as the manager's capability or skill in identifying the unique attributes of an organizational situation so that the appropriate corrective action could be matched to that situation. The study also revealed dependency of employee change readiness level across all the demographic variables taken for this study i.e. gender, salary, age and educational qualification.