Ambiguity and ambivalence Senior managers’ accounts of organizational change in a restructured government department

Abstract
Purpose – Imposed change at work can present individuals with ambiguous events about which
they experience ambivalence in their interpretation of meaning. This paper seeks to examine the
dimensions of ambivalence as defined by Piderit among a group of managers in the public sector.
Design/methodology/approach – The research is based on a group of 20 Band 11 senior managers
responsible for collecting tax and between them covering the UK in a business restructured into a large
business group. The authors adopted a qualitative approach involving semi-structured interviews
seeking to uncover individual accounts of imposed change, allowing subjects to reflect on their
experience of change and its meaning to them.
Findings – The findings suggested that long-service civil servants and private sector managers
draw on their previous experience to interpret the changes they experience, giving rise to different
perceived ambiguity between rhetoric and reality. Each group either comes to terms with ambiguity
by interpreting the meaning of change to fit in with their expectancies of change, or, in one case, do not
reconcile the change which then becomes a point of resistance.
Practical implications – The case highlights the need for change agents to understand the full
complexity of employee attitudes. Not only can a variety of attitudes be identified, but each set of
responses can be understood in variety of ways.
Originality/value – The devil in the detail of imposed change offers both researchers and managers
of change a significant source of information about likely individual and group responses to imposed
change at work. Piderit’s framework offers three dimensions of ambivalence which clarify different
individual responses to imposed change.