The Effects of Uncertainty and Source Credibility on Attitudes about Organizational Change

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Abstract
A substantial portion of the literature on organizational change focuses on the effects of change but fails to consider how information about change is communicated and processed. Social information processing is used as a theoretical framework to guide the development of a causal model in which the impact of uncertainty, source competence, and source similarity were examined as precursors to employees' attitudes about organizational change. The results of this study indicate that social information had its strongest effect on employee attitudes in situations involving high source credibility and high uncertainty. A test of the path model incorporating the interaction between uncertainty and credibility provided a good fit to the data. The implications for research and theory in organizational change are discussed.