Activation and Valence in Responses to Organizational Change: Development and Validation of the Change Response Circumplex Scale

Organizational members’ responses to organizational change have a key role in determining the success of the change. The predominant conceptualization of responses to change has focused on the valence of responses—the degree to which they are positive (e.g., openness to change) versus negative (e.g., resistance to change). Yet, recent theory suggests that rather than a single continuum, ranging from negative to positive, responses to change are better represented with a bidimensional framework including both a valence-based continuum and an activation-based continuum(active vs. passive; Oreg et al., 2018), comprising a change response circumplex. Based on this theoretical framework, we develop and validate a scale for measuring the four dimensions of the change response circumplex (i.e., change acceptance, change proactivity, change disengagement, change resistance). We conducted five studies in which we develop the scale and demonstrate its content validity (Study 1, N = 208), circumplex structure and construct validity (Study 2, N = 221; Study 3, N = 315), concurrent validity (Study 4, N = 588), and predictive validity (Study 5, N = 146). We also demonstrate the usefulness of distinguishing among the four responses for predicting the amount and types of feedback that change recipients provide, and show the particular value of active responses, above and beyond valence.