Looking at transparent communication and employees’ assessments of change during COVID-19

By April Yue, University of Connecticut, and Justin Walden, North Dakota State University

It feels like change is everywhere these days.

Economic shifts, environmental concerns, social change, and new health issues such as monkeypox and emerging Coronavirus variants have forced organizations to engage in a seemingly constant process of change management.

This, of course, has crucial implications for a number of employee outcomes—and as researchers from an array of disciplines have begun documenting, the arrival of the Novel Coronavirus (COVID‐19) as a global pandemic in 2020 has been a particularly difficult change period to navigate.

As communication scholars, we wanted to understand change management through the lens of transparent internal communication during the pandemic. This has resulted in a Page Center-supported study in the Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management.

We drew on an online survey panel with 414 full-time employees in the United States to look at the relationship between transparent communication and employees’ cognitive appraisals of COVID-related organizational change. We also examined the relationship between change appraisals and employees’ willingness to comply and support change, and the relationship between these appraisals and employee turnover intention.

Among our noteworthy findings was that transparent internal communication positively predicted employees’ views that the change was a positive challenge, which in turn, was related to employees’ change compliance and championing. We also found that transparent internal communication was negatively linked with threat appraisal of the change, which in turn, was connected to lower change compliance but not championing. Further, employees’ turnover intention was negatively associated with employees’ compliance and championing for the change.

The big takeaway from our study is that transparent communication (as characterized by participation, sustainability, and accountability) can play a crucial role in driving employees’ support for organizational change. This is important for both organization-initiated change and change from outside triggers like the pandemic.

One of the Page Center’s important contributions is that it has supported scholars with a diverse set of interests. Our work on transparent communication is one of two forthcoming studies to emerge from a Legacy Scholar grant that we received in late 2020. A second study by Yue, Patrick Thelen of San Diego State University, and Walden is coming out soon in Management Decision on empathetic leadership and employees’ turnover intentions. (A third study was recently submitted to a journal by Walden and Cheng Zeng on teleworkers’ job engagement during the pandemic.)

With the Page Center’s support for our research, we have not just talked with fellow communication scholars. We have been able to bring theoretical insight from our discipline to other areas and have helped expand the discussion around key workplace communication issues to broader audiences.

For more information about these two forthcoming studies, send us an email at either cen.yue@uconn.edu or justin.walden@ndsu.edu.