It is becoming paramount that successful change management is crucial for an organization’s development and growth. However, it is becoming even more evident, that many organizations have yet to succeed in the planning and execution of change processes. This can be attributed to one of the major hindrances of change cited by many scholars and practitioners – employee resistance. This challenge was one of the main features of the traditional approach of change management, where decisions to effect change were made by managers at the onset of the change process and then communicated to employees in a convincing and vertical flow. However, increasing research is denoting the effect of positive psychology, an emerging phenomenon, as a model of successful change due to its premise of making people an integral component of the change process. This is particularly necessary in the public sector and in particular, the Transport Authority, which is the organization this qualitative exploratory case study is based. This method, a qualitative exploratory case study, was employed so as garner a more profound understanding of how organizational change is effected at this organization.
To this extent, this study, which was completed by me from October 2018 to May 2022, is based on the exploration, understanding, and application of positive psychology, the main theory being explored to enact successful organizational change. The theories of cognitive dissonance and appreciative inquiry will serve as useful and complementary constructs for the successful implementation of organizational change, particularly from a behavioural perspective. Therefore, data were collected from employees via semi-structured interviews and analyzed using thematic analysis. A questionnaire was also administered to triangulate the research findings.
The study found that while employees perceived organizational change to be critical to the continuous growth of the organization, successful change will be dependent on pertinent factors such as employee involvement, readiness, and perception of change as well as organizational leaders’ understanding of the forces that could influence resistance, such as installed political parties as revealed by the findings. As such, one of the main contributions of this study is that it will help to provide a kind of blueprint for the successful implementation of change from an empirical perspective, particularly using positive psychology methodologies as the main vehicle. The implication of the findings and possible directions for future research are discussed further in the research.