People go through predictable emotional stages when facing change.
A business adaptation of Kübler-Ross's grief stages, which she described for the terminally ill and never validated as a sequence. Neither the original stages nor the change-curve version is empirically supported.
In practice
- A restructuring programme allows a week for denial and a week for anger, and finds staff who never stop bargaining and others who were fine by Tuesday.
- The defensible version is narrower: people react to imposed change with a mix of resistance, distress and adjustment in no fixed order, and expecting a sequence produces bad management.
- Standing
- A business adaptation of the grief stages; the original sequence is not empirically supported.
- Subject
- Psychology & Behavior
- Essay
- Theories of the mind, from the lab to the bookshop