Ready or Not? Developing an Organizational Change Fitness Scale

The management of organizational innovation and change remains a persistent problem, with many initiatives failing due to a lack of understanding of organizational readiness. This paper addresses a gap in the literature by developing and validating a novel, psychometrically sound scale to diagnose organizational change readiness, grounded in the dynamic capabilities framework.Through a series of four studies, the authors generated and refined a set of items, establishing a reliable and valid five-factor structure. This structure, which they term the Organizational Readiness Scale (ORS), includes Strategic Scanning, Leadership Insights, Coordinating Structures, Dysfunctional Defensive Routines, and Organizational Openness. Using a large sample of 4,591 respondents from 255 organizations, the authors conducted exploratory factor analysis and confirmed the factor structure using confirmatory factor analysis (N = 2,296). Their findings provide initial evidence of criterion validity, demonstrating a serial mediation pathway where Strategic Scanning influences change performance through Leadership Insights and Dysfunctional Defensive Routines. Theoretically, this research advances the field by explicitly integrating managerial attention and emotional dynamics into the conceptualization of change readiness. For practitioners, the developed scale offers a critical diagnostic tool to assess and improve an organization's capacity for successful change.