An Examination of the Processes by which Social Accounts Influence Change

During organisational change, managers use social accounts to influence the behaviour of organisational members. Social accounts are a specific form of communication. They are explanations of organisational actions (Bies, 1987; Cobb & Wooten, 1998; Shaw, Wild, & Colquitt, 2003). The term refers to an explanation where the account giver aims to influence the receiver?s affective or behavioural reactions, often to mitigate reactions to negative outcomes (Bies, 1987; De Cremer, van Dijk, & Pilluda, 2010). Hence, social accounts are useful in creating support for change in affecting the sense people make of a particular situation. Social accounts are effective in manipulating individual perceptions of decisions and change responses (Cobb & Wooten, 1998; Shaw et al., 2003; Tucker, Yeow, & Viki, 2013). Significant research has studied this relationship (Bies, 1987; Cobb & Wooten, 1998; Frey & Cobb, 2010) but theory is less developed in the process of how social accounts get taken up, specifically; the recipient?s role in uptake. During change, both top-down and bottom-up processes influence organisational members understandings and employees themselves play a significant role in filling in gaps in information with their own expectations (Rousseau & Tijoriwala, 1999). Organisational members actively interpret information and influence the development of schema and the behaviour of peers (Balogun & Johnson, 2004; Maitlis & Sonenshein, 2010; Rouleau, 2005). Key to understanding this issue is when the influence of deliberately given social accounts leads to behaviour change (or not). During change, employees are continually given information and suggestions about why events have occurred. Sometimes intended recipients do not register this information; they choose to attend to one piece of information over another; and only then is information subsequently given meaning and acted upon (Ginsberg & Venkatraman, 1995). In this paper, we first describe the processes when organisational members receive social accounts and then we formulate an explanation of why some accounts influence change behaviour whilst others do not. By understanding this process we advance social accounts literature, exploring the currently neglected role of the recipient in social account uptake. This, in turn advances our understanding of variation in the influence generated by social accounts and their effective use. Social accounts literature is criticised for its neglect of contextual factors (Frey & Cobb, 2010; Tucker et al., 2013). This is especially the case when discussing the behaviour of organisational members in context sensitive situations. Traditionally, social accounts research comes from a positivist tradition, with little consideration of context, for example how the organisational landscape might influence the account receiver. Instead research has focused on refining the design and delivery of accounts to maximise their likelihood of influencing behaviour (Cobb & Wooten, 1998; De Cremer et al., 2010; Frey & Cobb, 2010), but this focus is either the content of the account or the attributes of the account giver. The importance of account-giving in organisational change highlights that change represents a complex situation here numerous, often conflicting, explanations create challenges (Cobb & Wooten, 1998) but again little direct research asks how contextual influences affect the process of accommodating one account over another. In this paper we explore this process, taking a cognitivist and an interpretivist approach to understanding context. We draw on influences from information processing and sensemaking to highlight how the interplay between context and cognition explains why some social accounts lead to changes in understanding whilst others do not. We propose that social accounts must be relevant in order to navigate perceptual filters; must demonstrate imperative for action, in order to attract the attention of account receivers; and must be credible within their immediate context to demonstrate value.