Change climate in the University Hospital Bratislava

Organizational change can generate skepticism and resistance in employees, making it sometimes difficult or impossible to implement organizational improvements. To enable the University Hospital Bratislava to manage these realities in a most effective way, the assessment of attitudes to change was conducted among 304 full-time hospital employees in the summer of 1999. The assessment was based on the Change Climate Survey allowing for investigation of attitudes in four main areas: orientation towards change in general, understanding and acceptance of change, management of change, and change outcomes. In spite of some limitations due to the fact that the survey did not use a true random sample, in general, the results seem to be able to illustrate the University Hospital employees' attitudes to change. The findings indicate that, in general, the attitudes of the hospital employees towards change are rather positive. However, the mixed feelings prevail among the employees from the point of understanding and acceptance of the current changes. Similarly, the mixed feelings persist among the employees with respect to the way the change is managed, though with slightly positive attitudes towards the level of communication. From the practical point of view, the results imply that emphasizing the involvement of organization members in learning about their organization and how to change it might prove to be more effective in managing change in the University Hospital Bratislava, than the traditional approaches to planned change, where consultants carry out most of the change activities, with the agreement and collaboration of management. (Tab. 8, Ref. 28.)