Ethics in Change Management: Current Issues and Directions for Future Research in the Post-COVID-19 Era

Introduction

One issue which is important for organizations today is to learn to deal with a highly uncertain environment (Rossidis et al., 2020, 2021a,b; Viterouli et al., 2023). It is not only major crises, such as the Covid-19 pandemic, which forces companies to have a high level of readiness for the case of a change, but also the uncertainty which exists on many industries and within the organizations which is a key driver of change (Errida & Lofti, 2021). Hence, change management in on the heart of management and it is strongly associated with the sustainability of an organization in today’s uncertain times (Belias & Trihas, 2022a).

Despite of the fact that change management is understood that it is a necessity for securing the sustainability of an organization, still it is a point where many companies and their managers fail to implement. Indeed, there are many aspects of organizational management that a manager would have to look after in a very complicated environment. Miller (2020) notes that organizational change may involve adjustments related with corporate culture, adaptation of new technologies, changes on the internal processes and many other issues related with the operation of an organization. However, a set of recent students (Errida & Logit, 2021; Katsaros et al, 2020; Giglioptti et al, 2019; Belias et al, 2019) have indicated that the 60%-70% of changes fail. Such a low success rate indicates that there is a need to go deep into the heart of organizational change and to find ways to ensure the sustainability of a change. Scholars have indicated that some of the reasons which lead in low success rates include resistance to change (Wang & Kebebe, 2020) but also dissatisfaction from the way that the change process has been managed which leads on low levels of change integration (Belias & Trihas, 2022b). Nonetheless, what is common on most of the researches and publications made on organizational change is the fact that the human resources are the ones who will determine the success or failure of organizational change (Wang & Kebebe, 2020).