We live in times of change – rapid and radical change – and much of it centres on our working lives. Even if we lived in times of tranquil stability we would still be confronted with the task of adjusting to transitions, compelled by the perpetual motion of the life cycle. People would still have to undergo training and socialization to acquire occupational competence at the start of the life/career cycle, have to maintain and reform skills in the middle years to be able to fill the slots vacated by departing seniors, and eventually move on into retirement, renewing the cycle by passing on their positions to junior successors. Transitions are, to this degree, inevitable, but, as we shall be seeing in the pages that follow, such orderly and measured change is not the normal experience of most managers.

What do we know about how people adjust to the demands of change? Within the various literatures on people at work, change is too often treated as a troublesome aberration – an external force that disturbs the stable patterns of daily life. The snapshots of survey designs and case studies are often used to deduce and uncover these patterns, for example, in the search for law-like relationships between such factors as job characteristics, personality, work satisfaction, and performance.