While organisational change literature is extensive and continues to expand, it still prioritises top management/change leaders’ perspectives, and in doing so, sustains a predominantly managerial logic. Furthermore, a review of the literature on making sense of strategic change confirms that very little attention has been given to the intersection between the sensemaking of change leaders and non-managerial organisational citizens who are tasked with realising the leadership’s strategic mandates for change.

This doctoral study addresses this shortcoming in sensemaking literature by examining how frontline workers engage with and make sense of senior managers’ sensegiving during a restructuring of non-academic functions in a university. The design included two phases. Firstly, it examined the university change leaders’ sense- giving frames and how these influenced frontline employees’ sensemaking and sensegiving frames, and secondly, it looked at why leaders and frontline workers’ frames were so divergent. At the core of this study, the following questions were posited: RQ1: How do frontline staff frame their responses to change agents’ framing of change? RQ2: How are the change agents’ frames related to the staff’s framing responses? The researcher employed an interpretative research approach, as its subjective ontology was ideally suited to a study of sensemaking. All formal emails and documents disseminated to all employees by the change leaders were collected and key staff forums were attended to gather the change leaders’ formal sensegiving accounts. Members of the executive team, which included the key change leaders,

were interviewed while 43 semi-structured and unstructured interviews were conducted with 34 frontline participants over 18 months of the official 24-month life span of the change project.

The first stage of the analysis found that frontline workers’ framing responses were not directly related to the management’s formally communicated frames. Rather, the frames workers (i.e., change recipients) employed various degrees of communicative bypassing, by virtue of the way they chose to focus on understandings and informational resources associated with historical changes and the current change context. The phase two analysis, which sought to explain from the workers’ perspectives why such bypassing was occurring, found that workers perceived the change initiative as part of an ongoing process of organisational change, rather than an isolated one-time change event occurring in the present. This meant that the organisation’s history of change as experienced by the individual or reported by his or her colleagues was shaping present-time sensemaking. Furthermore, workers’ trust in the management’s credibility and their perceptions of procedural justice, as well as individuals’ appraisals of the utility of proposed changes, were identified as the core factors impacting participants’ framing of change.

This research study’s contributions are fourfold. Firstly, the study contributes a rich empirical case that addresses sensemaking at the interface between change leaders and change recipients. Secondly, it extends the conceptualisation of how frontline staff make sense of strategic change by incorporating change history. Thirdly, it reveals how, in an organisation with a history of frequent strategic changes, frontline workers targeted by these changes make sense of current change by mobilising expectations established by their past experiences of change and readily available information on the competence change histories of their organisation’s new change leaders. Finally, this study demonstrates how the failure to address information regarding past changes further compounds the bypassing effect between change leaders’ sensegiving and frontline workers’ sensemaking.

Together, the findings contribute an original case study of sensemaking at the intersection between change leaders and change recipients, which includes an original conceptualisation that incorporates the concepts of temporality, organisational memory and prospective sensemaking. The case and especially this model have theoretical and practical implications.