The Change Curve Explained: How People React to Workplace Change

The change curve is a diagram of how people tend to react to an unwelcome change at work: morale and output dip through shock and resistance, then recover as people explore the new way and accept it. It is borrowed from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s 1969 account of how dying patients responded to their diagnosis.¹ Research on grief finds little support for a fixed order of stages.²

Use the curve for its labels, which name what a manager may hear in the weeks after an announcement, and drop any timetable for when people ought to be over it. In practice that means explaining why the change is happening, asking each person what it means for their work and expecting your team to sit at several points at once. It belongs with the other leadership and management skills that a reorganization tests hardest.

What are the stages of the change curve?

Common versions of the change curve have four or five stages. The University of Exeter’s change guidance for its own staff in the UK uses four: denial, resistance, exploration and commitment.³ The change-management firm Prosci keeps the five Kübler-Ross named: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.⁴

Both draw the stages along a line that falls and climbs again, with time running left to right. The dip has a wider pedigree than grief. In a 2002 review, P. David Elrod and Donald Tippett compared models of change from a range of disciplines and found that most of them describe a loss of capability in the middle of the process.⁵

The reason is easy to see in ordinary work. A new structure, system or boss makes old expertise less useful before new skill exists. The university’s line-manager toolkit points out that a person may have been the expert in the old way of doing things and earned respect for it, and the change undermines that position.⁶ In a finance team moving to a new reporting tool, the analyst who knew every shortcut in the old spreadsheet is suddenly slower than the new hire, and much of the irritation comes from losing that edge rather than from the software.

The names keep shifting. The same model also circulates as “the seven stages of grief”, and Kübler-Ross described more reactions than the famous five, including shock, hope and a grief that comes before the loss itself.¹ Pick whichever version your organization already uses and hold its labels loosely. What matters is noticing that a drop in mood and speed after a change is a common reaction, which Prosci frames as normal and expected.⁴

Myth

Everyone goes through the stages of the change curve, one after another.

Fact

Kübler-Ross herself wrote that her patients often showed two or three stages at once, and grief research finds little support for a set order.

What managers can say and do at each stage

Use the change curve to anticipate what you may hear, then answer the specific worry each person raises. The table pairs each common reaction with steps from the University of Exeter’s staff guidance, Prosci’s guide and a field study by Tina Kiefer. The advice in the two guides comes from practitioner experience and has not been tested as an intervention.

Read the table as a menu with no fixed order. People move back and forth, and a team will be spread across several rows at once.⁴ Your one-on-one meetings are where you find out which row each person is in, with a direct question such as “What does this change mean for your work?”

Your usual leadership style still applies. The extra work during a change is listening for the specific worry behind a reaction and fixing what you can: a training gap, an unclear decision, a sense of being treated unfairly.

Is the change curve the same as the Kübler-Ross model?

The change curve is a business adaptation of the Kübler-Ross model, not the model itself. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a Swiss-American psychiatrist, described five stages in her 1969 book On Death and Dying, which grew out of seminars and interviews with dying patients at the University of Chicago.¹ The book drew on her contact with more than 200 dying patients.²

The workplace version came later. Wikipedia’s history, citing a management website, dates the move from grief to the “Kübler-Ross Change Curve” to the 1980s.¹ Her own chart looked different. The Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Foundation, which now uses a registered-trademark sign on the Change Curve name, describes her 1969 chart as ten overlapping bands, including shock, partial denial, preparatory grief and hope, and says that by 1978 she drew the responses as interlocking circles with no timeline and no numbered order.⁸

1. 1969On Death and Dying names five stages of dying
2. 1974Kübler-Ross notes patients show two or three stages at once
3. 1978She draws the responses as circles with no order
4. LaterThe stages move into workplaces as the change curve
5. 2007A Yale study tests the stages on bereaved adults
6. 2017A review urges professionals to drop the stages

In a 1974 follow-up book she wrote that most of her patients had shown two or three stages at the same time, and not always in the same order.¹ Her last book, written with David Kessler and published in 2005, put it this way:

they are not stops on some linear timeline in grief. Not everyone goes through all of them or in a prescribed order

She called her stages a heuristic device, categories separated out for clarity, and her main aim was more patient-centered care for the dying.¹ Borrow them for a team in the same spirit: they help you name what someone tells you in a conversation, and they do not predict what that person will feel next.

What grief research found when it tested the stages

Grief researchers who tested the stages found the reactions Kübler-Ross named but little evidence of a sequence. A 2017 review in the journal Omega by Margaret Stroebe, Henk Schut and Kathrin Boerner concluded that bereaved people do feel some of these emotions some of the time, that the ordered stages lack empirical support, and that professionals should stop using them.²

A widely cited test followed bereaved adults in one US state for two years.¹

The study

Limited evidence

Acceptance from month one: the Yale Bereavement Study

The Yale Bereavement Study interviewed 233 adults in Connecticut, US, between 1 and 24 months after a family member died of natural causes. Acceptance was the reaction people endorsed most often from the first month on, and yearning, which is not one of Kübler-Ross’s five, was the strongest negative reaction throughout. Once each reaction was rescaled, the peaks lined up in the order stage theory predicts: disbelief, then yearning, anger, depression, with acceptance rising all along.⁹

Both readings of that study can be true at once. A group average can rise and fall in a rough order while individual people mix the reactions, and acceptance was there from the first month. Critics writing to the same journal argued against the stage idea and questioned which participants had been left out of the analysis.¹

George Bonanno of Columbia University adds a larger point in a 2004 review in American Psychologist: in bereavement studies that report group data, people showing relatively low depression or distress approached or exceeded half the sample, while lasting distress appeared in a smaller minority.¹⁰ Many people show little visible dip, a pattern covered in more depth in what research shows about resilience after hardship.

The practical risk runs the other way too. Stroebe and her colleagues warn that a belief in stages can leave bereaved people feeling they are not grieving properly and can lead friends and professionals to give the wrong support.² At work, telling a calm colleague that they must still be “in denial” does the same damage. Describe the range of reactions to your team and leave each person to place themselves.

Does everyone go through the change curve?

No. Research on employees finds that reactions to change vary with the person, the change and how it is run. Shaul Oreg, Maria Vakola and Achilles Armenakis reviewed 79 quantitative studies published between 1948 and 2007 and traced reactions to the people affected, the organization’s existing climate, how the change was handled, whether people expected to gain or lose, and what the change itself was.¹¹

The reason is that one announcement means different things to different people. The same restructure can remove one person’s team and give another a promotion. Say a manager tells five people their department is merging with another: one shrugs, one is angry about losing a project, one is excited about a bigger scope, one asks a dozen practical questions, and one quietly updates a CV. The textbook curve is an average that may describe none of them.

• Fairly level: little visible distress; in bereavement studies, a large share of people
• Dip and recover: the textbook shape, which some people do follow
• Dip and stay low: a smaller group whose distress lasts
• Back and forth: reactions that return and overlap, as Kübler-Ross herself described

What sets off the low mood is more specific than the stage labels suggest. In a field study of ongoing change, Tina Kiefer found negative emotions were linked to three perceptions: an insecure future, inadequate working conditions, and inadequate treatment by the organization. Those emotions predicted lower trust and more withdrawal, both at the time and a month later.⁷ Observational data like these cannot show that fixing the three perceptions lifts anyone’s mood, yet each is something a manager can ask about.

Prosci, which sells its own method, lists the same weakness in the curve: it assumes everyone moves through the stages in a line, while in practice reactions overlap, repeat or cycle back.⁴ Plan for several reactions at once, and find out which one each person is having before you decide what they need.

How long does the change curve last?

We found no study that measured how long people take to move through the change curve at work, so any timetable attached to it is a guess. The nearest data come from bereavement, a far heavier loss. In the Yale study, the negative reactions peaked within about six months on average.⁹ Bonanno’s review describes time-limited disruption lasting from several months to a year or two in considerable numbers of bereaved people.¹⁰

Those are averages from grief, and they should not be read as a target for a team adjusting to a new schedule. What the workplace research does offer is a set of conditions linked to how open people become. In a study that measured the same employees at more than one pointlongitudinal study: A study that measures the same people more than once over a period of time, so it can see how they change and which thing came first. Following people over time still does not show that the earlier thing caused the later one.Full entry in the glossary in a reorganizing workplace, Connie Wanberg and Joseph Banas found that people who received more information about the changes, felt more able to cope with them and had taken part in the decisions were more open to them. Lower acceptance went with less job satisfaction, more irritation at work and stronger intentions to quit.¹²

Two offices going through the same system change show why that matters. In one, the manager explains the reason, asks the team how to phase the switch and books practice sessions before the go-live date. In the other, the news arrives by email the Friday before. Nobody can promise the first office a shorter dip from an observational study, but every factor in it is something a manager can influence.¹²

The bottom line

The stages of the change curve give you names for the reactions you will hear after an announcement, and the workplace studies suggest where your effort goes further: people who get more information, take part in the decisions and feel able to cope tend to be more open to a change. Before you announce the next one, write down why it is happening, decide which parts the team can still shape and book time for people to practice the new way.