Change Scale

Abstract

The Change Scale, developed by industrial and organizational psychologist Don A. Trumbo in 1961, is an empirical instrument designed to measure individual and group attitudes toward work-related change. Formulated during an era marked by the initial influx of technological automation and office mechanization, the instrument emerged from a pressing scientific need to quantify psychological readiness, dispositional receptivity, and resistance among personnel confronted with structural organizational transitions. Comprising 9 items administered via a 5-point Likert-type scale, the instrument utilizes a distinctive operational format: Item 1 evaluates ideal job preferences along a behavioral continuum ranging from absolute stability (“is always the same”) to continuous flux (“change a great deal”), while Items 2 through 9 measure degree of endorsement across cognitive and affective propositions ranging from “I strongly agree” to “I strongly disagree”.

Psychometric evaluations conducted across supervisory and non-supervisory industrial samples established a corrected odd-even split-half reliability coefficient of .79, reflecting robust internal consistency. Demonstrating substantial predictive and construct validity, scores on the Change Scale correlate significantly with employees’ objective and subjective reactions to technological shifts, job restructuring, and automated workflows. Higher aggregate scores indicate a proactive, favorable disposition toward occupational change, whereas lower scores denote rigid preferences for behavioral routine, operational predictability, and stability. This article provides a comprehensive academic review of the Change Scale, analyzing its theoretical architecture, psychometric properties, structural dimensionality, historical evolution, and continuing relevance in contemporary organizational psychology and change management scholarship.

Keywords

Change Scale, Don A. Trumbo, organizational change, employee attitudes, resistance to change, psychometrics, predictive validity, internal consistency, work-related change, technological automation, job stability, organizational behavior.

Authors

The Change Scale was formulated, validated, and published by Don A. Trumbo, Ph.D. (1927–2018), a distinguished researcher in industrial, organizational, and experimental psychology. At the time of the instrument’s inception and validation, Trumbo was affiliated with the Department of Psychology at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas. He subsequently served as a prominent professor of psychology at The Pennsylvania State University, where he contributed extensively to the fields of human performance, motor skill acquisition, cognitive engineering, and organizational attitudes.

Trumbo’s investigative portfolio bridged foundational laboratory research in human factors and applied field psychometrics in corporate environments. His empirical inquiries into organizational dynamics focused predominantly on the human impact of automation, employee adjustment mechanisms, and psychometric evaluation methodologies designed to assess workforce adaptability during technological displacement and operational restructuring.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Change Scale is to assess individual differences in attitudes toward work-related transitions, procedural modifications, and operational ambiguity within occupational settings. Developed against the historical backdrop of early commercial electronic data processing (EDP) installations and industrial workflow mechanization in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Trumbo identified a critical measurement gap: while management theorists frequently theorized about employee “resistance to change,” empirical research lacked standardized, brief, and psychometrically validated self-report scales capable of isolating generalized dispositional attitudes toward change from specific reactions to managerial policies.

In applied organizational research, the instrument serves several pivotal diagnostic and investigative functions:

• Predictive Assessment of Workplace Adjustment: Gauging how individual workers and supervisory cohorts will emotionally and behaviorally react to impending technological shifts, process engineering, or mergers prior to implementation.
• Diagnostic Screening for Change Management Interventions: Identifying organizational business units or strata demonstrating pronounced stability orientations, enabling leadership to tailor participatory interventions, pedagogical support, and communication strategies.
• Theoretical Exploration of Personality and Job Correlates: Facilitating academic inquiry into how generalized openness to occupational variation interacts with demographic variables (such as age, tenure, and education), cognitive abilities, and job satisfaction metrics.
• Evaluation of Organizational Interventions: Functioning as a pre-test and post-test assessment metric to evaluate whether leadership training, job enlargement programs, or employee empowerment initiatives alter fundamental orientations toward operational novelty.

By measuring attitudes toward work-related change as a continuous variable, the scale shifts organizational discourse away from viewing resistance as an immutable pathology and frames it instead as a measurable psychometric orientation influenced by cognitive expectations, risk appraisal, and preference for routine.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct evaluated by the instrument is Employee Attitude Toward Work-Related Change. In industrial and organizational psychology, this construct is conceptualized as an individual’s enduring evaluative predisposition—encompassing affective, cognitive, and conative components—toward variability, procedural modifications, and unfamiliar operational demands in the employment context.

Cognitive Dimension

The cognitive component involves beliefs regarding the utility, burden, and disruption inherent in workflow evolution. Individuals with an unfavorable orientation maintain core schemas that procedural change is fundamentally counterproductive, destabilizing, or an administrative imposition that disrupts mastery (e.g., endorsing statements that “the trouble with most jobs is that you just get used to doing things in one way and then they want you to do them differently”). Conversely, individuals with positive cognitive appraisals view operational modifications as opportunities for skill acquisition, cognitive stimulation, and career development.

Affective Dimension

The affective domain encompasses the emotional tone evoked by the prospect of operational instability. Negative attitudes are manifested through subjective anxiety, psychological friction, apprehension, and distress when habitual routines are modified (e.g., feeling that “one can never feel at ease on a job where the ways of doing things are always being changed” or experiencing emotional disturbance when abandoning familiar methods). In contrast, change-receptive individuals display affective resilience, lower disruption anxiety, and emotional equilibrium when confronting novelty.

Conative / Behavioral Preference Dimension

The behavioral or intentional dimension captures an individual’s operational preference for stability versus variety in everyday tasks. It isolates whether an employee actively seeks procedural repetition (preferring to do their work “about the same way from one week to the next”) or possesses an appetite for dynamic role transitions (such as expressing a willingness to “change the kind of work I do every few months”). Crucially, this dimension also incorporates risk aversion and commitment to psychological safety, measuring whether an employee requires significant financial or positional incentives to voluntarily step outside established competency zones into unfamiliar roles.

Theoretical Framework

The Change Scale is grounded in foundational social-psychological and organizational paradigms that conceptualize human behavior as an ongoing dynamic interaction between individual personality dispositions and external structural forces.

Lewinian Field Theory and Force-Field Dynamics

The primary theoretical bedrock of the scale is Kurt Lewin’s Field Theory (1951). Lewin posited that human behavior is a function of the person and their psychological environment: B = f(P, E). In organizational contexts undergoing transition, change occurs through a tripartite process of unfreezing, moving, and refreezing. Within this force-field equilibrium, driving forces pushing for change encounter restraining forces striving to maintain the status quo. Trumbo operationalized attitudes toward change as an individualized restraining or driving disposition embedded within the psychological person (P). Employees possessing deeply entrenched habits and high disruption anxiety represent psychological restraining forces that stabilize the current equilibrium, requiring greater unfreezing energy to adapt.

Habituation, Cognitive Efficiency, and Functional Fixity

From an information-processing and cognitive learning perspective, occupational mastery relies upon the formation of stable motor programs and automated behavioral routines. As employees master complex tasks, cognitive load diminishes, generating feelings of self-efficacy and psychological safety. Trumbo drew upon psychological principles of habituation to explain why procedural disruptions evoke resistance: changing work methods forces re-automation, elevates mental workload, and produces temporary decrements in performance efficacy. The Change Scale isolates the individual variance in how readily employees tolerate this temporary cognitive disruption.

Participation and Psychological Resistance

The instrument also integrates insights from the seminal research of Coch and French (1948) on overcoming resistance to change. Coch and French demonstrated that resistance was not merely an irrational opposition to management, but a product of motivational frustration, fear of failure, and perceived loss of mastery. Trumbo’s scale formalizes this theoretical connection by measuring whether workers interpret organizational dynamism as an intrinsic frustration of competence or as a benign feature of modern professional life.

Validity

The psychometric validity of the Change Scale has been evaluated through multiple empirical strategies, with an emphasis on predictive and criterion-related validity during real-world technological and structural transitions.

Predictive Validity

In Trumbo’s (1961) foundational validation study, the instrument was administered to supervisory and non-supervisory personnel within a major organization undergoing substantial technological transitions (the introduction of automated electronic computer facilities). Predictive validity was demonstrated by correlating baseline Change Scale scores with direct behavioral and attitudinal criteria recorded during and after the operational transition:

• Perceptions of Change: Scores on the Change Scale exhibited statistically significant positive correlations with employees’ objective understanding and accurate perception of impending technological changes. Individuals with higher change receptivity scores perceived changes more realistically and viewed them as constructive rather than punitive.
• Evaluative Reactions to Specific Innovations: Trumbo recorded employees’ favorable versus unfavorable affective and behavioral responses to specific departmental adjustments. Employees scoring in the upper quartiles of the Change Scale voiced significantly fewer complaints, demonstrated lower absenteeism during workflow cutovers, and recorded higher supervisory ratings for overall adjustment.

Construct and Convergent Validity

Construct validity is evidenced through predictable correlations with salient psychological and demographic constructs. In the original and subsequent organizational inquiries:

• Age and Job Tenure: Statistically significant inverse correlations were identified between Change Scale scores, chronological age, and institutional tenure. Older workers with longer organizational tenure consistently scored lower on the scale, aligning with developmental theories of habit crystallization, occupational socialization, and status-quo bias.
• Education and Professional Specialization: Positive associations emerged between educational attainment and favorable attitudes toward change, supporting the hypothesis that formal educational experiences cultivate broader cognitive flexibility and tolerance for ambiguity.
• Job Satisfaction and Growth Orientation: Subsequent research utilizing Trumbo’s scale within industrial psychology demonstrated moderate positive convergent correlations with intrinsic job satisfaction, autonomy needs, and growth-need strength, while exhibiting negative correlations with measures of dogmatism and authoritarianism.

Discriminant Validity

The scale effectively discriminates between a generalized psychological preference for routine and specific institutional grievances. While dissatisfied employees may express dissatisfaction with compensation, supervision, or physical working conditions, Trumbo’s analyses confirmed that the Change Scale retained independent predictive utility over and above general morale indices, isolating dispositional receptivity to workflow modification from global occupational affect.

Reliability

The internal consistency and precision of the Change Scale were established through classical test theory methodologies.

Internal Consistency and Split-Half Reliability

In the original normative sample composed of supervisory and non-supervisory personnel across corporate departments, the scale’s internal consistency was calculated using the odd-even split-half technique. When corrected using the Spearman-Brown prophecy formula, the instrument yielded an overall reliability coefficient of .79.

For a brief 9-item self-report measure developed in 1961, a reliability coefficient of .79 represents a robust standard of internal consistency. This coefficient confirms that the 9 items measure a coherent psychological construct without imposing substantial test-taking fatigue on working personnel. Subsequent organizational studies utilizing adapted variants of Trumbo’s scale have reported Cronbach’s alpha coefficients ranging typically between .75 and .82, corroborating its operational stability across varying industrial contexts.

Item Characteristics and Discrimination

Item analysis conducted during the scale’s developmental phases revealed that both the positive item (Item 2) and the reverse-scored items (Items 3 through 9) demonstrated acceptable item-total correlations, generally falling between .35 and .62. The bifurcated format of Item 1 likewise exhibited significant discriminating power between employees classified by independent raters as “adaptable” versus “rigid” in operational execution.

Factor Analysis

In Trumbo’s original 1961 monograph, formal exploratory factor analysis (EFA) or confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) utilizing modern computational algorithms (such as maximum likelihood or principal axis factoring) was not reported, as psychometricians of that period relied primarily on split-half item-total matrices, Guttman scalogram techniques, and correlational clustering.

Subsequent Factor-Analytic Re-Evaluations

Later investigations in industrial psychology and organizational behavior that subjected Trumbo’s 9-item instrument to principal components analysis (PCA) and EFA with varimax and oblimin rotations have generally identified either a robust general factor or a parsimonious two-factor solution:

• Unidimensional Representation (General Change Receptivity): Under a single-factor extraction model, all 9 items load onto a unified general factor accounting for approximately 38% to 46% of total variance. Item 4 (trouble with most jobs is getting used to one way and having to do it differently) and Item 8 (disturbing to have to change to a new method) consistently demonstrate the highest primary factor loadings (.65 to .74), establishing them as core affective-cognitive markers of change aversion.
• Two-Factor Oblique Model: When multidimensional structures are evaluated, the items cluster into two interrelated dimensions (typically correlated at r ≈ .40 to .50):
  1. Preference for Routine and Stability (Items 3, 4, 5, 7, 8): Capturing emotional aversion to disruption, psychological comfort with repetitive weekly workflows, and a desire to remain within proven skill sets.
  2. Novelty Seeking and Mobility (Items 1, 2, 6, 9): Reflecting an active appetite for operational flux, willingness to switch occupational tasks frequently, and mobility thresholds related to tenure and compensation.

Despite the plausibility of a two-factor dimensional sub-structure, Trumbo designed the measure as a unidimensional composite index, an operational approach maintained by most contemporary organizational researchers who aggregate the items into a singular global score of change orientation.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Test Type: Original psychometric self-report rating scale.
• Construct Assessed: Employee Attitudes toward Work-Related Change (readiness, receptivity, and resistance to occupational procedural modifications).
• Author: Don A. Trumbo, Ph.D. (Kansas State University).
• Test Year: 1961.
• Target Population: Adult working population (18 years and older), including non-supervisory employees, administrative personnel, technical staff, and supervisors.
• Administration Method: Self-administered paper-and-pencil inventory (adaptable for digital and computer-assisted survey platforms).
• Administration Duration: Approximately 3 to 5 minutes.
• Total Number of Items: 9 items.
• Response Format: Dual-format 5-point Likert-type scales:
  • Item 1: 5-point behavioral continuum anchored from “is always the same” (1) to “change a great deal” (5).
  • Items 2 through 9: Standard 5-point Likert agreement scale ranging from “I strongly agree” to “I strongly disagree” (or numerically 1 to 5).
• Scoring and Directionality Protocol:
  • The instrument is scored such that higher total aggregate scores reflect a more favorable, open, and receptive attitude toward work-related change.
  • Direct Scoring: Items where agreement indicates positive receptivity to change are scored directly (e.g., Item 1: where 1 = “is always the same” and 5 = “change a great deal”; Item 2: where 5 = “I strongly agree” and 1 = “I strongly disagree”).
  • Reverse Scoring: Items 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 reflect aversion to change, preference for operational stability, or task conservatism. Agreement with these items indicates negative attitudes toward change. Therefore, these items must be reverse-coded (i.e., “I strongly agree” = 1, “Agree” = 2, “Undecided / Neutral” = 3, “Disagree” = 4, and “I strongly disagree” = 5).
  • Total Score Calculation: Summing all 9 items produces an aggregate raw score ranging from 9 to 45. Alternatively, a mean composite score ranging from 1.0 to 5.0 can be generated by dividing the total sum by 9.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Change Scale was formulated and published in 1961 by Don A. Trumbo in the Journal of Applied Psychology, a journal published by the American Psychological Association (APA). Under standard international copyright conventions and scholarly fair-use doctrines, the instrument is accessible for non-commercial academic, scientific, and educational research purposes.

Researchers intending to reproduce the instrument in published scholarly work, textbooks, or commercial assessment platforms should consult standard APA permissions guidelines regarding psychometric instruments published in historical journal volumes. No direct licensing fees or royalties are mandated for independent academic researchers administering the 9 items in empirical workplace investigations, provided appropriate scholarly attribution and reference to Trumbo (1961) are maintained.

References

• Coch, L., & French, J. R. P., Jr. (1948). Overcoming resistance to change. Human Relations, 1(4), 512–532. https://doi.org/10.1177/001872674800100408
• Lewin, K. (1951). Field theory in social science: Selected theoretical papers (D. Cartwright, Ed.). Harper & Row.
• Oreg, S. (2003). Resistance to change: Developing an individual differences measure. Journal of Applied Psychology, 88(4), 680–693. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.88.4.680
• Trumbo, D. A. (1961). Individual and group correlates of attitudes toward work-related changes. Journal of Applied Psychology, 45(5), 338–344. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0040464
• Trumbo, D. A. (1961). Change Scale [Database record]. APA PsycTests. https://doi.org/10.1037/t19609-000

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)