During the last ten years, there has been a slow, but promising, increase in the number of
studies that apply a multilevel, or cross-level, perspective when aiming to explain significant variations in
employee behavior, such as job satisfaction and organizational commitment. These studies typically
investigate their outcome variables by focusing on antecedents at both the individual and the
organizational levels in the same methodological framework or research model. Within the subfield of
organizational change studies, the picture seems to be somewhat less promising, and multilevel, or crosslevel,
organizational change studies seem to be outnumbered by equivalent studies that are being
conducted within subfields like leadership and occupational health. When addressing organizational
change, researchers seem to agree that prerequisites for managing healthy or successful change initiatives
may reside both in the employees and in the organization, but still they tend to limit their research to just
one conceptual and analytical level, and do not often explore how phenomena may work together across
these levels in order to ensure healthy change. The aim of this chapter is to demonstrate why and how
organizational change should be studied within a methodological framework that takes into account the
multilevel nature of organizational change. The chapter is structured around two main questions: a) why
should organizational change be studied within a multilevel perspective?, and b) drawing on some of the
most recent studies within organizational change, what issues related to organizational change could be
studied within this methodological framework? The first part of the chapter discusses conceptual and
methodological reasons why organizational change should be studied from a multilevel perspective, by
providing a brief and easily accessible introduction to the philosophical and methodological literature that
exists on the topic. The second part of the chapter presents change topics that might be particularly
interesting to explore by means of a multilevel framework. The presentation is based on several empirical
studies that have been published in the period from 1999 to 2008, and focuses on the relationship that
may exist between the characteristics of the change effort, the individual or collective change capabilities
in the organization, and two individual outcome variables that have been associated with successful
change initiatives, namely job satisfaction and organizational commitment. The categories developed by
Armenakis and Bedeian (1999) are used as an important framework in this discussion.
