This article examines the plausible interactions and ramifications of chronic and acute stressors in the workplace. Our position is that current organizational change and work stress models inadequately address the subjective experience of employees. We use existing physiological adaptation paradigms as starting points to illuminate the psychological responses to multiple and simultaneous environmental demands. A new framework is developed, the Asynchronous Multiple Overlapping Change (AMOC) model, to account for the complexity of contemporary work settings. We suggest that the net effect of employee response to continuous major and minor organizational changes is a primary contributor to employee resistance to change: The cumulative impact of multiple and sometimes conflicting change initiatives eventually overwhelms cognitive appraisal and coping mechanisms. Other theoretical, empirical, and practical implications of the proposed framework are also discussed.
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