Stefanie MaccaroneDirector of Operations and Sales Enablement| Change Enthusiasm GlobalBrooklyn, NY, United States
In our 2026 U.S. benchmark study with the Center for Generational Kinetics (CGK), 59% of respondents said anxiety was the primary emotion they experience during change initiatives. This is nearly unchanged from 56% in 2022 when Change Enthusiasm Global first sponsored the study.
What stood out to me, though, wasn’t just the persistence of anxiety. It was the strong connection between emotional safety and change adoption. The data showed that employees are significantly more motivated to embrace change when they feel genuinely heard and understood by managers and peers. And Gen Z? They're surprisingly more hopeful than other generations.
For project and change leaders, this feels like an important reminder: successful change, especially in this age of AI, is about creating environments where people can process uncertainty, ask questions, and feel included in the journey.
Project & PMO Manager | Research & Enterprise Mentor| GFB HoldingSouth America, Brazil
The persistence of anxiety during change initiatives highlights a duality that modern leaders must navigate: the delicate balance between fostering psychological safety and inadvertently cultivating organizational fragility. While creating an inclusive, emotionally secure environment is essential for driving change adoption, we must resist the temptation to build a sheltered, "imaginary" comfort zone that shields teams from the relentless demands of the market, real-world projects demand tangible results, impose natural adversaries, and require teams to grow stronger, sharper, and more robust to achieve greatness. The ultimate challenge for project and change leaders lies in precisely identifying the fine line between the "harm that evolutes" (the constructive friction, high-performance pressure, and developmental discomfort that forces professional growth) and the "harm that damages," which actively degrades human capability and trust. To truly succeed in this era of AI-driven transformation, we should not aim to sanitize the workplace of all challenge, but rather design welcoming environments where emotional inclusion serves as the stable bedrock for high-stakes capability, transforming shared uncertainty not into fragility, but into a robust collective drive to deliver exceptional results. Saving Changes...
Luis BrancoCEO| Business Insight, Consultores de Gestão, LdªCarcavelos, Lisboa, Portugal
One of the most important insights in this discussion is that anxiety during organizational change is often less a reaction to change itself and more a reaction to uncertainty without sufficient clarity, trust, or psychological safety.
People can navigate significant transformation when they understand:
Why change is happening,
How decisions are being made,
What support exists,
Whether concerns, doubts, and disagreements can be expressed safely without fear of exclusion or negative consequences.
That is why emotional safety is not a secondary or “soft” dimension of change leadership. It is a fundamental operational condition for sustainable adaptation, learning, and change adoption.
This becomes even more critical in AI-enabled environments.
AI accelerates workflows, decision cycles, automation, and organizational change itself. But if trust, communication, inclusion, and decision transparency do not evolve at the same pace, organizations risk accelerating anxiety faster than they accelerate alignment.
I also find the Gen Z signal particularly interesting.
Younger generations may not necessarily experience less uncertainty. But many have grown up in environments defined by continuous technological change, instability, and constant adaptation. In some cases, this may create greater psychological familiarity with uncertainty itself.
For project and change leaders, this creates an important responsibility.
Successful transformation is no longer only about implementation speed, adoption metrics, or delivery execution.
It increasingly depends on an organization’s ability to preserve trust, human coherence, inclusion, and responsible leadership while navigating continuous change under pressure.
Very relevant reflection. Saving Changes...
Sergio Luis ConteHelping to create solutions for everyone| Worldwide based OrganizationsBuenos Aires, Argentina
After more than 40 years in the profession I must said: nothing new under the sun. Saving Changes...
SANTOSH BADGUJARCHIEF OPERATING OFFICER| Accumax Lab DevicesAhmedabad, Gujarat, India
Stefanie, this data resonates deeply with what I observe in our manufacturing operations. The persistence of anxiety as the dominant response to change — essentially unchanged over four years — tells me that most organizations are still leading change as an announcement rather than a process.
The finding that emotional safety drives change adoption is one I've tested firsthand. When we introduced new quality management systems and process changes on the production floor, the teams that pushed back hardest weren't those who lacked capability — they were the ones who hadn't been included in the design phase and felt the change was being done *to* them rather than *with* them. Bringing floor supervisors into the change design early, letting them flag concerns before rollout, completely shifted the dynamic.
On Gen Z being more hopeful: I think this reflects a generation that entered the workforce already in a state of continuous change — remote work, AI tools, economic volatility. They've normalized uncertainty in a way that older generations haven't. That's actually a competitive advantage for organizations that can channel that openness productively.
The practical implication for project and change leaders is straightforward: invest in listening mechanisms before, during, and after change initiatives. Not surveys — actual conversations. The data shows people respond to feeling heard, and that's a leadership behavior, not a technology solution. Saving Changes...
Interesting insight, and it actually lines up with what a lot of workplaces are seeing in practice right now. The anxiety number isn’t surprising, most change programs still feel like something being done to employees rather than with them, so resistance is almost built in. The part about emotional safety driving adoption is probably the most important takeaway here. If people don’t feel safe asking questions or admitting confusion, they’ll just quietly disengage and pretend to follow along. The Gen Z angle is also believable. They’ve grown up with constant change (tech shifts, remote work, AI tools), so they’re a bit more used to adapting, even if they still feel uncertainty. Overall, the key point is simple: change management isn’t just process and communication anymore, it’s emotional buy in. If that part fails, even the best strategy won’t land. Saving Changes...
Program Manager| HARPER SRLSanto Domingo / Distrito Nacional, Dominican Republic
I think this reflects what many teams are already experiencing in practice. A lot of resistance to change is not necessarily about the change itself, but about uncertainty, lack of visibility, or feeling excluded from decisions that affect people directly. I’ve also noticed that teams usually adapt better when communication feels honest, questions are welcomed, and managers create enough space for people to process the transition instead of only pushing adoption metrics. Saving Changes...
Senior IS Project Manager| Baycare Health SystemsClearwater, Fl, United States
When I started my Career I was told that (a) people don't like change, and (b) things change all the time. ten years ago there was a popular book written by Dr. Spencer Johnson, "Who Moved My Cheese?".
I think this is part of the human experience that we must learn to adapt and accept change in the workplace. Saving Changes...
Imran AfzalAuthor| The Strategic PMOCary, NC, United States
One thing I think this discussion surfaces is that organizational anxiety is often less about change itself and more about the loss of interpretive stability.
Most organizations today are operating in environments where:
priorities shift continuously
roles evolve rapidly
AI is changing workflows faster than governance can adapt
and employees are expected to reinterpret their work constantly
In that environment, uncertainty becomes cumulative.
What I’ve observed is that people can tolerate significant change when they believe:
leadership is coherent
decisions are explainable
tradeoffs are transparent
concerns can be surfaced safely
and the organization has a stable mechanism for making sense of ambiguity
Without that, even well-managed transformations start to feel psychologically chaotic.
That’s why I increasingly think successful change leadership is becoming less about “driving adoption” and more about creating organizational clarity under continuous uncertainty.
AI makes this even more important.
AI accelerates execution, information flow, and decision velocity — but if interpretation, trust, and communication systems don’t mature at the same pace, organizations may simply accelerate confusion faster than alignment.
So while I agree emotional safety matters, I think the deeper operational challenge is building organizations that can maintain coherence while continuously adapting.
That may ultimately become one of the defining leadership capabilities of the next decade. Saving Changes...
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