Developing Readiness for the Implementation of a New Personnel Evaluation System in the Context of Management Buyout of a Consulting Company

In 2022 many international companies made strategic decisions to leave the Russian market, as a result, their local divisions acquired the status of independent companies. A leading consulting company in Russian commercial real estate market was selected for the study, which, after leaving the global network, faced the need to introduce a new personnel evaluation system. This change demands a comprehensive understanding of employee readiness — a fundamental concept featured in the change management literature. The aim of this study is to develop an approach for overcoming the unreadiness of employees for the implementation of a new personnel evaluation system in the context of the management buyout of a consulting company. The data was obtained by conducting a survey and semi-structured in-depth interviews among employees of the selected company. Further analysis included clustering k-means analysis, factor analysis and a discriminant analysis. Three distinct clusters of employees were identified based on the factors of readiness for the implementation of the new personnel assessment system: “Active supporters”, “Cautious evaluators” and “Conservative skeptics”. The results also indicate that the readiness of employees for the implementation of a new personnel evaluation system is determined by the structure of attitudes towards it, openness to change and the desire for self-enhancement, understanding of the goals, objectives, principles and potential results of the implemented system, as well as various types of past failures of employees and their attitude towards them. To mitigate these issues, this paper proposes recommendations for each cluster based on the methodology within the framework of the theory of planned behavior by Fishbein and Ajzen, as well as the concept of execution as learning by Amy Edmondson.