What Is the Difference between Change and Transition?

Two support teams were merged into one on the first Monday in March, under a new manager and a new name. The org chart changed that day. Six months later, people still say "the old team" when they mean the group they belong to, and the manager is still being asked who approves what.

Change is the external event that happens on a date, such as two teams becoming one, and transition is the internal process of letting go of the old way and taking up the new one, which runs on its own timeline. William Bridges, a practitioner, drew the distinction (Bridges and Bridges, 2016).

Who Separated Change from Transition?

William Bridges was a consultant and writer on life changes, and his 1980 book Transitions described a pattern he saw in people going through divorces, moves, bereavements, and new jobs. The change in each case was an event. What took time was something else, a process of letting go of the way things had been before a new way could take hold (Bridges, 1980). In 1991 he applied the same pattern to organizations in Managing Transitions, and the book's first chapter carries his two-sentence version. Change is situational. Transition is psychological (Bridges and Bridges, 2016).

The distinction is a practitioner's observation. It explains why an organization can mark a change complete on the date the new structure takes effect while the people inside it are still working out what the change means for them. In the merged team, the org chart was finished in March, and the question of which team each person belongs to was still open in September.

What Are the Three Phases of a Transition?

Bridges described three phases, and he put the ending first. A transition begins with an ending. Before anyone can take up the new way, they have to let go of the old one, which means losing a role, a routine, a group, a sense of competence, or a picture of how things work. The second phase he called the neutral zone, the period after the old way has stopped working and before the new way works, in which people are between identities and much of what they knew no longer applies. The third phase is the new beginning, when people have a new sense of how things work and their energy goes into it (Bridges, 1980; Bridges and Bridges, 2016).

In the merged team, the ending was the loss of two team names, two sets of working relationships, and two managers' ways of running things. The neutral zone was the spring, in which the approval process was unclear and people did their old jobs in a structure built for a different one. The new beginning is the point at which "the team" means the merged one without anyone thinking about it, and that point had not arrived by September.

The phases are a description, and Bridges did not measure them. The studies below measured the process, and they support the shape he described.

How Do People Interpret a Change as It Unfolds?

One account of the inside of a transition comes from Lynn Isabella, who interviewed 40 managers at one financial services company about events the company had gone through. She found that managers construed each event in four stages. In anticipation, before the event, they assembled rumors and fragments into a guess about what was coming. In confirmation, as the event arrived, they compared it with past events and with what they had expected. In culmination, as the change took effect, they amended their picture of the organization and tested what the new conditions meant. In aftermath, they judged the event in hindsight and took lessons from it (Isabella, 1990).

The study was one organization and 40 people, so it describes a pattern found there. What it adds to Bridges is that the transition begins before the change does. The anticipation stage starts with the first rumor, and the uncertainty of that wait has its own physiology, which is the subject of Why Is Waiting for News Worse than Getting Bad News?. In the merged team, the transition began in January, when people heard that something was being decided about the two teams, two months before the change.

Why Does the Same Change Affect People Differently?

Because each person appraises it. Alannah Rafferty and Mark Griffin studied employees in one organization across two annual rounds, measuring their perceptions of change one month before measuring their attitudes. They separated three features of a change as people experienced it, how frequent change had been, how large its impact was, and how well planned it appeared, and found that the frequency of change was linked, through uncertainty, to lower job satisfaction and higher intentions to leave (Rafferty and Griffin, 2006). A person who has been through several changes in a short time starts the next transition with that history, which is one condition behind a team's exhaustion with another change (Why Is My Team Exhausted by Another Change?).

Mel Fugate, Angelo Kinicki, and Gregory Prussia followed employees through an organizational change and modeled the chain from appraisal to outcome. People who appraised the change negatively used less control-oriented coping and more escape coping. Escape coping went with negative emotions. Negative emotions predicted sick time and the intention to quit, and intention to quit predicted actual departures, with each link running through the one before it (Fugate, Kinicki and Prussia, 2008). The transition, in that study, is the sequence from the first appraisal to the later behavior.

What Decides How People React to a Change?

The appraisal depends on what the change puts at risk, which is the subject of Why Is Change at Work So Hard?, and on the five social conditions a reorganization touches (Why Does a Reorg Feel Threatening Even When Your Job Is Safe?), and a negative appraisal starts the body's response described in What Does Fight or Flight Mean at Work?. A sixty-year review of 79 quantitative studies on how recipients react to organizational change found that reactions, affective, cognitive, and behavioral, depend on the change process, on what the change contains, and on the context the person is in, and the process factors include how much people participate and how the change is communicated (Oreg, Vakola and Armenakis, 2011).

Why Does Every Transition Start with a Loss?

Bridges put the ending first because something has to be given up before anything new can be taken on, and the stress research gives that observation a mechanism. Stevan Hobfoll's conservation of resources theory holds that people work to keep, protect, and build the resources they value, and that what produces stress is the loss or threatened loss of those resources (Hobfoll, 1989). In a later statement of the theory he made resource loss the principal ingredient in the stress process, with a loss weighing more heavily than a gain of the same size (Hobfoll, 2001). A merger removes resources that appear on no org chart. A team name, a manager who knew your work, a seat near the people you ask for help, and the competence that came from knowing how things were done are all resources in Hobfoll's sense.

The bereavement research adds the shape of the process. Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut described coping with a loss as an oscillation between two kinds of work, loss-oriented, which confronts what has gone, and restoration-oriented, which attends to the new tasks and roles that the loss creates, with periods of respite from each (Stroebe and Schut, 1999). Their model was built for bereavement, and a merged team is a smaller loss than a death. A person in the merged team moves between missing the old team and working out the new one, which is the same oscillation at a smaller scale, and the losses that a way of working carries with it are the subject of a later post.

What Happens in the Middle?

In Bridges' account the neutral zone is the phase organizations plan for least, because on the calendar the change is already done (Bridges and Bridges, 2016). In the merged team, the old approval path has stopped working. The new one is not yet understood. Work that used to run on habit now requires asking, and the asking goes to a manager who is also new. Isabella's confirmation and culmination stages sit here, in which people compare the change with what they expected and test what the new conditions mean (Isabella, 1990), and the uncertainty in that period is the kind measured in Why Is Waiting for News Worse than Getting Bad News?.

Christine Amiot and colleagues followed 220 employees through a merger, measuring them three months after it and again two years later. The features of the change that people saw as positive at three months predicted their confidence in handling it and lower stress at that point, and confidence at three months predicted problem-focused coping two years later, which went with higher job satisfaction and identification with the merged organization. Avoidance coping went with lower identification (Amiot, Terry, Jimmieson and Callan, 2006). Early confidence in handling the change predicted how people were coping two years on, and the two-year point was still inside the process for the people identifying with the old organization, which is the period a later post on the middle of a change examines.

Do Things Get Worse Before They Get Better?

Many practitioner models say so. Pamela Elrod and Donald Tippett compared change and transition models from several fields and found that most of them share two traits. They follow a three-phase structure that goes back to Kurt Lewin, and they describe a drop in capability or performance in the middle phase before recovery (Elrod and Tippett, 2002). The section on the model's evidence below states what those models rest on, and the dip itself, as the change curve and the J-curve describe it, is the subject of a later post.

John Kotter, in a practitioner article drawn from his observation of over a hundred companies and carrying no formal data, listed the failure to plan for and create short-term wins as one of eight errors that cause transformation efforts to fail (Kotter, 1995), and the mechanism by which an early win changes what people expect is described in Why Do Small Early Wins Change How People Feel about a Project?.

Is Resistance Part of the Transition?

Yes, and the research locates it in the ending. Shaul Oreg's measure of dispositional resistance to change found four tendencies that vary on a scale, which Why Is Change at Work So Hard? describes (Oreg, 2003). In Bridges' account, what reads as resistance from the outside is a person in the ending phase, giving up something specific (Bridges and Bridges, 2016), and in Hobfoll's account the stress comes from that loss (Hobfoll, 2001). Which losses sit behind a refusal of a change that would help the person is the subject of a later post.

The people who keep their jobs in a layoff go through a transition of their own. Joel Brockner and colleagues found that survivors' work effort rose and then fell as their job insecurity rose, an inverted U, with the pattern strongest among people who most needed the income (Brockner, Grover, Reed and DeWitt, 1992). The survivors' transition runs through the same ending, with job insecurity as the loss, and a later post on the people who survive layoffs follows it.

Where Did the Three-Step Picture Come From?

Kurt Lewin, in a 1947 article on group dynamics, described changing a group's standard in three steps, unfreezing the present level, moving to the new level, and freezing group life at the new level (Lewin, 1947). The passage was a short part of a long article, and a 2016 study of its history found that the three-step model as it is now taught, with "change" and "refreeze" as the middle and last steps, was built by other writers after Lewin's death and attributed to him (Cummings, Bridgman and Brown, 2016). Karl Weick and Robert Quinn, reviewing the field in 1999, used the three steps to describe episodic change, the kind with a start and a finish, and distinguished it from continuous change, the ongoing adjustment in which the sequence runs the other way (Weick and Quinn, 1999). Bridges' three phases describe the person going through episodic change, and Lewin's three steps describe the group.

What Does Transition Mean?

Transition: in William Bridges' account, the internal process by which a person lets go of the way things were and takes up the way things will be, in three phases, an ending, a neutral zone between the old and the new, and a new beginning. It is distinct from the change, which is the external event, and it runs on its own timeline, continuing after the change (Bridges, 1980; Bridges and Bridges, 2016).

How Solid Is the Model?

Bridges did not test his three phases. The research above supports the shape, a process that begins before the event, involves loss, has an uncomfortable middle, and ends in a new picture of how things work, without supporting any fixed timeline or sequence through which everyone passes.

The change curve rests on less. Elrod and Tippett compared models and verified the dip during one team's formation (Elrod and Tippett, 2002). The closest empirical test tracked one Finnish company of 44 people through a ten-year replacement of its main system and found that the company's financial result dipped and then recovered to about its starting level. The study measured money in one firm, and no employee's mood (Nikula, Jurvanen, Gotel and Gause, 2010). A 2025 review concluded that little high-quality research has validated the curve (Holdsworth and Bridgman, 2025). The curve is a model that practitioners agree on, and a search for a peer-reviewed study showing employee mood or performance following it through a change found none.

The five stages of grief that several versions of the curve borrow, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, were described by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross from interviews with dying patients, and her book concerns terminal illness (Kübler-Ross, 1969). Whether the stages hold for grief is disputed. A study of 233 bereaved people found that yearning was the dominant negative indicator throughout and that acceptance was the most endorsed item at every point, while the five indicators peaked in the predicted order, which the authors read as partial support for the sequence (Maciejewski, Zhang, Block and Prigerson, 2007). A later review by Stroebe, Schut, and Boerner argued that the stage model lacks empirical support and can harm people who are told their grief should follow it (Stroebe, Schut and Boerner, 2017). The two sources disagree about the sequence.

Pick the change your team is in the middle of and write down, for one person on the team, what ended for them on the date the change took effect.

FAQ

What is the difference between change and transition?

Change is the external event, the new structure or system that takes effect on a date. Transition is the internal process of letting go of the old way and taking up the new one. William Bridges, a practitioner, drew the distinction, and his one-line form is that change is situational and transition is psychological (Bridges and Bridges, 2016).

Is it normal to still be adjusting months after a change?

Yes. Transition runs on its own timeline. In a study of 220 employees after a merger, confidence in handling the change at three months predicted problem-focused coping two years later, which went with higher job satisfaction and identification with the merged company, so the adjustment was still underway well past the event (Amiot, Terry, Jimmieson and Callan, 2006).

What are the three phases of transition?

An ending, a neutral zone, and a new beginning, in that order. The ending is letting go of the old way; the neutral zone is the period after the old way has stopped working and before the new one works; the new beginning is when people have a new picture of how things work (Bridges, 1980). The phases are a practitioner's description.

Does everyone go through transition the same way?

No. How people react depends on how they appraise the change, on how frequent change has been for them, and on the change process, including how much they participate and how it is communicated (Oreg, Vakola and Armenakis, 2011; Rafferty and Griffin, 2006). Dispositional resistance varies on a scale across four tendencies (Oreg, 2003).

Why does the transition start before the change?

Because people start interpreting a change from the first rumor. In interviews with 40 managers, Lynn Isabella found an anticipation stage in which people assembled fragments into a guess about what was coming, before confirmation, culmination, and aftermath (Isabella, 1990). In the merged team, that stage began two months before the change took effect.

Is the change curve real?

It is a model practitioners agree on, and the evidence behind it is thin. Elrod and Tippett found that most change models describe a dip in the middle phase (Elrod and Tippett, 2002), the closest empirical test tracked a single company's finances (Nikula and colleagues, 2010), and a 2025 review found little high-quality research validating it (Holdsworth and Bridgman, 2025).

Did Kurt Lewin say unfreeze, change, refreeze?

His 1947 article describes unfreezing the present level, moving to the new level, and freezing group life at the new level (Lewin, 1947). The three-step model as it is taught today was assembled by later writers and attributed to him (Cummings, Bridgman and Brown, 2016).

What can I do about a transition I am leading?

Treat the ending as real. Name what people are losing, the team name, the working relationships, the competence on the old process, on the date the change takes effect, since loss is the principal ingredient in the stress process (Hobfoll, 2001). Build participation and communication into the process, two of the process factors the sixty-year review lists among the antecedents of how people react (Oreg, Vakola and Armenakis, 2011).

If you're leading a change and want people to keep moving through it, The DANCE System gives you 29 tools for planning and communicating the change in five phases, from defining it to keeping it in place after launch.

Related Posts:

What Does Fight or Flight Mean at Work?

Why Is Change at Work So Hard?