Kübler-Ross Change Curve
People are often assumed to move through a recognizable emotional sequence, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, when confronting organizational change, but the model was built from interviews with terminally ill patients confronting their own impending death, not employees adjusting to a reorg, and even in its original context it isn’t the strict, linear staircase it’s often taught as.
What Is It?
Psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross proposed the five stages in her 1969 book On Death and Dying, developed from interviews with terminally ill patients about how they coped with their own impending death. She did not present the stages as a mandatory emotional itinerary, and in later clarifications explicitly emphasized that people could experience several simultaneously, move between them, or not experience them all, not a rigid checklist every patient completes in sequence. Decades later, organizational change practitioners adapted the model to describe how employees emotionally respond to significant workplace change, mergers, layoffs, reorganizations, new systems, even though Kübler-Ross’s original research concerned individuals confronting their own death, not employees reacting to a new reporting structure. The familiar workplace diagram, a smooth emotional curve that dips and then rises through labeled stages, is itself part of that later management adaptation, not something Kübler-Ross developed from organizational data. The stage framework has also been extended to bereavement, where stage theories of grief have faced substantial empirical criticism; more broadly, evidence does not support treating the five stages as a universal sequence people reliably progress through, whether in dying, grieving a loss, or adjusting to change at work.
Why Does It Matter?
Leaders often use the curve to predict or manage how employees will react to change, expecting a roughly predictable emotional arc that resolves into acceptance if they simply wait long enough. This creates two related problems: it can normalize resistance as a “stage to pass through” rather than a signal worth investigating, and it can impose a fixed emotional timeline on people whose actual reactions vary considerably and rarely move in a clean line from denial through anger and bargaining to acceptance.
What Changes Once You See It?
You stop assuming a workforce’s negative reaction to change is simply “denial” or “anger” that will resolve itself with time. You start asking what’s underneath a given reaction, a legitimate grievance, a real risk, a lack of information, rather than filing all resistance under an emotional stage to be waited out. You can still use the curve as a reminder that change may involve loss, uncertainty, anger, anxiety, or adjustment, but not as a map telling you which emotion a person should be experiencing next. You also get more skeptical of tidy stage-based narratives applied to organizational behavior generally, given how loosely the underlying evidence supports them, even in the clinical context the model came from.
Common Misunderstandings
- It wasn’t originally about organizational change at all. Kübler-Ross researched dying patients, not employees experiencing a merger or reorg, the workplace-change application is a later borrowing by other writers.
- It isn’t a strict, universal, linear sequence even in Kübler-Ross’s original context. She did not present the stages as a mandatory emotional itinerary, and later explicitly emphasized that people could experience several simultaneously, move between them, or not experience them all.
- The familiar curve itself is not Kübler-Ross’s original model. Plotting employee morale or performance as a predictable dip-and-recovery trajectory is a later change-management adaptation layered on top of the five-stage framework.
- It isn’t a strongly empirically validated model. The extension to bereavement has drawn substantial empirical criticism, and evidence doesn’t support a universal five-stage sequence people reliably progress through, whether the context is dying, grieving a loss, or workplace change.
- It doesn’t mean waiting out a “stage” is a sound management response. Even where something like these emotions does show up, treating resistance as a stage to be patiently endured rather than a signal to investigate can mean overlooking real, valid concerns underneath it.
Diagnostic Question
When someone reacts negatively to a change, are we treating it as an emotional stage to wait out, or are we actually finding out what’s behind the reaction?
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Field Notes
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Related Field Guide
Origin
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying (1969). The now-common application to organizational and workplace change was popularized by later change-management writers and consultants, not developed or validated by Kübler-Ross herself.