Organizational change often provokes concept uncertainty among employees—questioning “what is the change”—particularly when the change consists of highly novel and ambiguous content, such as adoption of emerging technologies. This study explores how employees navigate through phases of high concept uncertainty by developing concepts of the pending change based on available information. We accompanied the implementation of a robot—internally and externally communicated as organizational change—into an organization. Based on an inductive qualitative case study involving analysis of 31 semi-structured interviews, we reveal that employees use different ways to reduce their concept uncertainty, depending on the opportunity to gain first-hand experiences with the robot. Compared to employees without such access to direct cues, experience led employees to develop a more realistic image of the robot and perceptions of human agency gains in contrast to more blurred image and perceptions of agency loss. On this basis, the two groups of employees derived different concepts of the change itself, and construe distinct projections of anticipated future versions of their organization, a phenomenon that we characterize as organizational versioning.
