Dynamic CapabilitiesMarketing StrategyOrganizational PsychologyPsychometrics

Strategic Change Capability Scale (SCC)

A comprehensive academic psychometric profile of the Strategic Change Capability Scale (SCC), a 20-item, second-order reflective scale measuring dynamic capabilities across prechange, initial implementation, and postimplementation stages.

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PUBLISHED
Scientifically Reviewed · Dr. Marwa Abd-Alazim · September 18, 2026
Medically & Scientifically Reviewed Verified: September 18, 2026
Dr. Marwa Abd-Alazim Ph.D.
Professor of Psychology • University of Kerbala
Review Criteria & Clinical Standards

This content undergoes rigorous scientific peer-review and medical editorial standards at Arab Psychology Network to ensure clinical accuracy, validity, and compliance with evidence-based guidelines from leading psychological and healthcare authorities (APA / WHO).

1. Abstract

The Strategic Change Capability Scale (SCC) is a psychometrically validated, 20-item, second-order reflective measurement instrument designed to evaluate an organization’s dynamic capacity to formulate, execute, and sustain major strategic transformations within its marketing and operational environments. Developed by Georgios S. Bekos, Simos Chari, Milla Jaakkola, and Heiner Evanschitzky (2025), the instrument captures strategic change across three sequential, interconnected stages: prechange, initial implementation, and postimplementation. These three stages are operationalized via five first-order reflective dimensions: (1) Developing the Business Case, (2) Preparing Employees, (3) Establishing Organizational Setup, (4) Institutionalizing the Change, and (5) Assessing and Adjusting. Developed through an initial grounded theory study comprising 26 in-depth qualitative interviews with senior executives and strategy consultants, the scale was subsequently validated across five quantitative studies involving approximately 738 marketing executives and business leaders across the United Kingdom and the United States. Empirical validation demonstrates that the SCC exhibits robust construct validity, high internal consistency reliability (composite reliabilities exceeding .85; Cronbach’s alphas ranging from .86 to .92 across dimensions), and invariant second-order factor structures. Crucially, the SCC demonstrates significant incremental predictive validity, explaining substantial variance in overall market performance, customer equity, and financial performance over and above established dynamic marketing capabilities such as strategic flexibility, organizational agility, market responsiveness, and marketing adaptiveness.

2. Keywords

Strategic Change Capability, Dynamic Capabilities, Marketing Strategy, Organizational Transformation, Scale Development, Prechange Preparation, Strategy Implementation, Institutionalization, Performance Monitoring, Psychometrics

3. Authors

The Strategic Change Capability Scale was conceptualized, developed, and empirically validated by a team of leading scholars in marketing strategy, organizational behavior, and strategic management:

  • Georgios S. Bekos: Department of Marketing, Alliance Manchester Business School, The University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom. Specializes in strategic marketing, dynamic capabilities, and strategic change processes.
  • Simos Chari: Marketing Division, Leeds University Business School, University of Leeds, Leeds, United Kingdom. Research focuses on marketing strategy implementation, corporate agility, and quantitative marketing models.
  • Milla Jaakkola: Department of Marketing, Turku School of Economics, University of Turku, Turku, Finland. Expert in organizational adaptation, strategic flexibility, and market-oriented capability architectures.
  • Heiner Evanschitzky: Aston Business School, Aston University, Birmingham, United Kingdom. Professor of Marketing, focusing on retail strategy, customer management, and organizational change dynamics.

4. Purpose

Strategic transformations represent some of the most resource-intensive, high-stakes endeavors an enterprise can undertake. Despite extensive investments in digital transformation, commercial restructuring, and customer-centric reorientations, empirical studies consistently reveal that between 50% and 70% of organizational strategic change initiatives fail to achieve their stated objectives. Traditional organizational psychology and strategic management literature has historically suffered from conceptual fragmentation: strategy formulation has been studied in isolation from organizational behavior, while change execution has frequently been reduced to reactive human resource management. Furthermore, existing dynamic capability metrics have primarily focused on generic organizational postures—such as organizational agility, absorptive capacity, or strategic flexibility—without articulating the granular, stage-based operational routines that managers must orchestrate when transitioning a marketing organization from an incumbent state to a desired future state.

The fundamental purpose of the Strategic Change Capability Scale (SCC) is to bridge this theoretical and diagnostic divide. The instrument provides an empirically rigorous, stage-contingent diagnostic framework capable of assessing an organization’s systemic competence across the entire lifecycle of a strategic change initiative. In applied corporate and clinical-organizational consulting contexts, the SCC serves as a powerful diagnostic audit tool. It enables leadership teams to benchmark their organizational readiness prior to committing capital, pinpoint structural bottlenecks during mid-transformation rollout, and diagnose why previous transformations failed to stick. In academic research, the SCC provides scholars with an operationalized metric to test hypotheses regarding how marketing capabilities interact with competitive intensity, environmental turbulence, and corporate governance to drive sustainable competitive advantage.

5. Psychological Construct

The construct of Strategic Change Capability (SCC) is defined as a marketing organization’s dynamic, learned, and repeatable pattern of collective activities through which it systematically prepares, initiates, embeds, and refines strategic market-facing reorientations. In accordance with contemporary psychometric theory, SCC is conceptualized as a hierarchical, second-order reflective construct manifested across five distinct first-order dimensions structured along three temporal stages:

Stage 1: Prechange

The prechange stage represents the cognitive, analytical, and socio-emotional foundation of the transformation. Success during this phase hinges upon establishing strategic legitimacy and cultivating organizational readiness.

  • Developing the Business Case (Items 1–4): This dimension captures the cognitive and analytical competence of leadership to clearly define the strategic rationale, construct a compelling future vision, establish rigorous financial and commercial justifications, and systematically map potential operational risks and strategic opportunities. It measures the organization’s ability to move beyond vague aspirations and establish an ironclad rationale that demonstrates why the status quo is untenable.
  • Preparing Employees (Items 5–8): Grounded in organizational psychology and readiness for change theory, this dimension evaluates the socio-communicative routines deployed to articulate the necessity of change to the workforce. It gauges leadership’s active identification of cognitive resistance, mitigation of employee cynicism, creation of psychological safety, and intentional generation of genuine commitment and buy-in across diverse functional silos.

Stage 2: Initial Implementation

The initial implementation stage concerns the operational mobilization of tangible and intangible organizational assets, establishing behavioral governance, and embedding new working modalities into corporate routines.

  • Establishing Organizational Setup (Items 9–12): This dimension evaluates structural orchestration. It measures how effectively the enterprise realigns its reporting hierarchies, allocates budgetary and technological resources, mobilizes cross-functional implementation task forces, institutes change governance mechanisms, clarifies operational roles, and equips personnel with the tools and capability-building programs required to execute new initiatives.
  • Institutionalizing the Change (Items 13–16): Drawing from institutional theory and organizational habit formation, this dimension measures the degree to which novel operational processes, customer-engagement protocols, and strategic routines are embedded into everyday workflows. It specifically assesses the realignment of formal performance appraisal systems, executive compensation incentives, corporate cultural values, and longitudinal reinforcement mechanisms that prevent regression toward legacy behaviors.

Stage 3: Postimplementation

The postimplementation stage represents the organizational feedback loop, ensuring dynamic adaptability in volatile external markets.

  • Assessing and Adjusting (Items 17–20): This dimension reflects the organization’s dynamic sensing and continuous improvement routines. It captures the systematic tracking of performance milestones, rigorous post-launch outcome evaluation, identification of operational friction or strategic drift, and the agile execution of real-time corrective actions and operational recalibrations based on objective data.

6. Theoretical Framework

The conceptual architecture of the Strategic Change Capability Scale is rooted in the convergence of three foundational paradigms within strategic management and organizational psychology:

1. The Dynamic Capabilities View (DCV)

Originating from the seminal work of David Teece, Gary Pisano, and Amy Shuen (1997), and further refined by Teece (2007) and Kathleen Eisenhardt and Jeffrey Martin (2000), the Dynamic Capabilities View posits that sustained competitive advantage in rapidly shifting market regimes depends not on static resource endowments, but on an enterprise’s ability to “sense, seize, and transform.” The SCC directly operationalizes the “transforming” (or reconfiguring) cluster of dynamic capabilities within marketing strategy. While operational capabilities allow a firm to earn its living today (ordinary capabilities), strategic change capabilities enable the enterprise to systematically alter its product-market configurations, customer interaction architectures, and value-creation routines over time.

2. Stage-Based Models of Organizational Change

The temporal organization of the SCC draws heavily from classical social-psychological models, particularly Kurt Lewin’s (1947) three-step change framework: unfreezing, moving, and refreezing. In the SCC, the Prechange stage corresponds directly to Lewin’s unfreezing phase, wherein current paradigms are questioned, complacency is dismantled, and motivational readiness is fostered (Armenakis, Harris, & Mossholder, 1993). Initial Implementation reflects the moving phase, wherein structural scaffolding, new technologies, and modified behaviors are introduced. Postimplementation corresponds to the refreezing and re-calibrating phase, ensuring behavioral stability while maintaining strategic responsiveness. Furthermore, the framework integrates modern insights from John Kotter’s eight-step change process, particularly regarding vision communication, guiding coalitions, and the consolidation of gains.

3. Routine-Based Microfoundations

Modern strategy theory demands that dynamic capabilities not be treated as opaque “black boxes.” Instead, they must be decomposed into identifiable, replicable managerial microfoundations (Felin et al., 2012). The SCC operationalizes strategic change capability not as an innate executive trait or vague firm culture, but as a deliberate constellation of repeatable micro-routines: risk assessments, communication forums, steering committee meetings, training cadences, incentive re-weightings, and metric variance reviews.

7. Validity

The psychometric properties of the SCC were established through a multi-study development and validation program conducted by Bekos et al. (2025), adhering to the rigorous scale development guidelines articulated by Churchill (1979) and MacKenzie, Podsakoff, and Podsakoff (2011).

Content and Face Validity

Initial item generation originated from a comprehensive literature review combined with 26 inductive, semi-structured grounded theory interviews with senior marketing executives, chief commercial officers, and transformation consultants. An initial pool of 54 candidate items was evaluated by an expert panel of 8 academic strategy scholars and 6 senior executives, who evaluated each item for conceptual clarity, representativeness, and face validity. Iterative content adequacy assessments reduced the pool to 20 highly focused items.

Convergent and Discriminant Validity

Across five validation samples totaling approximately 738 marketing leaders in the US and UK, confirmatory factor analyses demonstrated robust convergent validity. All 20 items exhibited high, statistically significant standardized factor loadings on their respective first-order constructs, ranging from .72 to .91 ($p < .001$). The Average Variance Extracted (AVE) for all five dimensions significantly exceeded the standard .50 threshold, ranging between .58 and .74, indicating that the latent constructs capture substantially more variance than measurement error.

Discriminant validity was established via two rigorous tests:

  • Fornell-Larcker Criterion: The square root of the AVE for each dimension was substantially higher than the inter-construct correlations between that dimension and any other dimension in the model.
  • Heterotrait-Monotrait Ratio of Correlations (HTMT): All calculated HTMT ratios fell well below the conservative .85 threshold (values ranged from .48 to .76), confirming empirical distinctiveness among the five sub-dimensions as well as distinctiveness from related external constructs.

Predictive and Incremental Validity

Structural equation modeling demonstrated that the second-order Strategic Change Capability construct exerts a strong, positive, and statistically significant effect on multiple objective and subjective firm outcomes, including marketing program effectiveness ($eta = .48, p < .001$), customer equity growth ($eta = .39, p < .001$), and overall financial performance ($eta = .34, p < .001$). Most importantly, hierarchical regression analyses confirmed significant incremental predictive validity: the SCC explained 14% to 19% additional unique variance in firm market performance after controlling for established dynamic capability scales, including strategic agility, organizational flexibility, market responsiveness, and marketing adaptiveness.

8. Reliability

The SCC exhibits exceptional internal consistency across varied industries, organizational sizes, and geographic regions. Psychometric analyses conducted across the validation datasets reveal that all five first-order dimensions and the overarching second-order construct meet and exceed rigorous psychometric benchmarks:

  • Developing the Business Case (Items 1–4): Cronbach’s $lpha = .88$; Composite Reliability ($ ext{CR}$)$= .89$; Average Variance Extracted ($ ext{AVE}$)$= .67$.
  • Preparing Employees (Items 5–8): Cronbach’s $lpha = .91$; Composite Reliability ($ ext{CR}$)$= .91$; Average Variance Extracted ($ ext{AVE}$)$= .72$.
  • Establishing Organizational Setup (Items 9–12): Cronbach’s $lpha = .87$; Composite Reliability ($ ext{CR}$)$= .88$; Average Variance Extracted ($ ext{AVE}$)$= .65$.
  • Institutionalizing the Change (Items 13–16): Cronbach’s $lpha = .89$; Composite Reliability ($ ext{CR}$)$= .90$; Average Variance Extracted ($ ext{AVE}$)$= .69$.
  • Assessing and Adjusting (Items 17–20): Cronbach’s $lpha = .86$; Composite Reliability ($ ext{CR}$)$= .87$; Average Variance Extracted ($ ext{AVE}$)$= .63$.
  • Second-Order Strategic Change Capability Index: Overall composite reliability exceeded $.94$, with Cronbach’s alpha for the full 20-item instrument reaching $.95$.

Test-retest reliability was evaluated across a four-week temporal separation using a sub-sample of 84 executive respondents. Intra-class correlation coefficients (ICC) across the sub-dimensions ranged from .82 to .89 ($p < .001$), establishing strong temporal stability in organizational assessments over time.

9. Factor Analysis

The structural dimensionality of the SCC was established through rigorous exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses:

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

During initial validation on Sample 1 ($n = 214$), principal axis factoring with promax rotation revealed an unambiguous five-factor structure corresponding exactly to the five theorized microfoundations. All five factors exhibited initial eigenvalues exceeding 1.0 (Kaiser criterion), collectively accounting for 71.8% of the total variance. Scree plot examination confirmed a clean inflection after five factors. No significant cross-loadings above .25 were observed, and all primary loadings exceeded .68.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Subsequent validation on independent samples ($n = 312$ and $n = 212$) confirmed the hierarchical second-order factor model, where the five first-order dimensions reflect the higher-order Strategic Change Capability construct. The hypothesized model demonstrated superior fit to the observed data across standard fit indices:

  • $\chi^2/df = 1.74$ (well below the recommended 2.50 or 3.0 threshold)
  • Comparative Fit Index ($ ext{CFI}$)$= .968$
  • Tucker-Lewis Index ($ ext{TLI}$)$= .962$
  • Root Mean Square Error of Approximation ($ ext{RMSEA}$)$= .043$ ($90% \text{ CI } [0.034, 0.052]$)
  • Standardized Root Mean Square Residual ($ ext{SRMR}$)$= .041$

The hierarchical model was systematically compared against alternative competing specifications: (a) a unidimensional single-factor model ($\chi^2/df = 5.82, \text{CFI} = .712$), (b) a three-factor model organized strictly by the three temporal stages ($\chi^2/df = 3.91, \text{CFI} = .834$), and (c) a five-factor uncorrelated orthogonal model ($\chi^2/df = 4.45, \text{CFI} = .801$). Chi-square difference testing ($\Delta \chi^2, p < .001$) confirmed that the reflective second-order, five-factor structure provides an empirically and theoretically superior representation of the data.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

  • Instrument Name: Strategic Change Capability Scale (SCC)
  • Authors: Georgios S. Bekos, Simos Chari, Milla Jaakkola, and Heiner Evanschitzky
  • Year of Publication: 2025
  • Construct Measured: An organization’s dynamic capability to initiate, implement, and institutionalize strategic change across prechange, initial implementation, and postimplementation phases
  • Construct Structure: Second-order reflective construct comprising five first-order reflective dimensions
  • Subscales / Dimensions:
    • Stage 1: Prechange
      • Developing the Business Case (Items 1–4)
      • Preparing Employees (Items 5–8)
    • Stage 2: Initial Implementation
      • Establishing Organizational Setup (Items 9–12)
      • Institutionalizing the Change (Items 13–16)
    • Stage 3: Postimplementation
      • Assessing and Adjusting (Items 17–20)
  • Item Count: 20 items
  • Target Population: Senior marketing leaders, chief marketing officers (CMOs), business unit directors, strategy consultants, and organizational change managers
  • Administration Format: Self-administered organizational survey (paper-and-pencil or computerized/online survey platforms)
  • Administration Time: Approximately 7 to 10 minutes
  • Response Scale: 7-point Likert scale (1 = Strongly disagree, 7 = Strongly agree)
  • Scoring Mechanism:
    • None of the items are reverse-coded.
    • Dimension Scores: Calculated as the unweighted arithmetic mean across the corresponding 4 items for each dimension (score range: 1.00 to 7.00).
    • Overall SCC Score: Calculated as the composite mean of all 20 items or as the mean of the five dimension scores (score range: 1.00 to 7.00). Higher scores reflect superior dynamic strategic change capability.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Strategic Change Capability Scale was published in 2025 in the Journal of Marketing by the American Marketing Association (AMA). In accordance with standard academic publishing practices:

  • Academic Research Use: The scale items are publicly available within the published academic literature. Academic researchers, doctoral scholars, and educational institutions are permitted to utilize the instrument free of charge for non-commercial research, empirical testing, and thesis work, provided that the original validation study (Bekos et al., 2025) is fully credited and cited.
  • Commercial and Consulting Application: Organizations, corporate practitioners, commercial assessment developers, and strategy consultancies seeking to deploy the scale for commercial diagnostics, fee-for-service consulting engagements, or digital corporate toolkits should seek permission through the American Marketing Association (AMA) or contact the corresponding author.

12. References

Response Scale:

7-point Likert scale (1 = Strongly disagree, 7 = Strongly agree)

Stage 1: Prechange

Dimension 1: Developing the Business Case

  1. Clearly defining the strategic rationale for the change.
  2. Articulating a compelling vision and objectives for the change.
  3. Building a strong business justification for undertaking the change.
  4. Identifying the potential business risks and opportunities of the change.

Dimension 2: Preparing Employees

  1. Communicating the need for change effectively to employees.
  2. Creating readiness for change among our workforce.
  3. Actively addressing employee concerns and potential resistance to change.
  4. Engaging employees to gain their buy-in and commitment to the change.

Stage 2: Initial Implementation

Dimension 3: Establishing Organizational Setup

  1. Aligning organizational structures and resources to support the change.
  2. Setting up cross-functional teams and governance mechanisms to drive the change.
  3. Assigning clear roles and responsibilities for executing the change.
  4. Providing the necessary training and tools required for change implementation.

Dimension 4: Institutionalizing the Change

  1. Embedding new processes and working routines into day-to-day operations.
  2. Aligning performance metrics and incentives with the objectives of the change.
  3. Ensuring that new behaviors become part of the organization’s culture.
  4. Reinforcing and sustaining the changes over time across organizational units.

Stage 3: Postimplementation

Dimension 5: Assessing and Adjusting

  1. Continuously monitoring progress and performance against change milestones.
  2. Evaluating the impact and outcomes of the change systematically.
  3. Identifying bottlenecks or deviations from expected change outcomes.
  4. Making necessary course corrections and adjustments based on ongoing assessment.
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