Repeated organizational change can leave employees facing a succession of ambitious announcements, incomplete delivery, revised rationales, and renewed requests for commitment. Existing change research explains important event-level reactions, psychological contract breach, trust, fatigue, and behavioral responses, but it does not fully specify how earlier promise–delivery discrepancies shape the interpretation of later transformations. This Original Temporal Theory Article develops the proposed Temporal Theory of Change Cynicism to explain that cross-cycle process. The theory treats a promise cycle as a proposed temporal unit in which employees register explicit or reasonably implied commitments, observe implementation, appraise discrepancies, attribute responsibility, and update expectations about organizational reliability. Repeated adverse updating is proposed to deplete trust and make cynical interpretation function as a form of self-protection that limits emotional investment and vulnerability to renewed disappointment. Such interpretation may contribute to silence, reduced discretionary effort, withdrawal, or oppositional conduct, although constructive agency and contextual moderators remain possible. The theory also distinguishes a parallel change-fatigue pathway from cynicism and specifies conditional recovery through candid explanation, bounded commitments, consequential voice, and verifiable delivery over time. The contribution is an integrative, testable temporal account rather than a validated causal model or managerial prescription. Its principal limitations concern construct measurement, reciprocal relationships, memory and attribution bias, cross-level inference, and contextual transferability. Longitudinal, within-person, multilevel, and comparative research is required to test whether the proposed mechanisms outperform rival explanations based on workload, insecurity, dispositional resistance, or general dissatisfaction.
