Organizational change can alter employees’ workload, autonomy, social relations, employment security, participation, and access to support at the same time that organizations expect adaptation and sustained performance. Yet the literature on employee well-being during change remains distributed across leadership, work-design, voice, change-reaction, and resource theories, making it difficult to distinguish mechanisms that preserve resources from those that merely accompany successful implementation. This integrative review synthesizes conceptual and empirical research published from 2017 to 2025 to examine how leadership, work design, participation, perceived control, resource loss, and recovery jointly shape employee well-being during organizational change. The synthesis treats well-being as multidimensional and change as a heterogeneous, temporally unfolding exposure rather than a unitary event. Across the evidence, protective conditions operate through distinct but interacting pathways: leaders can shape relational safety and resource access; work design determines whether changed jobs add demands or usable resources; participation can increase control only when voice is safe and consequential; and recovery can restore depleted resources without substituting for prevention of avoidable loss. The article develops a proposed resource-preservation framework in which these mechanisms may complement, substitute for, or interfere with one another across change stages. Deterioration is correspondingly understood as potentially configurational rather than attributable to one missing resource. The review is bounded by heterogeneous constructs, predominantly observational evidence, context-specific studies, and limited direct tests of cross-mechanism interactions. Implications therefore concern evidence-informed HRM and change design rather than universally effective prescriptions.
