Gaining employee buy-in is acknowledged as a major hurdle to transforming workplace practices and procedures. This study draws upon a social information processing perspective to present and test a framework for understanding individual acceptance of change. Drawing on a study of nurses undergoing a significant change to their task operating procedures, this paper hypothesizes that interpretation of the organization’s change communication is the primary mechanism through which social information processing influences individual acceptance. The results indicate that one’s history with organizational change and the emotions of one’s friends toward the focal change shape individual perceptions of the quality of the organization’s change communication, and indirectly influence individual acceptance of change. Results also demonstrate the indirect effects of friends’ emotions on change acceptance are contingent on the change recipient having a sufficient number of friends to make social influence possible. This article extends theory on individual reactions to organizational change by showing that interpretation is seminal for change acceptance, and sheds light on why individuals who receive the same change communication interpret it in differential ways. This study also highlights that emotion is a powerful social influence in the interpretive process of change recipients.