Antecedents of Employee Readiness for Change : Mediating Effect of Commitment to Change

Abstract

The study attempted to look at the influence of individual factors (creative behavior and practical intelligence), process factors (participation in decision making and quality of communication) and context factors (trust in management and history of change) on employee readiness for change to transformational changes. Commitment to change and its three dimensions-affective, continuance and normative were hypothesized to act as a mediator in the present study. The data was collected through a survey using self-reported questionnaire and by judgment sampling. The data was collected from large sized organizations in manufacturing and IT sector, which were undergoing transformational changes and the total sample size for the study was 305. To understand the mediation effect of commitment to change dimensions, mediated regression analysis was carried out. Among the three dimensions of commitment to change, affective commitment to change alone was found to have a partial mediation effect. Thus, focusing on the employees' emotional attachment to the change could be one way for increasing employees' readiness for change. The study also provides insight into the construct commitment to change in the Indian context.

Employee Readiness for Organizational Change: A Case Study in an Export Oriented Manufacturing Firm in Sri Lanka

“…A thorough knowledge in employee change readiness directs the change agents to understand the best way to approach the change and the best mode to implement the change (Soumyaja, Kamlanabhan & Bhattacharyya, 2015). Susanto (2008) highlights the importance of having better judgment on individual change readiness perception prior to any change implementation.…”

“…Some of those factors can be listed as, organizational commitment (Eby et al, 2000;Weber & Weber, 2001;Vakola, Tsaousis & Nikolaou, 2003;Madsen et al, 2005;Barber, 2010;Vanhala et al, 2016), trust in peers and management (Weber & Weber, 2001;Rafferty & Simons, 2006;Oreg et al, 2011;Shah, 2014), change commitment (Herscovitch & Meyer, 2002;Soumyaja et al, 2015), job satisfaction (Goulet & Singh, 2002;Robbins, 2003;Shah, 2009;Khammarnia, Ravangard & Asadi 2014;Lizar & Mangundjaya, 2014), employee empowerment and social relationship within the organization (Hanpachern et al, 1998;Cunningham et al, 2002;Madsen et al, 2005), support from peers and management (Karasek et al, 1982), teamwork (Rodriguez et al, 2015) and relationship with superiors and peers (Eby et al, 2000;Miller et al, 2006;Barber, 2010;Shah & Shah, 2010). In this article, we focus on two factors (organizational commitment and trust in peers and management) that have been intensively studied in many developed countries, but hardly in developing countries of their impact on employee readiness.…”

The influence of ambidextrous organization and authentic followership on innovative performance: The mediating role of change readiness

“…Based on several studies it was concluded that followership significantly moderated the relationship of leadership and employee participation in change (Khan et al, 2018), the need for changes that shape authentic behavior of employees will influence support for change (Abdel-Ghany, 2014), employees who are ensure in their abilities experience a high level of readiness to change (Vakola, 2014). Affective commitment of employees, which is characteristic of authentic followership also has to do with readiness for change (Soumyaja et al, 2015). Based on the above researches, our study proposes the following hypothesis: H4: Authentic followership has a positive influence on change readiness.…”

Relationship between Emotional Intelligence and Commitment to Change among Senior Administrative and Diplomatic Service (ADS) Officers in Malaysia

“…In the context of organizational change, a research by the Gartner group revealed that the main reason why change initiatives fail, is due to the inability of the people to adjust their behavior, skills and commitment to their new requirements (Soumyaja, Kamlanabhan & Bhattacharyya, 2015). Gelaidan and Ahmad (2013) suggested that one of the many reasons why change efforts failed have been argued to lie in humans and their inadequate or lack of commitment to change.…”