Impact of transformational leadership on employees’ reactions to change and mediating role of organizational trust: Evidence from service companies in Hungary

Abstract

In the context of organizational change, employees can have different reactions, where some of them accept and engage with it, and others completely refuse and resist it. Hence, companies should permanently settle for the best and introduce a fruitful leadership style along with a good change management strategy to ensure the company’s prolonged survival and prosperity. This investigation aims to examine the influence of transformational leadership on employees’ affective commitment and intention to support change. Both were chosen to constitute the main dimensions of employees’ reactions toward organizational change and highlight the importance of organizational trust as a mediator in that correlation. To confirm the hypotheses subtracted from the literature review, a quantitative study was managed by a survey devoted to 428 employees working for diverse service companies in Hungary and going through different change cases.Structural equation modeling (SEM) was then applied to hold out the favorable findings, which reveal that transformational leadership is a booster for employees’ intention to support change but not for affective commitment. It was also found that organizational trust firmly mediates the relationship between transformational leadership and employees’ reaction to change. This statement justifies that both transformational leadership and organizational trust are able to reduce change complexity and lead to its acceptance, openness, and support.

Impact of transformational leadership on employees’ affective commitment and intention to support change: Mediation role of innovative behavior

“…A group of workers employed by marketing consulting, business consulting, transportation, and IT service-oriented firms located in Hungary was selected, mirroring the sample utilized by Hamza et al (2022). This choice was entrenched according to some reports dedicated to the service sector in Hungary, which show that the majority of the Hungarian and international service business sectors in the country represented 64% of the country's GDP in 2020 (Marciniak & Ránki, 2020).…”

“…The subsequent research focused on two critical elements aligned with two prominent theories: the social learning theory (Bandura, 1977) and the social exchange theory (Blau, 1964). These elements encompass employees' affective commitment to change (Herscovitch & Meyer, 2002), regarded as a psychological factor facilitating decision-mak-ing, action for successful change implementation (Mangundjaya & Amir, 2021), employees' intention to support change, and a behavioral manifestation of their acceptance and endorsement of the change (Fedor et al, 2006;Hamza et al, 2022). These dimensions were specifically chosen due to their positive nature and significant relevance as reactions in a change scenario, particularly when the change involves introducing innovation, prompting employees to exhibit their innovative behaviors.…”

“…Following this line, several leadership styles were linked to employees' reactions to change, such as the authoritarian leadership style (Du et al, 2020), the charismatic leadership (Bakari et al, 2019), and the change leadership (Onyeneke & Abe, 2021). Finally, transformational leadership (Peng et al, 2021) has recently garnered significant attention from scholars (Hamza et al, 2022), but not that much from the Hungarian business context.…”

Yemen’s Public Sector transformation: Unpacking the dynamics of assessing organizational culture, leadership Approaches and Employees Adherence to Change

“…Jiatong et al (2022) discovered that, through employee engagement as a partly mediating factor, transformational leadership had a beneficial impact on affective organizational commitment and job performance in China. Last but not least, Hamza et al (2022)…”