Employees' concerns about change and commitment to change among Italian organizations: the moderating role of innovative work behavior

Abstract

Despite being regarded as a critical psychological process influencing the effectiveness of change initiatives, concerns about change have not received empirical attention in the organizational change literature. The present study addresses this issue by examining the relationships among employees' concerns about change (conceptualized as including concerns about the contents and benefits of change, and concerns about mastering the change), commitment to change and innovative work behavior. First, in a hospital undergoing a major administrative change (N = 435), concerns about change were generally found to be negatively related to affective and normative commitment to change and positively related to continuance commitment to change. These results were replicated in a chemical and pharmaceutical company undergoing a technological change (N = 113), except that concerns about change were unrelated to normative commitment to change. In addition, employees' innovative work behavior moderated the relationship of concerns about change to affective commitment to change such that the relationship was negative when innovative behavior was low but nonsignificant when innovative behavior was high. This study provides scholars and practitioners with a theoretically and empirically grounded framework for assessing employees' concerns about change, and moves research a step forward into identifying the behaviors that organizations should support to counteract this psychological threat.

Keywords::

• affective
• concerns about change
• innovative work behavior
• normative and continuance commitment to change
• organizational change

Notes

^1. This proposition may apparently contradict the findings reported by Oreg (2006), who, as mentioned above, found a negative relationship between cognitive evaluations of the change and continuance organizational commitment. However, this inconsistency can be explained by the fact that organizational commitment and commitment to change relate to different targets, i.e. the organization and the change, respectively. This suggests that employees who report negative cognitive appraisals of the change, as in Oreg's (2006) study, might regard the costs associated with the change initiative as being higher than those associated with leaving the organization. Consequently, these employees would be more likely to believe it is preferable to leave the organization, which is indeed what Oreg (2006) found. In contrast, our study does not assess the impact of negative appraisals of the change on employees' desire to remain in the firm. Rather, it examines their effect on the willingness to work toward a change initiative. In this regard, in line with our earlier arguments, and consistent with the current organizational change literature, employees who worry about change initiatives should be more likely to refrain from supporting the change. Accordingly, we expect concerns about change to be positively, rather than negatively, associated with continuance commitment to change.