Creating Positive Employee Change Evaluation: The Role of Different Levels of Organizational Support and Change Participation

Abstract

Organizations are faced with fast-paced change and the need to ensure ongoing change intervention success. There is, however, evidence that employees who have experienced poor change management in the past are more likely to resist new changes. This is because poor change management is likely to create more adverse attitudes towards new changes, such attitudes in turn are likely to increase employees' resistance to change, a key factor for change failure, which can further contribute to an employee's perception of poor change management. We, in response to this, identify key elements which create positive change evaluations and adopt a socio-cognitive approach, the schematic approach, in discussing these. Bootstrapped mediation analysis of survey data collected from 228 employees suggests that different types of organizational support and change participation are key in creating a positive change evaluation. Specifically, the analysis shows that the relationships between perceived organizational support and supervisor support and change evaluation are mediated respectively fully and partially by change participation. Co-worker support, further, is directly related to employee's change evaluations. These very elements of the change process, we argue, are directly modifiable by change agents and are, therefore, of real practical value when seeking to increase future change intervention success.

Key Words:

• Perceived organizational support
• perceived supervisor support
• perceived co-worker support
• change participation
• change evaluation
• change management

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Jana Watkins for her support with this study.

Notes

1. Please note that Preacher and Hayes' SPSS Macro can be downloaded from: http://www.afhayes.com/spss-sas-and-mplus-macros-and-code.html [accessed online July 9, 2012].

2. Please note at this point that the measurement independence tests suggest further testing of our positive change evaluation measure in order to determine its statistical distinctiveness. The results of this additional testing are reported within the scope of the Harman test at the end of this paragraph.

3. Please note that the directional link from change participation to positive change evaluation is always Beta = 0.17 (p < .05) in the Preacher and Hayes mediation testing, and will therefore not be repeated for Hypotheses 2b and 2c in this section.