Research On Change–supportive Behaviors From The Perspective Of Planned Behavior Theory

In the 21 th century, the organizational external enviorment has been becoming more and more dynamic and complex. The endlessly emerged new technologies and the popularity of Internet plus have made this trend more remarkable. Therefore, all business organizations are facing greater and greater challenge that organizational change is not a selectable strategy but an inevitable one. The only options that business organizations can choose are when and how to change.One conclusion which can be drawn from numerous research results and organizational change stories is that organizational changes cannot be implemented easily. Even lots of carefully planned organizational changes failed finally. Gradually, people realized that the macro-level change plans are not the only decisive factor for successful organizational changes, even not the most important one. In fact, how organizational change participants respond to organizational changes plays the critical roles for successful implementation of organizational changes. Under this context, organizational change participants(or recipients) have become one focus of organization and management researchers and managers. Among the several concepts concerning how change participants respond to organizational changes, the change-supportive behavior has been distinguished from other relevant constructs recently since it is extremely important for successful organizational changes.However, literature review shows that the researches on change-supportive behaviors are relative rare. There is a dearth of researches focusing on how changesupportive behaviors are developed and whether and how the behaviors of change leaders affect the change-supportive behaviors. Theoretically speaking, the planned behavior theory provides a general theoretical framework for explaining human’s behaviors. For better applying the planned behavior theory in the context of organizational changes, several limitations need to be overcome. For example, the three antecedents of intentions are regarded as exogenous variables in the original model of the planned behavior theory. The understanding of how they are influenced by environmental factors may benefit both organizational change theory and practical management. Under organizational change context, several environmental factors, for example, the change-mobilizing behaviors of change leaders, probably put great influence on the change participants’ beliefs which to further influence their change-supportive intentions and corresponding behaviors finally. However, there are few empirical researches evidenced this process. Therefore, the further research on how change leaders take actions to influence change-supportive behaviors can textend the application of planned behavior theory in organizational change context as well as our understanding of change-supportive behaviors.Under the above mentioned practical and theoretical context, the current study takes the change-supportive behaviors of change recipients as the dependent variable, the change mobilizing behaviors of change leaders as the explanatory variable, the MilitaryCivlian-Integration strategic change as the research setting, to answer three research questions. First, how do change participants develp their change-supportive behavior? Second, how do the change-mobilizing behaviors of change leaders influence such development process? And third, how does the change participants’ trust in change leaders influence the above mentioned relationship between change-mobilizing behaviors of change leaders and change-supportive behaviors of change participants?In the main body of this thesis, a pilot case study and a questionnaire-based study were applied to answer these research questions. The pilot case study has three main purposes. First, it can give detailed description of the research context. Second, to preliminarily explore the relationship between the change-mobilizing behaviors of change leaders and the change-supportive behaviors of change participants, which can provide field observational evidence for the research model of the subsequent empirical research. Third, it can also provides important first-hand data for the measurement of relevant viriables in the subsequent empirical study.In the empirical research part, a model has been developed to describe the process by which the change-mobilizing behaviors of change leaders influence the changesupportive behavior of change participants, combining the planned behavior theory, social learning theory, social exchange theory and relevant literature. The model also shows how the change participants’ trust in change leader influence the above mentioned process. The data used to test the model were from 455 valid questionnaires from 16 Chinese military enterprises which have been implementing the policy of military-civilianintegration strategy. The structural equation modeling method in Mplus and the descriptive analysis and multivariate regression analysis method in SPSS have been used to analyze the data. The results indicate that the affective commitment to change has significant positive effect on the change-supportive behaviors of change recipients; the change recipients’ expectation of change future(positive attitude), their perception of change climate(norm), and their perception of change efficacy(control) all have significant effect on affective commitment to change; the mobilizing behavior of change leader can increase the change recipients’ three beliefs including their expectation of change future, their perception of change climate, and their perception of change efficacy; the change recipients’ trust in change leaders has positive moderating effect on the process by which the mobilizing behavior of change leaders influences the change-supportive behaviors of change recipients, and such moderating effect influences the seven between-two-variable paths in this process.The current research provides empirical evidences which are helpful in understanding how change participants develop their change-supportive behaviors and how change leaders can influence the complex development process. On one hand, these results can extend people’s understanding of both change-supportive behaviors of change recipients and the influences of mobilizing behaviors of change leaders, and the trust in change leaders of change recipients. On the other hand, the planned behavior theory can be extended and developed to some extent. Meanwhile, several managerial implications and future research directions can be drawn out of these findings.