Change Leadership, Benevolent Leadership And Employees' Reaction To Change

As the eternal and significant theme in the organizational life cycle, change has been subject to theorists and practitioners for more than sixty years. The micro, person-oriented research based on employees' perspective, instead of the traditional macro, systems-oriented research from managers' angel, became a new focus in organization change domain. At present, with China's social transformation step into pivotal stage, to promote a variety of organization change actively and steadily is not only conducive to the survival and development of a single organization but also conducive to social harmony and stability of the transition period. This study, based on social exchange theory, explored that who leads change and how to lead change during the implementation process could build harmonious organization-employee relationship in times of change.This study, based on social exchange perspectives and person-oriented angel in organization change domain, firstly critical reviewed the leadership style and behavior, employees' reaction to change and psychological mechanisms, organizational commitment and organizational justice which reflect the social exchange and economic exchange respectively. Through out the review, there are four gaps found in the research about organizational change leadership behavior and employee's reaction to change:lack of a unified theoretical framework for the guidance of the employee's reaction to change; gap existing in the relationship of change leadership behavior and employee's reaction to change; lack of discussion and empirical research on employee's psychological reaction mechanism of the change management; lack of integration on either research paradigm or research integrity in organizational change domain.As for many research angels and lack of a unified theoretical framework for micro, person-oriented organization change, this study, based on social exchange theory perspective, analyzed the interdependent exchange nature of mutual reciprocate, combined with the dynamic notion of organizational development, proposed the model of employee's reaction to change. The model considered employees' reaction to change depended on cognition of social exchange relationship between the impetus and the acceptance:organization commitment formed in daily work on the one hand and fairness judgment of the current process of change on the other hand. The employees' organization affective commitment and change commitment rooted in the day-to-day management, the characteristics of change, change management behavior and disposition of themselves, and determined their reaction to change and organization.As to the question that who and how to perform in the implementation process, this article gave empirical test for the employees'reaction to change model through two sub-study. In the first study, data was collected from 374 part-time MBA students experienced a variety of organization change with questionnaire survey to explore the affection and mechanism of benevolent leadership and change leadership on employee affective commitment to change. The results of structural equation model analysis show that change management had both direct affection and change fairness-organizational affective commitment indirect affection on affective commitment to change. Benevolent leadership exerted affection on affective commitment to change through organization affective commitment.Against the common method bias and individual-level research not as good as cross level reflecting layered nature of organization and change event, the second study adopted cross level, counterpart design, obtained data from 263 participant experienced change in 28 departments of 18 organizations. The results found that both benevolent leadership climate and change leadership climate exerted positive affection on employees'affective commitment to change, and had significant interaction effect:in high benevolent leadership climate, change leadership could bring much higher affective commitment to change, while in low benevolent leadership climate, change leadership had more significant affection on affective commitment to change. As for change fairness, benevolent leadership climate and change leadership climate almost determined the variance among different change units. As far as the variance of organizational commitment between units, both benevolent leadership climate and change leadership climate had no significant affection.Finally, this article summarized and analyzed conclusions, elaborated theoretical implication and practical significance of this study, and pointed out the limitation and future research directions.