The Study On The Relationship Among Employees' Cognition Of Change, Resistance To Change And Organizational Commitment In Organizational Change

The success or failure of organizational change to a large extent depends on the attitude of organizational members, while the cognition of organizational change has an important effect on the attitude of organizational members. So far, there are few empirical researches studying the dimension of employees' cognition of organizational change. Even if there are some, they are only limited to the case study and the conclusions lack the universality for different types of enterprises. Besides, there are few researches comprehensively exploring the influence of employees' rational cognition (cognition of organizational change) and emotional feelings (resistance to change) on the attitude of staff (organizational commitment). This study attempted to probe into the conceptualization of employees' cognition based on the background of organizational change, discussed its impact on organizational commitment, in the meanwhile examinated individual personality traits (resistance to change) on the relationship between cognition of change and organizational commitment. The major goal of this study was to clarify the relationships and mechanisms among these variables and provide a theoretical basis for human resources management practices in the contents of today's organizational change.This paper was divided into three parts: firstly, we reviewed the latest literature about organizational change, employees' cognition of change, resistance to change and organizational commitment, summarized the related theories, and proposed a research framework that employees' cognition of change affected organizational commitment with resistance to change as the moderator variable. Secondly, we adopted semi-structured interview study to validate the theory primly, and then used questionnaire research to modify research construct. We surveyed 282 employees of changing organizations in Hangzhou, Wenzhou, Shanghai, Beijing and Nanjing area, and analyzed data through descriptive statistics, factor analysis, correlation analysis, analysis of variance and regression analysis. Finally we got conclusions as follows:(1) Employees' cognition of organizational change includes four dimensions: cognition of change significance, cognition of change operation, cognition of rights and interests guarantee and cognition of adaptability to change.(2) Cognition of organizational change has a significant impact on organizational commitment. Furthermore, Cognition of rights and interests guarantee and cognition of change operation have an important effect on affective commitment; cognition of change significance, cognition of rights and interests guarantee and cognition of adaptability to change affect normative commitment; cognition of rights and interests guarantee, cognition of adaptability to change and cognition of change operation impact continuance commitment.(3) Resistance to change has a significant moderating effect on the relationship between cognition of change and organizational commitment. When cognition of change turns out to be higher, the stronger resistance to change is, the weaker the relationship between cognition of change and organizational commitment will be.(4) Cognition of organizational change, organizational commitment as well as resistance to change is significantly different among age, education, work experience as well as types of ownership.