Relationship Between Stress Climate Of Change And Behavior Intention:the Moderating Effect Of Psychological Empowerment

Organizational change has been one of the hot topics in both theory and practice recently, and the employee’s resistant behavior caused by the strong stress of change has attracted people’s attention. Organizational change was generally regarded as a source of stress in previous studies, and would lead to a series of negative results. Therefore, most of the definition and measurement for stress of change was based on the individual level, which conceptualized stress of change as the individual’s negative perception to organizational change. This paper defines it from the organizational level that stress is a force or stimuli, which is about the role of environment for the individual. And the individual’s responds to environment is called stress perception. Based on this, the paper systematically reviewed the previous related literature, and according to attitude-behavior theory and cognitive appraisal of stress theory, designed two studies to investigate the following questions:(1) the formation of stress of change, namely the composition of stress of change in organizational level (study1);(2) the mechanism between employee’s shared perception to stress of change (stress climate of change, SCC) and their change behavior (study2).Study1constructed and verified the conceptual structure of SCC. First, on the basis of relevant literature, preliminary proposed conceptualization of SCC; Second, through the interview research based on grounded theory, analyzed and refined the structure model of SCC; Third, through multiple case studies, laid the foundation for questionnaire items design; Finally, we developed a scale to explore and verify the validity and reliability of the construct dimensions of SCC through exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). We found that, employee’s perception to stress of change in the organizational environment mainly consists of three dimensions: concept stress, authority stress and process stress.Study2discussed the mechanism of SCC on employee’s change behavior and the moderating effect of psychological empowerment. We found that:(1) SCC has a significant negative correlation with employee’s resistant behavior, and concept stress has a significant negative impact for employee’s resistant behavior; SCC and its dimensions all have a significant positive impact for employee’s supportive behavior; and compared with concept stress and authority stress, process stress has the most significant influence on support intention;(2) Psychological empowerment has a moderating effect on the relationship between SCC and employee’s behavior intention. Furthermore, impact, meaning, self-determination and self-efficacy all enhance the negative relationship between concept stress and resistant behavior; meaning and self-determination enhance the positive relationship between concept stress and supportive behavior; impact and meaning undermine the positive relationship between authority stress and supportive behavior; impact enhances the positive relationship between process stress and supportive behavior;(3) Except for gender, nature and size of enterprise, other individual and organizational feature variables have different impacts on SCC, psychological empowerment, change resistant behavior and change supportive behavior. Furthermore, the type of change shows significant difference for all the four variables.Finally, the main conclusions of the study were systematically summarized, including the theoretical and practical contribution, as well as the research limitations and further directions.