The Relationship Between Ambiguity And Project Members' Change-oriented Citizenship Behavior

Considering the complexity,changeability and uncertainty of project environment,project staff are expected to conduct jobs out of their roles with proactivity and innovation,namely,change-oriented citizenship behaviors.Therefore,it is necessary to study how to motivate project members' change-oriented citizenship behaviors.Among the factors influencing the behaviors,researchers disagree on the working situation's effect.Thus,based on the situation strength and stress,the research studies the relationship between ambiguity,a type of working situation and change-oriented citizenship behaviors,and the moderating role of individual character(proactive personality)and social situation(leader-member exchange).The thesis analyzed change-oriented citizenship behaviors in the project context from the perspective of citizenship behaviors and proactive behaviors.Theoretical model on the relationship between ambiguity and change-oriented citizenship behaviors was built on the basis of literature review.Then,data was collected through questionnaires that were distributed to construction project members.The reliability and validity of questionnaires were tested utilizing reliability test and confirmatory factor analysis.Then,the thesis tested the effects of ambiguity from work and interaction on project members' change-oriented citizenship behaviors separately using hierarchical regression analysis.In the meanwhile,the moderating role of proactive personality and leader-member exchange were tested.The results show that the relationship between working and interpersonal ambiguity and change-oriented citizenship behaviors are both inverted U shape,which implies that ambiguity can impose positive influence on change-oriented citizenship behaviors.In addition,proactive personality can moderate the relationship between working ambiguity and change-oriented citizenship behaviors,and moderating effects of leader-member exchange on both working and interpersonal ambiguity's influence are significant.The inverted U shape is weakened under the moderating effects,which indicates that the positive influence of low-level ambiguity is more prominent in the situation where the proactive personality or leader-member exchange is in the lower level.And in the situation where the ambiguity is high,proactive personality and leadermember exchange can compensate the negative effects.The study proves that ambiguity,usually regarded as a harmful situation,also has some beneficial aspects,which provides a new perspective for improving performance brought by proactive behaviors.On the basis of the research outcomes,project managers can learn to motivate project members' change-oriented citizenship behaviors and improve project performance.