The Formation Mechanism Of Middle Managers' Emotional Response To Organizational Change

Organizational change,especially radical organizational change,which is a very emotional event.Employees' emotions tend to be more frequent and more intense than their behavior.However,the research on the change response of most employees has long been inclined to use employee emotions as a disturbance factor in people's rational behavior,or simply not to consider the role of emotions in organizational change.Until the last two decades,the research on the emotional response of employees has become a mainstream research topic,attracting more and more scholars' attention.The middle layer as a company employee,especially as a layer of connection between senior managers(strategists of change programs)and grassroots employees(executors of change programs),plays a vital role in the implementation of organizational change.Their cognition and interpretation of organizational change affect the entire process of change,and even the success or failure of change.The middle-level manager's change emotional response changes with the progress of the change process and is constantly changing.This is not a closed process,but a social process that takes place in interaction with other members of the organization.The middle-level manager's change in emotional response stems from the continuous acquisition of change-related information,and the perception of superior organizational support through communication with senior management.In recent years,a new research viewpoint has emerged,combining the emotions and meaning construction in the process of organizational change.It is believed that the emotional response is both the realization of meaning construction and the output of meaning construction.Inspired by this point of view,this paper studies the formation process and intermediate mechanism of the emotional response of middle managers in the context of organizational change.This study takes a state-owned enterprise that is undergoing organizational change,Shenzhen Salt Industry Co.,as an example.Using case study methods,through the data analysis and processing of interviews,coding,decoding,etc.,the middle managers in the process of organizational change are studied.Transforming the “emotional meaning generation” and “emotional meaning regeneration” processes of emotional response;and the “top-down” impact of organizational support on the emotional response of middle managers,and the emotional response of middle managers to organizational support.The bottom-up process of circulation.Drawing on the psychological literature of emotional theory,the author puts "emotional infection","emotional pretense" and "emotional cognition theory" into the organizational transformation situation,and constructs the theory of "emotional meaning generation" and "emotional meaning regeneration".The framework will add examples to exploratory case studies and provide a more comprehensive and clear picture of the emotional responses in the context of organizational change,providing a reference for follow-up research.