조직변화에 대한 저항과 조직몰입 : 직무스트레스의 매개효과 및 노조수단성과 절차적 공정성의 조절효과

In today’s turbulent business environment, organizations face constant pressure to change. As a result, organizational adaptability has become a central focus in understanding organizational survival and sustainable growth. Despite the tremendous amount of time and effort organizations put into managing and implementing change, their efforts often fail to deliver expected results or meet intended objectives. Both management researchers and practitioners have acknowledged that employees play a major role in the success or failure of change in an organization. Specifically,prior research proposed that employees’ resistance to organizational change might be a critical reason for the failure of organizational change initiatives. Although change management literature has increasingly devoted attention to the role of employee resistance, the literature provides only a limited understanding of this phenomenon: it has either focused on conceptual explanations for the meaning and importance of employees’ resistance to organizational change, or has explored the antecedents of resistance to change. Therefore, how employees’ resistance to change affects their work attitudes and behaviors and under what conditions the potential negative effects of resistance to change can be mitigated have yet to be explored. The purpose of the present study is to explore the relationship between employees’ resistance to change and their organizational commitment, focusing on its underlying mechanisms and boundary conditions. Drawing on organizational change, job stress, procedural justice, and union instrumentality literatures, we investigate the psychological processes through which resistance to change affects organizational commitment, and how the negative impact on organizational commitment due to resistance to change is reduced. Specifically, we hypothesize that job stress plays a mediating role in the relationship between resistance to change and organizational commitment, and that procedural justice and union instrumentality function as boundary conditions that moderate the negative effect of resistance to change on job stress. Taken together, the present study proposes an integrative moderated-mediation model that involves both the mediating role of job stress in the relationship between resistance to change and organizational commitment and the moderating role of procedural justice and union instrumentality in that process. We tested the proposed moderated-mediation model using a sample of 1,153 employees from a public enterprise in South Korea who recently experienced considerable organizational change. The results indicate that resistance to organizational change is positively related to job stress and that job stress is negatively related to organizational commitment. The results support our hypothesis that job stress mediates the relationship between resistance to change and organizational commitment. The results also support the hypothesis that union instrumentality and procedural justice moderate the relationship between resistance to change and job stress. Furthermore, moderated-mediation analysis reveals that procedural justice and union instrumentality reduce the indirect effects of resistance to change on organizational commitment via job stress. The findings extend our limited understanding of the process through which resistance to change affects organizational commitment after significant organizational change. To further understand the impact of resistance to change on employee attitudes and behaviors, future research should examine other intervening psychological mechanisms that mediate the employee-organization relationship under change conditions. In addition, the finding that procedural justice and union instrumentality can moderate the relationship between employees’ resistance to change and job stress underscores the usefulness of considering organizational and social resources as boundary conditions in the relationship between employees’ resistance and change-related outcomes. Our findings offer several practical implications for change management in organizations. First,managers should be aware that employees who are reluctant to commit to organizational change are more likely to experience job stress, and as a result are more likely to have reduced commitment to the organization. Change managers, therefore, need to pay particular attention to employees’attitudes toward change initiatives and the psychological states they experience during and after implementation in order to anticipate commitment issues. Second, organizations should sustain and improve communication channels that deal with employee opinions and complaints throughout the change process. Formal procedures for collecting and soliciting employee opinion should be enhanced, and frequent and open communication with labor unions should be encouraged. By sharing and exchanging change initiative information, organizations can enhance employees’understanding of the necessity and the importance of organizational changes. Such efforts will help reduce employees’ negative reactions to change, and temper the indirect impact of these reactions on organizational commitment