The role of leadership in shaping employees' reactions during organizational change processesan empirical investigation on Spanish HRMs' experience

Resumen

Changes have become increasingly common context in organizations because they need to constantly adapt to the environment in order to remain competitive. This urges companies to be aware of the underlying factors that explain the success of organizational changes. Acknowledging this managerial concern, researchers have tried for long to find the key success factors of change processes and they have proposed a number of recommendations taking different perspectives and approaches. Among all the proposals, this research focuses on the relevance of employees’ reactions to change and the role of leadership in shaping these reactions. Additionally, this investigation examines the experience of human resource managers and considers their direct boss as the leader. So, the general aim of this dissertation is to examine the role of leadership in shaping employees’ reactions during organizational change processes. And this general goal breaks down in three more specific ones in order to analyze the relationship between more concrete variables of leadership (authentic leadership, trust in the leader and perceived power of the leader) and employees’ reactions (positive and negative emotions, attitude towards change and intention to quit). In this way, the three specific goals of the dissertation are: (1) to examine the effect of perceived authentic leadership behavior and followers’ level of trust in the leader as antecedents of HRMs’ emotions during organizational changes; (2) to study the influence of perceived authentic leadership behavior, soft power bases [expert, reference and informational power], and followers’ level of trust in the leader on HRMs’ attitude towards change; and (3) to analyze the mediating role of HRMs’ emotions between perceived hard power bases [reward, coercive and legitimate power] of the leader and their intention to quit during organizational change processes. In order to give an answer to these goals three independent studies are carried out, which are presented in the dissertation as articles. The empirical analysis of this dissertation is based on a cross-sectional study that gathers the information of 102 Spanish human resource managers working in different industries. An ad hoc questionnaire was used to obtain the information. The measurement model and the relationship between the variables has been examined using structural equation modeling (SEM) based on partial least squares (PLS). Generally speaking, the findings show that (regarding the variables included in this research) leadership plays a significant role in shaping employees’ reactions during organizational change processes. How leaders’ behave, and how powerful and trustworthy they appear to be influence HRMs’ emotions, attitude towards change and intention to quit during change processes.