The Role of Change Content, Context, Process, and Leadership in Understanding Employees’ Commitment to Change: The Case of Public Organizations in Kurdistan Region of Iraq

• Author: Zhichao Cheng,Ahmad Bayiz Ahmad
• Published date: 01 June 2018
• DOI: 10.1177/0091026017753645
• Date: 01 June 2018
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0091026017753645

Public Personnel Management

2018, Vol. 47(2) 195 –216

© The Author(s) 2018

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DOI: 10.1177/0091026017753645

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Article

The Role of Change Content,

Context, Process, and

Leadership in Understanding

Employees’ Commitment to

Change: The Case of Public

Organizations in Kurdistan

Region of Iraq

Ahmad Bayiz Ahmad1,2 and Zhichao Cheng1

Abstract

In times of financial austerity, public organizations are forced, either by internally

motivated goals or externally mandated policies, to implement reforms and changes

to cut back on expenses. While organizational change happens with increasing

magnitude and frequency in public sector organizations, much of public management

research concerning organizational change has mainly focused on change at the

sector or national level. This study, on the contrary, focuses on a more micro-level

and individual perspective by investigating the simultaneous influence of content,

context, process, and leadership on employees’ affective commitment to change

(ACC) in a non-Western, Islamic setting. To test the study’s hypotheses, data were

collected from a sample of 147 employees in five public sector organizations that

recently witnessed major structural changes in Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Regression

results reveal that process-related variables and transformational leadership

behavior of direct supervisors enhance commitment to change while employees’

negative perception of his or her change history (a context-related factor) impedes

commitment to change. The findings support the external validity of previous findings

in Western, non-Islamic settings, and, thus, would increase our understanding of

organizational change theories in non-Western settings.

1Beihang University, Beijing, China

2University of Raparin, Kurdistan Region of Iraq

Corresponding Author:

Ahmad Bayiz Ahmad, School of Economics and Management, Beihang University, 37 Xueyuan Road,

Haidian District, Beijing 100191, China.

Email: ahmad.bayiz@buaa.edu.cn

753645PPMXXX10.1177/0091026017753645Public Personnel ManagementAhmad and Cheng

research-article2018

196 Public Personnel Management 47(2)

Keywords

organizational change, attitudes, leadership, change commitment, public sector,

Kurdistan.

Introduction

In the past few decades, public organizations have come under increasing pressure to

initiate reforms and changes to cope with central government decisions, tighter

budgets, deregulation of financial markets and technological advances (Kuipers et al.,

2014; Van der Voet & Van de Walle, 2015). While organizational change happens with

increasing magnitude and frequency in all forms of organizations (Coram & Burnes,

2001), a review of the literature indicates that two thirds of all change initiatives fail

(Beer & Nohria, 2000; Kotter, 1995). Although failure of organizational change efforts

may have multiple causes, few are as critical as employees’ attitudes toward change

(Bartunek, Rousseau, Rudolph, & DePalma, 2006; Choi, 2011). In particular, research

has posited that many change initiatives fail because change agents often underesti-

mate the influential role organizational members’ attitudes play in determining change

outcomes (Armenakis, Harris, & Mossholder, 1993; Bartunek et al., 2006; Van der

Voet, Kuipers, & Groeneveld, 2015).

If we agree with the premise that employees’ attitudes toward change are salient in

determining change outcomes, then, what factors affect employees’ attitudes toward

change? Since Kurt Lewin’s early work on organizational change in 1940s, scholars

and practitioners have identified four change-related factors which are common in all

organizational change efforts and are suggested to affect employees’ attitudes toward

change: (a) change content, which is concerned with the type or substance of the

change (Armenakis & Bedeian, 1999); (b) change context, which refers to the existing

internal and external conditions that influence organizational effectiveness (Self,

Armenakis, & Schraeder, 2007); (c) change process, which describes the interventions

and processes that are involved in the implementation of a change initiative and

employees’ responses to such efforts (Van der Voet, 2014); and (d) change leadership,

which focuses on the role of leadership in promoting a certain change effort (Herold,

Fedor, Caldwell, & Liu, 2008).

Currently, a significant body of research is available that acknowledges the impor-

tance of these factors in predicting employees’ attitudes toward organizational change.

However, a review of the literature shows that knowledge of organizational change

management is limited in several ways. First, despite the relevance of content, process,

context, and leadership in organizational change, variables from each of these anteced-

ent categories have been considered separately, having distinct impacts on employees’

attitudes toward change (Armenakis & Bedeian, 1999; Oreg, Bartunek, & Lee, 2014).

Thus, the literature lacks a broad and systematic portrayal of how the various change

antecedents simultaneously affect employees’ attitudes toward change. Therefore,

such a broad consideration of the topic is necessary “if we are to more fully understand

the employees’ attitudes toward organizational change” (Oreg et al., 2014, p. 14).

Second, a number of studies have suggested that the specific characteristics of public