Purpose Commitment to change is vital for the success of any organizational change initiative. However, despite a sustained increase in research interest on employees’ commitment to change, there is still no consistency about the unidimensional or multi-dimensional construct of commitment to change, and previous research tends to ignore the impact vocational drivers may have on it. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach Drawing on prospect theory, the authors extended Herscovitch and Meyer’s (2002) commitment to change construct by developing and testing an additional dimension of commitment to change centered on employees’ vocational commitment across two studies, adopting a longitudinal design within a Chinese context. As organizational change often has implications that impacts individual decision making, vocational development and work adjustments and attitudes within the workplace, the authors presented the case for vocational commitment to change as an important extension to the commitment to change literature. The authors first provided evidence for the internal consistency, factor structure and the validity of the commitment to change in the Chinese context. Subsequently, the authors examined the changes of employees’ commitment to change across time, and demonstrated its predictive validity by exploring the relationship between commitment to change and change-related behaviors. Findings The current research represents improvements in commitment to change measurement, provides construct clarification in the Asia context, and sheds light on theoretical and empirical evidence for how to support change in the Chinese context. Limitations, implications and directions for future research are further discussed. Originality/value The current study responds to a call for research to further investigate the mechanisms of commitment to change within non-Western contexts, specifically within the Chinese context. Through a rigorous scale development process, the authors clarified Herscovitch and Meyer’s (2002) commitment to change model and present an augmented model with a fourth dimension –vocational commitment to change. Furthermore, through a longitudinal study, the current study also demonstrates that the cultivation of commitment to change has great importance to improving employees’ change-supportive behavior and reducing their resistance to change. This is consistent with cross-cultural research, which shows that Chinese individuals are more likely to possess inconsistent attitudes toward an object, including themselves, compared to Western individuals (Spencer-Rodgers et al., 2004). The study also explained the change of commitment to change over time, showing the significant relationships among the commitment to change and change-related behaviors.

Purpose Transformational leadership and service performance of civil servants greatly affect the government’s administrative effectiveness. However, there are few studies on the influence mechanism of transformational leadership on service performance in the context of public organizations. Based on the social exchange theory, this study aims to construct and examine the dual path mediating process of affective trust and cognitive trust for the effects of transformational leadership on service performance. Design/methodology/approach Drawing from 268 supervisor–subordinate dyads civil servants at the municipal level in China across three waves. Findings Both affective trust and cognitive trust partly mediated the relationships between transformational leadership and service performance, which supported the underlying theoretical mechanism of social exchange theory and transformational leadership theory in explaining the dual relationship between leaders and subordinates. This study innovatively and empirically examined the effects of transformational leadership on service performance through dual trust in civil servants in China, thus bridging the gap in this knowledge. Originality/value This study innovatively and empirically examined the effects of transformational leadership on service performance through dual trust in civil servants in China, thus bridging the gap in this knowledge.

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