No abstract

In this article, an attitudinal perspective on organizational members’ reactions to change is proposed and developed. By viewing change as an attitude object in this sense, a richer conceptualization of perceptions of change and reactions to change in terms of emotions, cognitions, and behaviors is achieved. The perspective also frames organizational changes in terms of aspects that are relevant for change recipients because of their relationships with important values that are held by organizational members. To identify classes of beliefs underlying the formation of attitudes toward change, constructs are integrated from theories of job characteristics and organizational justice with the overarching attitude perspective. Research implications of the framework as well as implications for managing change are discussed.

This paper investigates the relationships between organizational change and trust in management. It is argued that organizational change represents a critical episode for the production and destruction of trust in management. Although trust in management is seen as a semi stable psychological state, changes in organizations make trust issues salient and organizational members attend to and process trust relevant information resulting in a reassessment of their trust in management. The direction and magnitude of change in trust is dependent on a set of change dimensions that reflect trust relevant experiences and information. We distinguish between dimensions related to trust relevant consequences of the change and trust relevant aspects of how the change process is performed. Empirical results indicate that increases in post change emotional stress and the use of referential accounts for justifying change are both negatively related to post change trust in management. The use of ideological accounts and participation were found to be positively related to post change trust in management, so was perceived decision quality. Findings also indicate that the effects of change on trust are negatively moderated by tenure.

Despite the increasing interest in emotions at work, there is still a need for more research that focus on the antecedents of emotions in organizational change contexts. Moreover, literature on the subject considers leadership and trust to be fundamental when dealing with change processes. Taking into account both ideas, it is proposed here that authentic leadership (AL) perception can influence followers’ trust and emotions during change. To test these hypotheses, we gathered and analyzed the experience of 102 Spanish human resource managers using structural equation modeling based on partial least squares. Findings show that AL is directly and positively related to followers’ trust in the leader and the experience of positive emotions. Furthermore, we found that trust mediates the relation between AL perception and the experience of negative emotions. Based on these findings, some practical implications are proposed, such as the implementation of training initiatives in order to provide human resource managers with a better understanding of the AL concept and facilitate different actions that could be carried out by them so as to contribute to trust building.

No abstract