Psychological Capital, Openness to Change and Change-Supportive Behavior: The Moderate Effect of Work Autonomy

Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2016, Vol. 39 ›› Issue (4) : 934-941.

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PDF(755 KB)
Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2016, Vol. 39 ›› Issue (4) : 934-941.

Psychological Capital, Openness to Change and Change-Supportive Behavior: The Moderate Effect of Work Autonomy

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Abstract

Given the intense competition and the unpredictable change in business world, increasing number of organizations realize that it is important to encourage employees to take active part in the process of enterprise reform. Extant studies have recognized that some systematic level reasons can promote or inhibit employees' change-supportive behavior, but few of these studies have considered the effects and mechanisms by which individual factors may influence employees' change-supportive behavior. In this paper, we first reviewed the preliminary literatures and identified relative theories about psychological capital and change-supportive behavior. Secondly we proposed and tested a moderated model based on the analysis of planned behavior theory and conservation of resource theory to examine the effect of psychological capital on employee's change-supportive behavior, and the mediation role of openness to change as well as the moderating role of work autonomy. Thirdly, we examined our hypotheses by using a sample from 302 employees of companies located in Guangdong Province through two stages in order to reduce the effect of common method bias. In the first stage employees responded to survey questions about psychological capital and work autonomy, after 6 mouths they answered questions about openness to change and change-supportive behaviors. Correlation analysis and hierarchical regression modeling were used to test the hypotheses proposed. In line with our hypotheses, regression results revealed that: (1) psychological capital has significant positive effects on change-supportive behavior(β=.324, p<.01); (2) openness to change partly mediates the influence of psychological capital on change-supportive behavior(β=.214, p<.001); (3) work autonomy moderates the influence of openness to change on change-supportive behavior(β=.132, p<.01). After this we follow Dearing and Hamilton’s method to draw interaction picture further confirm the moderate effect of work autonomy on the relationship between openness to change and change-supportive behavior. Our findings contribute to change-supportive behaviors literature. First, most studies have focused on the systematic factors for the employees’ change-supportive behaviors, which may have obscured some individual factors that can explain exactly why employees engage in organization change. In addition, this study combine cross-sectional design and longitudinal design, fully consider the longitudinal effect on change-supportive behaviors. Finally, this study specify the boundary conditions of this model and reveal that employees perceived high work autonomy are more likely to engage in organization change. As such, this finding opens a new window on the issue of change-supportive behaviors. This study also bears some straightforward implications for managers and practitioners. On a general level, our findings demonstrate that if managers want to enhance the change-supportive behaviors of their employees, they need to pay attention on employees’ psychological capital. Further, our findings suggest that organizations should place high value on cultivate employees’ openness to change, which also contributes to the increase of change-supportive behaviors of employees. Finally, managers should engage in enhancing employees’ work autonomy. This study also exist some limitations. One limitation was that our data only collected from single source, this may cause some bias, future studies are necessary to collect subordinate-supervisor dyads datas. Another limitation was that we collected the data from organizations in South of China; the generalization of the findings to other areas or cultures may be problematic.

Key words

psychological capital / openness to change / work autonomy / change-supportive behavior

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Psychological Capital, Openness to Change and Change-Supportive Behavior: The Moderate Effect of Work Autonomy[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2016, 39(4): 934-941
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