德行领导与组织变革承诺:涓滴效应

Morality leadership and commitment to change:Trickle-down effects

已有研究表明,组织变革承诺对于变革成败有着重要影响,然而,关于变革承诺的研究正处于起步阶段。基于社会学习理论和领导理论,探讨德行领导与组织变革承诺之间的关系,并从社会关系的视角出发,考察社会互动在上述关系中的调节效应。以13家企业64个团队241名员工为对象进行配对问卷调查,采用SPSS 21.0和HLM 7.0对样本数据进行统计分析。研究结果表明:(1)部门领导的德行领导行为对员工的组织变革承诺有着显著的正向影响;(2)分管领导的德行领导行为不仅直接作用于员工的组织变革承诺,还通过部门领导的德行领导行为对员工变革承诺产生间接影响;(3)部门领导和成员感知的社会互动质量在上述关系中有着显著的正向调节效应。研究结果有助于全面把握与理解组织中的领导效应,并对企业进行组织变革有重要的借鉴意义。

Organizational change continues to occur at a high rate in modern organizations.However,as many as 50 percent of organizational change has failed to deliver expected results and/or meet intended objectives in most cases(Shin,2012).Therefore,the topic about how to improve the success rate of changes has become a key issue for both scholars and practitioners.When identifying the factors for the above failure,the previous research about organizational change effectiveness focused on two different paradigms:the macro wings focus on strategic,financial,technological dimensions(Pitts,2006).Recent studies,however,have increasingly found that human resource issues,as opposed to strategic or macro factors,are the leading cause of mergers failing to meet their intended objectives(Neves,2011),which gradually become a new trend in the study of organizational change.Employees’commitment to change,which has been shown to be an important determinant of employee support for change(Choi,2011),has received increasing attention as an important antecedent of change-related organizational outcomes.But what is needed to build employees’commitment toward change?Not surprisingly,leaders’behavior plays a central role in answering this question.However,at this initial stage,the relevant studies on commitment to change are far from being sufficiently researched.Firstly,the study of leadership,such as transformational leadership and charismatic leadership,is largely based on western society.Secondly,the study of leadership focuses on the capability,and much less is known about the morality leadership that contributes significantly to employee commitment to change.Thirdly,little attention has been devoted to the leadership of the trickle-down effect,despite the increasing enormous effort invested in trickle-down research.In light of these extant research gaps,the purpose of this study is threefold.First,this paper proposes a model to explicate the effect of morality leadership that is an important and special feature of leadership in China.Second,this paper provides theoretical and empirical rationale for the trickle-down effect of morality leadership that is consistent with the call for a trickle-down model of leadership research.Based on the leadership theory,this research examined morality leadership flows through multiple-level of management and ultimately influenced employee’s commitment to change.This article focuses on the social interaction of the basic elements of social capital(De Clercq,Thongpapanl&Dimov,2009)to strengthen the research of situational characteristics by considering variables that influence subordinate cognition and behavior in Chinese social variables.Thirdly,this paper provides arguments for how social interaction influences the relationship between morality leadership and commitment to change in the context of Chinese society and culture.Based on social learning theory and leadership theory,this study attempted to explore the relationship between morality leadership and commitment to change.From the perspective of social relations theory,this paper further explores the moderating role of social interactions between these relationships.A total of 241 employees and their 64 supervisors from 13 enterprises located in China were sampled by using SPSS 21.0 and HLM 7.0 to test a trickle-down model of morality leadership across 3 hierarchical levels.The results further reveal that team morality leadership has a positive effect on commitment to change.Supervisor’s morality leadership not only directly affects employees’commitment to change,but also affects team leader’s morality leadership and employees’commitment to change.Further,team leaders'and members'social interaction determine the extent to which team leader’s morality leadership accounts for the effect of supervisor’s morality leadership on employees’commitment to change.Research findings provide a new perspective for studying the leadership in organizations,and have practical implications for organizational change and management in firms.Drawing on conservation of social interaction and leadership theory,our study investigated the importance of morality leadership in enhancing employee commitment to the implementation of organizational change.Our findings indicate that employees who perceive that they have received a high level of morality leadership tend to be strongly committed to organizational change.We also found that firms should pay more attention to the morality training of the first-line leaders,positive leader-member exchange experienced during organizational change,and shock absorbers in organizational change.