Factors affecting employees’ attitudes and tendency to resign caused by organizational change

Abstract

Organizational change is inevitable for survival and growth in the current dynamic business environment. Under the pressure of external and internal environments such as economic policies, behaviors of competitors, visions of companies, mergers, acquisitions, etc. every organization is forced to change. However, organizational change does not always bring expected results for all organizations. The most common reason for the failure of organizational change is the employees’ resistance to change. This study aims at evaluating factors that affect acceptance, resistance and resignation among employees when organizational change takes place. The results showed that employees’ commitment to and trust in organization have positive effects whereas perception of status loss has negative effects on acceptance of organizational change. On the other hand, commitment and trust of employees with organization have negative effects whereas workplace stress has positive impacts on the resistance to organizational change. Additionally, employees with resistance to changes tend to quit their jobs. Goodness of fit of the general model based on path analysis is 64.6%.