The Factors Effecting Employee Commitment to Change in Public Sector: Evidence from Yemen

Hamid Mahmood Gelaidan,Hartini Ahmad

doi:10.5539/ibr.v6n3p75

Abstract

This study attempted to investigate the moderating effect of organizational culture between the leadership style and normative commitment to change. The study relied on the data collected from 371 employees of Yemeni public sector. The finding of this study shows that organizational culture plays an important role of moderating the relationship between leadership style either transformational or transactional and normative commitment to change. Furthermore, the results light out that the transformational leadership is positively related with normative commitment to change. In the same line, transactional leadership is found to be not only positively related with normative commitment to change but also as stronger effect on it. This study was carried out with numerous limitations as example is cross sectional was conducted in this study and this could not figure out the effect pre and after change, thus longitude study is highly recommend in order to look in deep and compare the result. Not only this but also there may conduce in another sector and industry, it may come out with different light. With believing of different culture and its effect, future study can be conducted in different research context. This research has figured out the weakness of empirical study in change management literatures by connecting the leadership style, and organizational culture, and how they are associated to employee normative commitment to change. In the same way, it has provided a guideline for the public sectors in general and particularly in Yemen context on how to successfully implement change phenomena as well as how to get effective and efficient leadership with change management.

Highlights

Change is a phenomenon that individuals and organizations face on a daily basis (Battilana, Gilmartin, Sengul, Pache, & Alexander, 2010 )
The finding of this study was confirmed the hypotheses which stated as there is a significant relationship between transformational leadership and normative commitment to change and organizational culture is significantly moderated the relationship between transformational leadership and employee normative commitment to change
Public sector organizations that are interested in implementing change must be concerned with leadership style and organizational culture as well as with normative commitment to organizational change

Summary

Introduction

Change is a phenomenon that individuals and organizations face on a daily basis (Battilana, Gilmartin, Sengul, Pache, & Alexander, 2010 ). Organizations have to respond quickly to the global forces since they are immersed in a virtual tempest of change regardless of their nature of business (Burke, 2002; Lo, Ramayah, de Run, & Voon, 2009; Westover, 2010) This is because organizations need to strive to adapt to the ever increasing challenges of both their domestic and global markets (Herold, Fedor, Caldwell, & Liu, 2008; Martins, 2008) in order to respond to demands placed on them by their external environments and complex value chain activities, a variety of changes in any organization should take place such as process reengineering, continuous improvements, restructuring, downsizing and rightsizing, merger and acquisition This was a great effort to be done from government side, but it was not sufficient to pick up the public sector organization to be effective and efficient as well, because the government has not paid adequate attention to the key factor of successful change which are the people

Objectives

Methods

Findings

Discussion

Conclusion