The Role of Psychological Empowerment and Organizational Citizenship Behaviors on Employee Resistance to Change

In today’s competitive business world, change is inevitable for organizations. During an organizational change, the toughest challenge of organizational leaders is to manage employee resistance to change. It is well established in literature that employee resistance is one of the leading causes for the failure of organizational change efforts. The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of psychological empowerment and organizational citizenship behaviors on employee resistance to change. It also investigates if psychological empowerment can be used as a human resource management strategy during a planned change in order to increase commitment to change. The study took place in Turkey in a private company which went under a strategic organizational change recently. Survey collection from employees and interviews with two human resource managers were the main tools in collecting information. The results from 85 respondents showed that both psychological empowerment and organizational citizenship behaviors have significant negative influence on employee resistance to change. The interview results showed that through psychological empowerment, employees were more involved in change process, took active role in decision making and were more committed to the change. The implications of the study can be used by organizational change practitioners to maintain employees’ positive reactions to change by considering psychological empowerment and organizational citizenship behaviors as a tool to lower the level of resistance.