Impacts of personal trust, communication, and affective commitment on change success

Abstract

Purpose

Successful change implementation is crucial for organizational prosperity, and even survival. The purpose of this paper is to examine the impacts of personal trust and communication on change success, through affective commitment.

Design/methodology/approach

Based on an empirical study conducted among 307 employees of Canadian organizations and using structural equation modeling techniques.

Findings

The authors find that communication has a direct impact on change success, as well as an indirect impact through affective commitment. Trust only exerts an indirect effect through affective commitment.

Originality/value

This research thus extends the literature on the role of “soft” organizational factors on organizational change. Since the authors have limited this study to “soft” variables, it can be complemented with a study of hard factors contributing to change success, in order to build a comprehensive organizational change success model.

Citation

Ouedraogo, N. and Ouakouak, M.L. (2018), "Impacts of personal trust, communication, and affective commitment on change success", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 31 No. 3, pp. 676-696. https://doi.org/10.1108/JOCM-09-2016-0175