The Significance of Career Commitment in Generating Commitment to Organizational Change among Information Technology Personnel

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INTRODUCTION

Modern organizations need their employees to adapt to constant changes with a minimal amount of disruption. However, dysfunctional reactions to change, in terms of poor commitment to new processes, appear to be far more prevalent than the authentic embracing of new changes (Fedor et al., 2006). In order to secure the desired form of commitment, managers spend a great deal of time, effort, and capital implementing elaborate change management and communication strategies, often with little success (Sumner and Yager, 2004; Sumner et al., 2005). While the importance of an individual's commitment to the success of a change has been well established in the literature (Meyer & Allen, 1996; Meyer & Herscovitch, 2001), there has been little research on the impact of change messages on individual commitment to change.

It has been discussed that people who are committed to the organization are more likely to embrace organizational changes (Herscovitch and Meyer, 2002). Also, Armenakis et al. (1999) extensively covers the role of communication in helping employees to make sense of organizational changes. We argue that, compared to organizational commitment, it is actually the commitment of professionals to their career that amplifies the effect of change message on individual's attitude towards organizational change. Even though organizational commitment is desirable during organizational change, it is more effective when employees are committed to their careers rather than just to the organization.

Through a survey of IT professionals in two large centers of a global bank, we collected 575 responses to test our model. Findings followed by discussions and practical implications are also presented.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND HYPOTHESES

The concept of organizational commitment has evolved over the last three decades, starting with Porter et al. (1974) which conceptualized commitment with the following factors: "(a) strong belief in and acceptance of the organization's goals and values, (b) a willingness to exert considerable effort on behalf of the organization, and (c) a definite desire to maintain organizational membership". More current research defines affective commitment as "the desire to remain", continuance commitment as "the perceived cost of leaving", and normative commitment as "the perceived obligation to remain"(Meyer, et al., 1990; Meyer and Allen, 1991). These factors enable the differentiation among commitment forms that are characterized by different mindsets, while individuals may simultaneously experience different combinations of all three mindsets. These three components altogether become an employee's commitment profile.

Commitment to change is particularly important now, given the speed and complexity of change in a distributed, global business environment. The command and control model of shaping employees' behaviors and attitudes at work is giving way to a model of "developing committed employees who can be trusted to use their discretion to carry out job tasks in ways that are consistent with changing organizational goals" (Arthur, 1994). Having a committed workforce is becoming a competitive advantage in the industry and various studies (Arthur, 1994; Huselid, 1995; Macduffie, 1995) have shown that commitment strategies are associated with low turnover and high productivity and corporate financial success. Commitment has also been shown to be positively associated with improved organizational functioning (Meyer & Allen, 1997) and even minor changes in employees' work always have significant influences on the bottom line (Cascio, 1982). Many studies have examined antecedents, correlates, and dimensions of organizational commitment and consequences (Mathieu and Zajac, 1990; Meyer and Allen, 1997; Ketchand and Strawser, 2001), but only a few have addressed the distinction between career commitment and organizational commitment (Darden et al., 1989; McAulay et al., 2006). As the successful implementation of organizational change often needs employees' acceptance and support from various aspects (Fedor et al., 2006), we propose the following theoretical framework of three levels of commitment. In particular, we address the impact of organizational commitment and career commitment on embracing change through change message effectiveness.

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Change Message Effectiveness

Communication literature has often talked about the quantity and channels of organizational commitment, but deeper insight occurs through the interpretation of specific change messages (Armenakis et al., 2007). This makes it important to understand the role that different change messages play in generating the acceptance of organizational change by employees.

In any organization, those individuals who are subjected to change try to make sense of the organization transformation based on what they hear, see, and experience; and they formulate their beliefs that become part of their process of deciding whether to support or resist the change. Armenakis et al. (2007) define a belief as "an opinion or conviction about the truth of something that may not be readily obvious or subject to systematic verification" and identify "discrepancy, appropriateness, efficacy, principal support, and personal valence" as the most significant factors to affect an organizational change. Change messages (beliefs) are typically exchanged through social interaction between various levels of the organization (top leaders, change agents, supervisors, and peers). These messages are typically transmitted through various influence strategies depending on the need or life-cycle stage of the change initiative.

Since a positive belief in change increases the chance of employees making a commitment to support the change (Armenakis et al., 2007), change messages through various communication venues from the management help employees understand the change and develop a positive attitude towards the change. This belief in turn leads to enhanced commitment towards the change. Therefore, we hypothesize:

H1: Change message effectiveness is positively associated with commitment to change.

Organizational Commitment

Organizational commitment has been defined and interpreted in a variety of ways (Mathews and shepherd, 2002). According to Arnold et al. (1998), organizational commitment refers to the attachment of a person to his or her organization. Taking a multidimensional view, Meyer (1990) distinguish affective commitment, continuance commitment, and normative commitment in employees' organizational commitment profile, and argue that employees can experience these three components simultaneously. Mathews and Shepherd (2002) define organizational commitment as "a strong belief in and acceptance of the organization's goals and values, a willingness to exert considerable effort on behalf of the organization, and a strong desire to maintain membership with the organization". In addition, organizational commitment is found to be a psychological bond that tied the employees to the organization. The nature of this bond is formulated as "compliance, identification and internalization" (O'reily and Chatmen, 1986), and "identification, involvement and loyalty" (Cook and Wall, 1980).

Many studies find that organizational commitment improved job performance and work attitude (Meyer, et al., 1989; Carson et al., 1999; Somers and Birnbaum, 2000; Rayton, 2006), and reduced turnover intention and behavior (Blau & Boal, 1987; Huselid and Day, 1991; Somers, 1995; Trimble, 2006). Furthermore, organizational change research shows that organizational commitment …