Making a Change through Responsibility - Examining Stakeholders’ Reactions to Responsible Change Management and Corporate Social Responsibility

Today’s business world is highly dynamic, increasingly international, and marked by powerful corporations. Nonetheless, individual human beings shape the environment in which business takes place. In light of such surroundings, one increasingly important challenge for organizations is successful change management, which can only succeed with employees’ support. When facing a well-informed, interconnected array of stakeholders, companies must also tackle demands to take social responsibility. By combining various theoretical and methodological approaches, the present dissertation addressed these trends in four empirical papers. Study 1 and Study 2 considered the reactions of employees during organizational change. The first study investigated the connection between dispositional resistance to change and emotional exhaustion. In a multilevel model, work-unit level informational team climate and perceived organizational support were relevant moderators. Using fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), the second paper turned to factors associated with employees’ intended support for change. Drawing from the theory of planned behavior (Ajzen, 1991), it revealed relevant configurations of attitude, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control. Study 3 focused on corporate social responsibility (CSR) and investigated which combinations of responsible and irresponsible activities, both recent and more historical, shape corporate reputation among the general public. Lastly, Study 4 expressly brought change management and CSR research together by showing that employees reacted more favorably to organizational change when their supervisors effectively communicated responsibility. Taken together, the present dissertation demonstrated that corporations can make a change through responsibility in order to favorably influence both stakeholder and business outcomes, thereby providing relevant implications for both research and practice