Resistance, justice, and commitment to change

Abstract This research focused on individual responses to organizational change by exploring the relationships among individual resistance, organizational justice, and commitment to change following organizational change implementations in three organizations. To accomplish this, Web‐based questionnaires were used to gather individual‐level quantitative data from 218 employees within three organizations located in the United States. The previously validated measures used included Oreg's (2003) resistance to change scale, Colquitt's (2001) four‐factor organizational justice scale, and the Herscovitch and Meyer (2002) commitment to change scale. The survey data were analyzed with the use of structural equation modeling to test for relationships among constructs, and results demonstrated that organizational justice was strongly associated with commitment to organizational change, the strongest relationship being between procedural justice and affective commitment to change. In addition, resistance to change was not significantly related to justice or commitment to change. These findings on resistance to change support recent conceptual arguments that conventional views of resistance to change are not useful for informing organizational change implementation efforts.