Individual Critical Literature Review

Organizations always face unprecedented changing challenges in the increasingly

competitive work environment, especially under severe impacts of the ongoing
pandemic of COVID-19. Under such severe circumstances, organizations with
well-designed plans of changes will also be inclined to trip up on various issues and
ultimately fail in high probability (Hughes, 2011, cited in Specht, Kuonath, Pachler,
Weisweiler& Frey 2018; Lockett, Currie, Martin, Waring& Finn 2014, cited in Specht et
al. 2018). Nevertheless, during the change process, change agents play an important
role because they can facilitate organizations to alter and formulate strategies for
implementing organizational change plans. This research area that integrates
organizational changes with motivation, is where my interest lies.

The research content of the empirical research written by Specht et al. (2018) is about
examining the specific influencing mechanism between organizational change and
two aspects of the motivation of change agents which are intrinsic motivation and
motivation to benefit others. Additionally, they also choose the experience of change
agents working on meaningful projects and organizational identification to be the
mediating variables. Regarding the methodology, they use the questionnaire survey
to test the proposed hypotheses, as shown in Figure 1. Specifically, they randomly
found 51 teachers from diverse schools and departments in a German university to be
questionnaire respondents. Those respondents all planned to implement changes in
their teaching climate within teaching project frameworks. And those participants
completed two online questionnaire surveys totally, before (Time1) and after (Time2)
the implementation of projects, with a time interval of one year. After that, they did
some statistical analyses depending on the questionnaire outcomes to get
conclusions. Apart from the method of this article, two other articles are central to it.
This study originally started with research results of Elstak, Bhatt, van Riel, Pratt and
Berens (2015) on the role of motivation in organizational change and investigated in
response to their call for an in-depth study of the characteristics of change motivation
and its enablers. However, it is not an easy task to determine which dimensions of
motivation to use as independent variables in this study. Luckily, research
contributions of Allen (2003) and other scholars, focusing on particular motivational
dimensions related to guidance and coaching, indicate that two factors should be vital
to change implementation. This is because coaching and guidance always involve
plenty of changes. Thus, Specht and others were able to identify their predictive
variables.

Figure 1. Proposed study model (Specht et al. 2018).

This study which realizes many contributions and findings to organizational alterations
is one of the pioneers to link factors of motivation with organizational alternations. In
this study, Specht et al. (2018) first lead people to be aware that diverse dimensions
of incentives may contribute to several facets at universities. For example, personal
cultivation, task performance perception and the initial motivation for change in the
teaching style and ideology. Then, based on results of hierarchical regression and
bootstrapping analyses, internal motivation, through meaningful experience, indirectly
affect the change agents' performance of project-related perceived tasks (Specht et al.
2018). Likewise, there also appears an indirect impact of motivation to benefit others
on the alternations of the teaching climate, while the organizational identification as
the mediator (Specht et al. 2018). Therefore, both two motivational aspects are
effectively relevant to change agents. In practical terms, this study finds that it is
beneficial to detect two predictive variables more effectively when the autonomy of
active change is provided to change agents (Specht et al. 2018). Owing to these
contributions extending previous work, this research values for learning and practical
purpose of change management.

Although this study is generally accepted, there still exist some limitations. Firstly, the
analysis of this article is mainly based on subjective statistics, that is, self-report data
obtained from the online questionnaire method. In fact, Self-report is an effective way
to reflect subjective consciousness and attitudes of change agents, such as the
predictive and mediating variables in this study. This is because it seems impossible
for others to assess the internal state of others. In the aspect of questionnaire design,
measurement items relevant to motivation were adjusted based on measurement
items of Allen (2003) to better match their research contents and show the
professionalism and credibility of the measurement. In this way, their study is
conducive to successfully test hypotheses, providing highly credible conclusions that
can present objective laws of things to a certain extent. Nevertheless, Podsakoff,
MacKenzie, Lee and Podsakoff (2003, cited in Specht et al. 2018) assert that
self-assessment is inevitable to cause the method bias, making findings lack
credibility. To minimize this interference with their findings, Specht and other authors
assess the results of predictors throughout the whole period. The tricky thing is that
this extra measure itself might also have an impact on the outcomes. Secondly, the
insufficiency of the research is also due to the fact that the sample size used is too
small and lacks diversity. Therefore, further researches may require a larger sample
to come to results in order to improve the broad applicability of findings. Conversely,
due to this small sample, they could have an insight into the characteristics of
evaluated participants. In this study, the sample is mainly distributed among middle-
and high-level participants in the organization. In fact, the behavior of change
promoters will be affected by their social status. Hence, this sample with relatively
uniform social status happens to control the influence of this irrelevant variable, and
particularly reflects the common traits of change initiatives shapers (Lockett et al.,
2014, cited in Specht et al. 2018). Moreover, this study may not be applicable to
causal inferences, since they fail to fully verify and exclude the interpretation of other
factors based on their design of the research methods (Pearl 2009, cited in Specht et
al. 2018). Even so, the findings of this research have certain guiding and enlightening
significance to organizations during their changes processes.

In general, this chosen article has informative and instructive learning values for
organizational change management and enriches the literature in this field despite its
limitations. As a matter of fact, incessant changes at present are asking and forcing
organizations to implement alterations, ignoring their inertia to alter which results from
the negative effect of overwhelming shock of continuous changes at high speed.
However, this study could help organizations and individuals to figure out how to
select and better use the motivational role of change agents to stimulate and assist
organizations to alter successfully, particularly at universities.
References
Allen, T. D. 2003, 'Mentoring others: A dispositional and motivational approach',
Journal of Vocational Behavior, vol. 62, pp. 134–154.
Elstak, M. N., Bhatt, M., van Riel, C. B. M., Pratt, M. G. & Berens, G. A. J. M. 2015,
'Organizational identification during a merger: The role of self-enhancement and
uncertainty reduction motives during a major organizational change', Journal of
Management Studies, vol. 52, pp. 32–62.
Specht, J., Kuonath, A., Pachler, D., Weisweiler, S. & Frey, D. 2018, 'How Change
Agents' Motivation Facilitates Organizational Change: Pathways Through
Meaning and Organizational Identification', Journal of change management, vol.
18, no. 3, pp. 198-217.