Self – efficacy as a resource

hile organizational change is essential for the survival and competitiveness of

W organizations and has, in consequence, been the focus of a great deal of

research, nonetheless many change initiatives have had disappointing outcomes.
Such negative outcomes typically result from failure to achieve employee commitment to
and support of change. Because of the importance of the leadership role in achieving
change, considerable research attention has been given to transformational leadership,
which is a significant factor in promoting change. However, the processes by which
transformational leadership may promote employee positive reactions to change need
further investigation.

Research and theoretical background

This study has two purposes. Firstly, it aims to investigate whether self-efficacy constitutes
one of the mechanisms by which transformational leadership impacts on employee
positivity in reacting to change. Secondly, it aims to investigate whether the extent of
change moderates the relationship between transformational leadership, self-efficacy and
reactions to change. This study also explores the possibility that when the extent of change
is higher, the effectiveness of transformational leadership may be lower.
Conservation of resources theory [COR] suggests that people seek to acquire and maintain
resource. It also suggests that possible loss of resources is more powerful than possible
gain and that resources need to be invested to gain resources and avoid their loss. This
may provide insight into resistance to change in the absence of transformational leadership.
People may be cautious about change because they may feel it risks resource loss, despite
change being essential to gain resources for the future.
Transformational leadership can create a vision of the future and inspire followers to work to
achieve it and to build hope and confidence for the future. This can prevent or overcome
resistance to or reluctance about change. Lack of alignment of values between employees
and the organization can result in change failure. Transformational leadership typically
changes employee values to align with that of the organization and hence to embrace and
support change.
However, current weaknesses in the transformational leadership research include:
䊏 a bias towards heroic leadership and away from collective and shared process of
leadership;
䊏 the underlying processes have not been clearly identified; and
䊏 lack of precision about situational variables that may impact on these processes.

Previous studies have found self-efficacy, the belief that what you do matters and affects
what happens to you, to be a mediating variable between transformational leadership and a
range of dependent variables including employee performance, creativity and innovative
work behaviour. However, the lack of specificity of context and situational variables are still
major weaknesses of the transformational leadership research.

DOI 10.1108/DLO-09-2020-0191 j
© Emerald Publishing Limited, ISSN 1477-7282 DEVELOPMENT AND LEARNING IN ORGANIZATIONS: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL j
 Methodology and results
This study used a sample of employees where the organization was going through a major
organizational change. The following hypotheses were tested:
䊏 Transformational leadership is positively and significantly related to [a] affective
commitment to change and [b] intention to support change.
䊏 The relationship between transformational leadership and [a] affective commitment
and [b] intention to support change is mediated by the self-efficacy of employees.
䊏 [3a] The relationship between transformational leadership and self-efficacy will be
moderated by the extent of change such that this relationship will be stronger if there
are fewer numbers of changes [or weaker if greater number of changes]. In other
words, transformational leadership may be associated with self-efficacy less strongly if
the extent of change is high.

[3b] The relationship between self-efficacy and [a] affective commitment and [b]
intention to support change will be moderated by the extent of change. More
specifically, the relationship between self-efficacy and commitment and intention to
support will be stronger when there are a higher number of changes [or weaker when
there are a lower number of changes]. In other words, self-efficacy may have a stronger
linkage to the commitment and intention to support when the extent of change is high.

Employee ratings on specific scales were used to measure transformational leadership,

self-efficacy, affective commitment to organizational change, and intention to support
change. A cumulative change index was used to assess the number of changes employees
had experienced during the change process. This covered the following types of change: a
new IT system, a new supervisor, new job tasks, new work settings, new workmates,
changes to the nature of the job, new job equipment, other. The respondents indicated
which of these they had experienced during the change process and the total number of
changes was then calculated as the change index.
To confirm that the factor specification matched the data, confirmatory factor analysis [CFA]
was conducted and this confirmed good model fit. Composite reliability and convergent
validity were acceptable as was discriminant validity. Hierarchical regression analysis was
then used to test the hypotheses.
The results confirmed hypothesis 1 that transformational leadership was related to affective
commitment and intention to support change and this was to a high level of statistical
significance.
Testing hypothesis 2 that self-efficacy mediated the effect of transformational leadership on
commitment and intention to support change indicated that self-efficacy did mediate in this
relationship confirming both hypothesis 2a and 2 b.
The results did not support hypothesis 3a, with no significant interaction effect showing
that the interaction between transformational leadership and self-efficacy did not differ
between low versus high extent of change. However, the results did support hypothesis
3 b with the strength of the positive relationship between self-efficacy and reactions to
change differing across high versus low extent of change. For both affective
commitment and intention to support change, the interaction of self-efficacy and
change index was significant.
In low change conditions, the effect of self-efficacy on affective commitment was not
significant while in medium and high change conditions it was significant. Very similar
results were found for the intention to support change with significant results for medium
and high change contexts but not for low change contexts.

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Practical implications
Self-efficacy gains importance when the extent of change is high. The results suggest that
change managers should adopt a transformational style of leadership to enhance
recipients’ self-efficacy to generate positive attitudes and behaviours during change. They
also suggest the selection and training of managers in transformational leadership
attributes and also the inclusion of this in the monitoring of managers’ behaviours in post.
The research outlined in this paper makes a significant contribution to an organization’s
capacity to achieve change, particularly when the extent of change is high.
Transformational leadership promotes effective change by building employee self-efficacy.
If employees believe that they have control over what they do and that what they do makes
a difference, they are more likely to act and think positively regarding change and less likely
to be resistant to change.

Commentary
This review is based on “Self-efficacy as a resource: a moderated mediation model of Keywords:
transformational leadership, extent of change and reactions to change” by Bayraktar and Transformational
Jiménez (2020) published in Journal of Organisational Change Management. The purpose leadership,
Self-efficacy,
of the study is to test three hypotheses regarding Transformational leadership is positively
Commitment to change,
and significantly related to [a] affective commitment to change and [b] intention to support Organisational change,
change. The relationship between transformational leadership and [a] affective commitment Conservation of resources
and [b] intention to support change is mediated by self-efficacy of employees. theory

Reference
Bayraktar, S. and Jiménez, A. (2020), “Self-efficacy as a resource: a moderated mediation model of
transformational leadership, extent of change and reactions to change”, Journal of Organizational
Change Management , Vol. 33 No. 2, pp. 301-317.

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