Dynamic Forces of Amplifying Employee Change Supportive Behavior: An Individual-Level Analysis

Introduction

Managing organizational change is one of the continuous processes for any business organization. However, due to the uncertainty and complexity related to organizational change, worldwide 70% of the change initiatives in organizations are struggling (Beer & Nohria, 2000). Therefore, last few decades the academic world has witnessed a number of scholarly works concentrating on the area of organizational change management (Rothwell et al., 1974; Yasir et al., 2016; Englert and Helmig, 2018). Researchers and practitioners around the world highlighted that being the greatest asset of the organization, employee and their change supportive behavior can be one of the prime factors to manage organizational change effectively (Herscovitch and Meyer, 2002; Bakari et al., 2017). Because, due to the uncertainty, dilemma, and fear related to the organizational change process, employees demonstrate disengagement and shows cynicism to participate in the organizational change process and which is considered as one of the important factors for the organizational change failure (Reichers et al., 1997; Brown and Cregan, 2008). Previous, scholarly works witnessed different research works concentrating on different typologies of employee behavior during organizational change such as employee resistance to change, employee readiness to change, employee cynicism and employee motivation for change as well as employee supportive behavior for change (Armenakis et al., 1993; Aslam et al., 2016; Bailey et al., 2016). However, currently, researchers argued that employee championing behavior or champion employee plays a very crucial role in order to implement organizational change successfully (Faupel and Süß, 2019; Herscovitch and Meyer, 2002). This is because of the distinctive characteristics of the champion employee in the context of organizational change. Faupel and Süß (2019) mentioned that champion employee puts extra effort, motivates coworkers to involve in the organizational change process as well as spread the positive outcome of the organizational change to the internal and external environment of the organization. But petite empirical evidence is available concentering on employee championing behavior in the context of organizational change. Even though inadequate research works explored employee championing behavior in the western context but in the eastern or south Asian context, it is still underexplored. Therefore, the current study emphasizes employee championing behavior in the context of Bangladesh’s banking sector during organizational change. This is because of being a key player in the economic growth of the country, the banking sector of Bangladesh is going through massive transformation (Julia and Kassim, 2019; Regi and Golden, 2019) in order to meet the international standards and customers’ expectations. The probable challenges to the banking sector in Bangladesh are product line-up gradation, upgrading, and improvement of the IT arrangement for banks as well as the habituation of artificial intelligence, green banking model, and improved banking supervision process. However, different banks in Bangladesh fail to adjust with the current changes and challenges (Islam et al., 2020a). Most importantly, Bangladesh’s banking sector recently ranked 130th among the 141 countries worldwide in the banking soundness index. This report showed that the efficiency of Bangladesh’s banking is worst among the south Asian countries (Ovi, 2019). Therefore, focusing on this key issue contribution of the champion employee to this employee service-oriented industry of Bangladesh may play an important role to overcome this current difficulty. However, the question that comes to the fore is which factors influence employee championing behavior in the context of organizational change?