Employee championing behavior in the context of organizational change: a proposed framework for the business organizations in Bangladesh
| Pages | 735-757 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JABS-01-2019-0019 |
| Published date | 01 May 2020 |
| Date | 01 May 2020 |
| Author | M. Nazmul Islam,Fumitaka Furuoka,Aida Idris |
| Subject Matter | International business,Strategy |
Employee championing behavior in the
context of organizational change: a
proposed framework for the business
organizations in Bangladesh
M. Nazmul Islam, Fumitaka Furuoka and Aida Idris
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to propose a conceptual framework for ensuring employee
championingbehavior (ECB) during organizationalchange for business organizationsin Bangladesh.
Design/methodology/approach –On the basis of previousliterature, this paper proposed a framework
for ensuringECB during organizational change.
Findings –This paper proposed transformational leadership (TL), which enhances the championing
behavior of the employee.In addition, valence, work engagement and trust in leadershipact as potential
mediators between TL and championing behavior. This paper also proposed organizational alignment
(OA) as a potentialmoderator that influences ECB in the contextof organizational change.
Research limitations/implications –This paper highlights numerous influential factors that enhance
ECB. Thisproposed conceptual framework will be validatedby the empirical evidence in futureresearch.
Practical implications –This paper provides new insights for business leaders to understand the
importanceof ECB during organizational change.Moreover, this research underlinedthe effectiveness of
valence, work engagement and trust in leadership and OA to nurture ECB in the time of organizational
change, which helps managers of the business organizations to make efficient strategies to tackle
organizationalchange.
Originality/value –This paper adopted Kurt Lewin’s change management theory and integrated with
different factors associated with organizational change (TL, valence, work engagement, trust in
leadershipand OA) to propose a model to understand the mechanismof enhancing ECB in the context of
changein Bangladesh’s business organizations.
Keywords Transformational leadership, Valence, Work engagement, Trust in leadership,
Organizational alignment, Employee championing behavior, Organizational change, Bangladesh
Paper type Conceptual paper
Introduction
The academic world witnessed a number of scholarly works on organizational change
management in the past few decades, and most of the research works focused on the
employee behavior for managing organizational change (Al-Ali et al.,2017;Agote et al.,
2016;Faupel and Su
¨ß, 2019). Organizational change is one of the most complex and
uncertain situations for the organization. Therefore, an employee feels anxiety, fear and
uncertainty during organizational change and that causes employee cynicism, resistance
and unsupportive behavior in the context of organizational change. Hence, a number of
research studies pointed out that the employee of the organization plays a crucial role to
manage organizational change successfully (Cuch and French, 1948;Post and Altma,
1994). Success and failure of the organizations for managing change highly depend on
M. Nazmul Islam,
Fumitaka Furuoka and
Aida Idris are all based at
the University of Malaya,
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Received 21 January 2019
Revised 8 November 2019
21 March 2020
Accepted 22 March 2020
DOI 10.1108/JABS-01-2019-0019 VOL. 14 NO. 5 2020, pp. 735-757, ©Emerald Publishing Limited, ISSN 1558-7894 jJOURNAL OF ASIA BUSINESS STUDIES jPAGE 735
employee behavioral support or involvement with the change process. In light of that,
organizational change management studies shed light on different typologies of employee
behavior during organizational change such as employee resistance to change,
employee readiness for change, employee cynicism, employee motivation for change,
employee change-supportive behavior and employee championing behavior (ECB) to
tackle organizational change (Aslam et al., 2016). Among different other typologies of
employee behavior, in recent times, ECB is identified as the most effective behavioral
outcome of the employee for successfully implementing change in the organization (Bakari
et al., 2017;Faupel and Su
¨ß, 2019). ECB is associated withthe change-supportive behavior
of the employee (Lysova et al.,2015), which not only allows an employee to participate in
organizational change process but also helps in reducing the coworkers’ resistance to the
change (Simon et al., 2002) and promotes urgency as well as usefulness of the
organizational change initiativein the external and internal environments of the organization
(Chou, 2015). However, despite various implications and the importance of ECB,
researchers around the world underlined that it is not an easy task for the organization to
ensure ECB during organizational change (Faupel and Su
¨ß, 2019;Lysova et al., 2015).
Thus, it is challenging for any business organizations to ensure ECB in the context of
organizational change. Focusing on this key issue, earlier studies highlighted the potential
antecedents of ECB, which suggested that leadership and employee-motivating factors
during organizational change are the key factors for ensuring ECB (Agote et al.,2016;
Faupel and Su
¨ß, 2019). Moreover, change management literature witnessed diverse
categories of leadership styles such as transformational leadership (TL) (Faupel and Su
¨ß,
2019), transactional leadership and authentic leadership (Bakari et al.,2017). This is
because, during organizational change, the leader plays an effective role to manage
change in the organization (Al-Ali et al.,2017;Islam et al., 2020;Seah and Hsieh, 2015). In
addition, the literature of change management also observed different typologies of
employee behavior (negative and positive behavior) such as employee readiness to
change, employee commitment to change, employee motivation to support organizational
change and employee resistance to change and employee change cynicism (Aslam et al.,
2016). However, still, the worldwide rate of organizational change failure is about 90 per
cent (Cope, 2003). Therefore, determining which factors ensure ECB for managing change
in the organization is an important subject to investigate (Agote et al., 2016;DeCelles et al.,
2013). Hence, the formulation of this research is to identify which factors influence ECB in
the context of organizational change.
Change management theories mainly developed in the West, and most of the change
management studies scrutinized the employee change-supportive behavior in the Western
context (Rees and Althakhri, 2008). However, various practitioners and researchers believe
that the models developed in the Western contextare also applicable in the Eastern context
(Curran and Blackburn, 2001;Ramayah and Jantan, 2004). On the other hand, others
believe that because of the cultural, economical and contextual differences, model
established in the Western context may not be appropriate for the developing and Eastern
country context (Barkema et al., 2015;Hofstede, 1980). Moreover, the research world
witnessed few studies on employee behaviorduring organizational change, considering the
Eastern context. Particularly, such studies in the context of a developing country such as
Bangladesh are rare (Siddiqui and Ahmed, 2016). Hence, a model that aims to enhance
ECB during organizational change for the business organizations in Bangladesh would
stretch its initial knowledge to understand ECB for managing organizational change in the
context of Bangladesh.
Bangladesh is one of the promising countries in South Asia. Bangladesh’s economy is the
39th largest economy and is placed 29th largest purchasing power parity in the world.
Bangladesh is successfully maintaining 8 per cent average GDP growth rate, which is well
above the average GDP growth ratein Asia. Moreover, Bangladesh has recently shifted to a
lower middle-income country from a lower income country and is also planning to move
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