Employee Commitment to Organizational Change with the Role of Job Satisfaction and Transformational Leadership

This study aimed to analyze the role of job satisfaction and transformation leadership for employees’ commitment to organizational change. Based on a survey sample of 381 employees in post-merger enterprises in retail and pharmaceutical sector and a linear regression model. The results revealed that Transformational leadership was associated positively and significantly with Affective Commitment (β = .42, p < .000), Normative Commitment (β = .32, p < .000), and Continuance Commitment (β = .27, p < .000); Job satisfaction was associated positively and significantly with Affective Commitment (β = .24, p < .000) and Normative Commitment (β = .30, p < .000) among employees’ to organizational change. The results of this study provide a foundation of theory and practice for organizational changes that can efficiently exploit the human resource for the development in the next period.


Introduction
Commitment is arguably one of the most critical factors involved in employees' support for change initiatives (Herscovitch & Meyer, 2002). In the context of vibrant economic development in Vietnam, where competition is taking place so fiercely that the result may be the acquisition of large businesses for smaller businesses that often take place (Hosseini, Thu, & Trang, 2017; Vuong, Napier, Topolnytsky, 2002). Therefore, this study adopted affective commitment in measurement of employee's commitment in post-merger enterprises.
In examining human factors in M&As, researchers have employed psychological, social, and cultural perspectives (Chung, Du, & Choi, 2014; Marmenout, 2010). The psychological perspective shows that employees affected by M&As are frequently exposed to high levels of psychological distress, role ambiguity, and anxiety from uncertainty (Cooper, Cooper, Dewe, & O' Driscoll, 2001). According to the social perspective, employees both in acquired and acquiring firms tend to classify people based on the origin of their firm's identity theory, so they experience difficulties in overcoming biases (Amiot, Terry, & Callan, 2007). The cultural perspective maintains that combining two distinct organizations with different cultures often leads to a cultural clash or collision that undermines performance (Marmenout, 2010).
investigated the relationship between job satisfaction and organizational commitment in the banking sector. Results of the research showed that satisfaction and commitment were significantly correlated and satisfaction was a good predictor of commitment. Malik, Nawab, Naeem, and Danish (2010) indicated that the satisfaction with work-itself, quality of supervision and pay satisfaction had significant favourable influence on organizational commitment of employees. Ahmad and Oranya (2010) aimed to examine the relationship between nurses' job satisfaction and organizational commitment in culturally and developmentally different societies. According to the results, there was a positive and significant correlation between job satisfaction and total organizational commitment. Markovits, Davis, and Dick (2010) found out that extrinsic satisfaction and intrinsic satisfaction were more strongly related to affective commitment and normative commitment for public sector employees than for private-sector ones. A study conducted by Tsai, Cheng and Chang (2010) showed that job satisfaction positively influenced organizational commitment on hospitality industry employees. Likewise, Silva (2006) investigated the relationship between job satisfaction and organizational commitment on hospitality employees. The results showed that significant positive relationship between job satisfaction and organizational commitment was found.
H1a: Perceived job satisfaction positively influences an employee's affective commitment to organizational change.
H1b: Perceived job satisfaction positively influences an employee's normative commitment to organizational change.
H1c: Perceived job satisfaction negatively influences an employee's continuance commitment to organizational change.

Transformational Leadership and Organizational Commitment to Change
The keys to successful integration process of enterprises are a hands-on leadership styles, a bias for action, involvement of the entire staff, continuous focus on customers, and most of all, open and honest communication with employees (Nguyen & Kleiner, 2003). Leadership can play a significant role in the preparation and integration of mergers and acquisitions by helping organizational members achieve common goals and minimizing the adverse effects associated with culture, the size of the organization, diversity, conflict, change, role modelling, team building, communication, planning and preparation, corporate reputation, and demographics (Pike, 2017). Mergers can be a significant source of trauma for both employees and management and often result in lowered trust, commitment, satisfaction, and productivity, and increased absenteeism, turnover and attitude problem (Bligh & Carsten, 2005). Kotter (1996) claims that change always demands strong leadership. Leadership style has a substantial impact on the satisfaction, commitment for both the merger and the merged party's employees, in which the adaptive factor of leadership style changes that strongly affected the satisfaction 5 Technium Social Sciences Journal Vol. 2, 1-17, January 2020 ISSN: 2668-7798 www.techniumscience.com as well as the employees' commitment of the merged party. Joyce Covin, Kolenko, Sightler, and Tudor (1997) explores the relationship between leadership style and post-merger satisfaction, noting from the results that leadership style is significantly related to merger satisfaction for employees of both acquiring and acquired firms. Being able to integrate quickly with enterprises after the merger will help employees with great motivation to associate with enterprises and the role of leadership style characterized by relationships, context, and inspiration, support and management will help workers in the process of rapid integration with the post-merger organization, thereby helping them connect with the organization

Sample and Data Collection
Hair, Black, Babin, and Anderson (2010) indicated that the sample size must total at least 100 to use exploratory factor analysis. Bentler and Chou (1987) proposed that the ratio of sample size to the number of free parameters may be 5:1 for a rational theory, primarily when many latent variables exist.
Due to resource constraints, this study used a sample of 381 observations that ensure reliability for statistical tests in the research model. Table 1 presents descriptive statistics of demographic characteristics. Questionnaires were administered to employees of the post-merger enterprises in retail 6 Technium Social Sciences Journal Vol. 2, 1-17, January 2020 ISSN: 2668-7798 www.techniumscience.com and pharmaceutical sector in Ho Chi Minh City of Vietnam, based on the non-probability sampling method (with convenient technique). The surveyed subjects in this study are employees working at postmerger enterprises, excluding newly recruited employees after the merger. The survey was conducted by the self-administered method, and employees were encouraged to complete the survey during work time.

Measures
To measure organizational commitment to change, we used the 18 items Organizational   Table 2 showed the correlation coefficients between the independent variables are generally, and the variance inflation factors do not exceed 0.5 suggesting that multicollinearity is unlikely to prove a significant problem (Hair, Black, Babin & Anderson, 2010). All of the hypothesized correlations are significantly different from zero and have the anticipated sign. Table 2 reports means, standard deviations, correlations among variables in the research model. The regression analysis was carried out to determine the efficacy level of the job satisfaction and transformational leadership on affective commitment, normative commitment, and continuance commitment to organizational change.

Results
The relationship between employee commitment to organizational change and job satisfaction and transformational leadership were estimated using OLS, and the results are shown in  The results of regression analysis in Table 3 suggest that the R 2 adjusted (0.267) was significant at the 0,000 level for affective commitment. This means that 26.7% of the variance in affective commitment was significantly explained by job satisfaction (β= .24; t= 5.53; p= .000) and transformational leadership (β= .42; t= 7.41; p= .000). Namely, job satisfaction and transformational leadership were found to be a significant predictor of normative commitment to organizational change (R 2 Adjusted = .247; β = .30 and .32; t= 6.86 and 5.44, respectively; p = .000). This means that 24.7% of the variance in normative commitment were significantly explained by the job satisfaction and transformational leadership. Addition, transformational leadership was found to be a significant predictor of continuance commitment (R 2 =.033; β = .27; t= 3.63; p= .000). This means that 3.3% of the variance in continuance commitment was significantly explained by the transformational leadership.

Discussion
The findings of this study align with other research results (Pike, 2017 During the organizational change such as M&As process, employees experience the merger syndrome, which is accompanied by increased self-interest, as employees become preoccupied with what the integration means for themselves, their incomes, and their careers. Employees seem to go through the merger as a loss of a loved one, often treated as a personal crisis, which may manifest itself as listlessness, apathy, a preoccupation with the past, lack of commitment to the new culture, fear, and active resistance to the new system (Cartwright & Cooper, 1993). As a result, several negative attitudes and behaviours are realized, including decreased job satisfaction, organizational commitment, loyalty and productivity and increased defective products, mistakes and withdrawal behaviours (Bellou, 2006).

Conclusion
This study was carried out in the context of organizational change such as the M&A market in Vietnam, is taking place very excitingly as a result of the business's strategy of enterprises as well as the consequence of competition becoming more and more so fierce. The merged enterprises in addition to the advantages, market opportunities, technology, finance and competitiveness acquired through merger deals, which also faced challenges due to the interests and cultural conflicts between the merged enterprises and the enterprises being merged, between members of merging organizations. Therefore, it is imperative to identify the factors affecting the employees' commitment in the post-merging enterprises based on harmonizing conflicts occurring to ensure the enterprises' success after the merger period,   [38] Jiali Zhang, Mohammad Faisal Ahammad, Shlomo Tarba, Cary L. Cooper, Keith W. Glaister