Predictors and processes related to employees’ change-related compliance and championing
Citation. Fugate, M., & Soenen, G. (2018). Predictors and processes related to employees’ change-related compliance and championing. Personnel Psychology, 71(1), 109–132. https://doi.org/10.1111/peps.12235
Summary. Fugate and Soenen use a two-wave field study during a French-Spanish company merger to explain why employees merely comply with change versus actively champion it. They model change management support as a contextual input, dispositional resistance to change as a person factor, and threat/challenge appraisals as the cognitive process linking implementation conditions to support behavior. The study is useful for AI transformation because it separates minimal compliance from discretionary championing and shows that leader-provided information, expectation clarity, and trust can make change feel like a challenge rather than only a threat.
Key claims
- Compliance and championing are distinct forms of support for change: compliance meets minimum expectations, while championing involves discretionary effort, initiative, problem solving, and promoting the change to others.
- Change management support negatively predicted threat appraisal (B = −.20, p < .05) and positively predicted challenge appraisal (B = .37, p < .001), suggesting that information, expectation clarity, and trust in management shape how employees cognitively interpret change.
- Challenge appraisal positively predicted both compliance (B = .43, p < .001) and championing (B = .50, p < .001), while threat appraisal significantly predicted lower championing (B = −.14, p < .05) but did not significantly predict compliance.
- Dispositional resistance to change moderated the relationship between change management support and challenge appraisal (interaction B = .13, p < .05): change management support mattered especially for employees higher in dispositional resistance.
- Conditional indirect effects through challenge appraisal were significant for both compliance and championing at mean and high dispositional resistance to change, but not at low resistance; indirect effects through threat appraisal were not significant.
Evidence & limitations
- Two-wave field study during an actual merger, with Time 1 assessing change management support and dispositional resistance to change and Time 2, six months later, assessing threat/challenge appraisals plus compliance and championing.
- Final matched sample was 115 employees from French and Spanish entities of a merged organization, representing 53% retention from Time 1 respondents and a 16% overall response rate; the setting included job redesign, department consolidation, executive committee merger, and an 8.3% reduction in force.
- Measures were self-report and the authors detected some common-method effects, though the estimated method variance was modest; the design is stronger than a single cross-sectional survey but still limited to one merger context and cannot establish broad generalizability to AI-specific change.
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