Impacts of personal trust, communication, and affective commitment on change success

Purpose Successful change implementation is crucial for organizational prosperity, and even survival. The purpose of this paper is to examine the impacts of personal trust and communication on change success, through affective commitment. Design/methodology/approach Based on an empirical study conducted among 307 employees of Canadian organizations and using structural equation modeling techniques. Findings The authors find that communication has a direct impact on change success, as well as an indirect impact through affective commitment. Trust only exerts an indirect effect through affective commitment. Originality/value This research thus extends the literature on the role of “soft” organizational factors on organizational change. Since the authors have limited this study to “soft” variables, it can be complemented with a study of hard factors contributing to change success, in order to build a comprehensive organizational change success model.