In this study, Organizational innovation is the most important topic in the university. Universities try to find the way to reduce the extent to which university workers resist in the innovation. This study is designed to verify the effect of persuasion on resistance to change. The study especially focused on finding the effective persuasion on the resistance to change. The study classified resistance to change to 3 components: emotional resistance to change, behavioral resistance to change, cognitive resistance to change. The study also tries to find the moderating effect of innovation type, and procedural justice and the mediating effect of the perceived risk. Data were obtained from 216 university staffs and were analysed through multiple regression. Reliability test was analyzed to verify the consistency of data. The samples included 133 males(61.6%) and 83 females(38.4%).
The result first showed that rational persuasion significantly have negative effect on resistance to change, emotional resistance to change and cognitive resistance to change, whereas coercive persuasion have a positive effect. Instead, rational persuasion does not have an significant effect on behavioral resistance to change while coercive persuasion significantly has a positive effect. Thus rational persuasion is not the effective way to reduce the behavioral resistance. The interesting thing is that coercive persuasion is counterproductive to the organizational innovation. Therefore university need to persuade the employees in a reasonable and sensible way.
The results revealed that innovation types moderated the relationship between incentive persuasion and resistance to change, and between incentive persuasion and emotional resistance to change. More specifically, innovation type increases the negative relationship between incentive persuasion and resistance to change, and between incentive persuasion and emotional resistance to change. compared to the innovation related to individual treatment.
Procedural justice moderated the relationship between the rational persuasion and cognitive resistance to change. That is, the effect of rational persuasion on cognitive resistance to change decreases when the procedural justice is perceived to be high. Thus if university keep the procedure for innovation, the appealing persuasion is less effective.
Finally the results revealed that the perceived risk mediated the relationship between rational persuasion and resistance to change, and between coercive persuasion and resistance to change. The perceived risk also mediated the relationship between the perceived risk and emotional resistance to change, and between coercive persuasion and resistance to change. Additionally the perceived risk coercive persuasion and behavioral resistance to change. Furthermore the perceived risk mediated the relationship between coercive persuasion and cognitive persuasion to risk.
This study has several contributions. One contribution of this study is our focus on the persuasion type, not the necessity of persuasion. another contribution is that this study tried to find the relationship between persuasion and resistance to change in the public organization such as the university, not private organization. Third, the study showed the dynamic relationship between persuasion and resistance to change by verifying the moderating effects innovation types, procedural justice. Fourth, the study is meaningful in that the mediating effect of the perceived risk between persuasion type and resistance to change was found. Finally, this study has a significance in that resistance to change is classified to 3 components of emotional, behavioral, and cognitive resistance and the effect of each persuasion on each resistance was verified.