Change fatigue is a new construct in the field of organisational change and stress, and in the last decade or so it has attracted many scholars’ attention. Change fatigue is often triggered by frequent changes and implicitly involves individuals' negative appraisals of change. Previous studies have found that change fatigue has various negative impacts on individuals and organisations, and it is one of the most important causes of change failure at the individual level. However, previous empirical studies on change fatigue have focused on its negative impacts on individual attitudes, i.e. job satisfaction, work engagement, organisational commitment, etc., and there is a lack of exploring the relationship between change fatigue and negative behaviors. As common negative slacking behaviors in the workplace, work withdrawal behaviors affect organisational performance and the success or failure of change. Although previous studies have explored the impact of change fatigue on the turnover intention, there is a lack of examination of the overall work withdrawal behaviors, so this study attempts to explore the mechanism of change fatigue's impact on the overall work withdrawal behavior.
Based primarily on the Affective Events Theory, this study attempts to open the "black box" of change fatigue affecting work withdrawal behaviors from the perspective of emotion according to the chain of "affective event-emotion-behavior". In addition，supervisor is an important role in the organization as it represents the organization to impact the individual’s behavior and it leads the change process. When individuals experience change fatigue, can the perceived supervisor support play a moderating role? This paper mainly focuses to explore the mediating role of negative emotions between change fatigue and work withdrawal behaviors, as well as the moderating role of perceived supervisor support on the relationship between change fatigue and negative emotions, and finally establishes a moderated mediation model.
In this study, the cross-sectional survey method was used with one-time survey and multi-wave time lagged survey respectively. One-time survey was used to collect valid questionnaire data from 525 full-time employees, while the multi-wave time lagged survey resulted in the collection of 313 valid questionnaires from full-time employees. The data were statistically analyzed and hypothesis tested using SPSS 26 and Amos 26.
By analyzing the data from both the one-time survey and the multi-wave time lagged survey, the results consistently showed that 1) change fatigue significantly predicted negative emotions after controlling for demographic and neuroticism variables; 2) negative emotions promoted work withdrawal behaviors and played a fully mediating role between change fatigue and work withdrawal behaviors; and 3) Perceived supervisor support negatively moderated the relationship between change fatigue and negative emotions and the mediation model, i.e., the higher the sense of supervisor's support, the higher the change fatigue-induced negative emotions, the lower the negative emotions, and the less employees' work withdrawal behaviors occur.
This study enriches the empirical research on change fatigue, reveals in depth the harm of change fatigue and its mechanism of action on work withdrawal behaviors; puts forward practical suggestions on how to intervene in change fatigue and its caused negative emotions and behaviors, which is of theoretical and practical reference significance for organisations to understand and intervene in members' change fatigue and its negative impact in a timely manner.
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