He Effect Of Employees’ Attitude On Organizational Change Practices: The Case Of Ethiopian Electric Utility, Ambo District

Abstract

Employees are an organization's valuable resource and studying factors that influence their attitude towards their internal business processes can improve change practices in the organization. The purpose of this research was to examine the effect of employees’ attitudes on organizational change practices at Ethiopian Electric Utility, Ambo district. The researcher used explanatory research design with quantitative approach. Both primary and secondary sources of data were used to collect data. Primary data were collected using 5-point Likert-scale -closed ended questionnaires. By distributing 153 questionnaires, 141 responses were properly filled out and returned. The analysis of the data was done with the help of the Statistical Package of Social Science version 24 and presented through descriptive statistics, correlations and regression analysis. According to the results, all employee attitude variables and organizational change practices dimensions have a mean value > 3(above the midpoint) which indicates the majority of Ethiopian Electric Utility employees have believed that their attitude has been expressed by the three predictors identified in this research. Moreover, job involvement has the highest mean (3.55) with a standard deviation of 0.68, implying that employees of Ethiopian Electric Utility were highly convinced that their attitude is expressed by it. Pearson correlation, the coefficient (r), was used to determine the relationship between each independent variable and the dependent variable (overall change practices). Accordingly, job satisfaction (r =.790**, p<0.01), job involvement (r =.629**, p<0.01) and organizational commitment (r =.786**, p<0.01) have a significant and positive correlation with overall organizational change practices. This implies that any increase or decrease on the independent variable will bring corresponding changes to change practices. Regression analysis results also showed that the set of three predictors included in the model explained 73.3% of variance in the dependent variable (organizational change practices) and independent variables significantly contributed to the variance at a significant level of 0.05. Among predicting variables of employees’ attitudes, job satisfaction was shown to be the best predictor, followed by organizational commitment to explaining the overall organizational change practices. Based on these findings, it was recommended that Ethiopian Electric Utility management should give more attention to enhancing the job satisfaction of employees across their company. Next, more focus will be given to the organizational commitment of employees for the effectiveness and successfulness of change practices in organization.