ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a research model about how trust and fairness perceptions of organizational leadership can influence employee work engagement during organizational change. It suggests that trust and fairness have the potential to boost employee work engagement via appraisals of the change, and by enhancing proactive employee behaviors targeted at improving one’s work environment. Challenge appraisals will empower employees to engage in expansive forms of job crafting that will help them learn and grow, even in the face of organizational changes. The chapter provides a reciprocal feedback loop between change appraisals and work engagement. Recent literature has argued that reciprocal models are necessary in order to capture the dynamism of employees’ trust and justice perceptions, changes in fairness perceptions and the relationships among stressors, responses and adjustment as they develop during stressful events. In top-down change processes, top management is typically responsible for the original decision, while supervisors implement the change at lower levels.
