Date of Award

Spring 2019

Document Type

Open Access Dissertation

First Advisor

Paul D. Bliese

Abstract

Individuals’ perceptions of their fit within in an organization unfold as a process over time that is subject to influence and change. This dissertation is a program of research that takes a process-oriented approach to understanding change from patterns of outcome trajectories and trajectory changes. Appendix A presents a study that introduces a conceptual framework for a temporal approach to change. Appendix A showed that strong events serve to change the trajectory of individuals’ affective commitment. Appendix B presents a first intervention study with surprising results where instead of self-affirmation, perspective taking appeared to facilitate positive trajectory changes in individuals’ identification with, commitment to, and intent to remain in their organization. The present study aimed to replicate and extend the surprising results. I integrated self-affirmation theory and motivated information processing to my conceptual change framework to design a new set of intervention procedures that were hypothesized to facilitate growth in individuals’ organizational attachment and pro-organizational interpersonal behaviors. The results show a lack of significant support for the majority of the theoretical predicts. Implications and future directions are discussed.

Rights

© 2019, Patrick J. Flynn

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