Top management's hypocrisy and employee's resistance to change: Explaining the mediating role of trust to top management

Employee’s resistance to change and the need to recognize its affecting factors in order to manage it has an important role in organizational development management. This study has examined the impact of top management’s hypocrisy on employee’s resistance to change and investigates mediating role of employees’ trust to top management. Based on the research variables, a questionnaire was designed and tested to assure its validity and reliability, and distributed among 323 employees of public organizations in the city of Rasht. In order to examine research hypotheses, confirmatory factor analysis was used and measurement models were estimated followed by multiple regression analysis to examine the fitness of data to structural equation models. Results of data analysis confirmed the relations among model’s variables and mediating role of trust. As a result, it became clear that in at 99 percent of confidence level, top management’s hypocrisy has a negative impact on employee’s trust to top management and in turn, trust has a declining role in employee’s resistance to change.