Browsing by Subject "uhka"

People constantly face environmental stimuli and appraise them as events of potential benefits (challenge appraisal) or events of harm and loss (threat appraisal). The reason why employees react to organisational changes as threats or challenges remains unclear in the literature. With an existing large panel of participants (OnlineResearch Finland), this Master’s thesis aimed to understand how employees’ trust towards their supervisor links with cognitive appraisals. Following previous research, the trust variable was further divided into reliance and disclosure. Based on Transactional Theory of Stress and Coping by Lazarus & Folkman, employee’s trust towards the supervisor was hypothesised to predict employees' reactions to organisational changes, in a way that trust would be positively related to challenge appraisals and negatively related to threat appraisal. Using Gillespie’s 10-item trust inventory, regression analysis indicated that both reliance and disclosure were positively related to challenge appraisal in single time-points, and negatively related to threat appraisal in over-time analysis. The results indicate trust has an important role in employees’ reactions to changes and hypotheses were partly accepted, but it seems employees' initial reactions derive from alternative factors, and further research is needed to better understand causal relations between these variables.