Team Flexibility in Organizational Change Context: Antecedents and Consequences

PURPOSE: The purpose of our study is to explore the antecedents and consequences of team flexibility in an organizational change context. In this regard, we considered team flexibility as an important theoretical mechanism under which the insiders would adapt to organizational change. PARTICIPANTS AND METHODS: A sample of 602 individual data that was nested in 108 teams and 43 organizations was used in this study, collecting from 43 enterprises located in mainland China through questionnaires. We adopted HLM 6.08 to testify all the hypothesized relationships and used the Monte Carlo method to create the confidence intervals for all the indirect effects. RESULTS: The empirical results show that 1) balance dimension of ambidexterity and change leadership have a significant positive effect on team flexibility; 2) balance dimension of ambidexterity only has marginal significant effects on employee change-specific adaptive behavior, change-specific proactive behavior, and change fairness. And change leadership has significant positive effects on the three outcomes; 3) team flexibility has a positive influence on the three outcomes. 4) Team flexibility plays a significant mediating role in the links between the balance dimension of ambidexterity and the three outcomes. In addition, team flexibility only has a significant indirect effect on the relationship between change leadership and change-specific adaptive behavior and proactive behavior. CONCLUSION: The current study reveals how team flexibility is established and how such flexibility is associated with employee-level change-specific behavior and perception under an organizational change context. The study indicates that team flexibility is contingent on two factors across two levels: change leadership at team level and balanced ambidexterity at organizational level, which also contributes to individual outcomes of organizational change.