The Relationship Between Age, Engagement And Disposition To Organizational Change

Human resource management as a strategic function in work organizations is currently a highly complex activity that implies significant challenges for human management leaders at a global level, due to the processes of constant change that all kind of organizations must experience, due to demands arising from the transformations of the environment and the internal requirements of adjustment in organizations to maintain their productivity and competitiveness in the dynamics of current markets, conditions that have serious implications in the management of change and its relationship with behavior, performance and commitment of the workers.. In this context, the human resources area has the important task of contributing to the management of human talent to achieve high levels of commitment from people in organizations and facilitate change processes, if organizational leaders want to achieve strategic objectives in a much more effective way. To achieve this, it is necessary to identify key variables that affect human behavior in work contexts and understand the possible relationships between these variables. The main objective of this research was to identify the relationship between age, engagement, and disposition to organizational change since these variables turn out to have a key role in human resource management in the current context of the world of work. The present investigation is framed in the perspective of positive psychology, a recent approach that seeks to move away from the emphasis on the pathological behavior to focus on the positive aspects and potential of the human being. This is the perspective of psychology in the field of the study of organizational behavior has been called positive organizational psychology. To achieve the objectives of identifying the relationship between the variables, a predictive study with a simple correlational design was performed. This kind of study is mainly oriented to investigate the functional relationship between two or more variables in which no forms of control of strange variables are used. The sample was made up of 808 people divided into two sub-samples (35.5 % Colombian and 65.5 % Ecuadorian), selected in an accidental non-probabilistic way; The self-report on age, the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES) questionnaire and the instrument Disposition to organizational change were used to evaluate the variables. The results showed significant relationships between the variables disposition to organizational change and engagement, both in general and in the subsamples; however, when investigating the possible role of age in moderating the other two variables, no evidence was found in this regard. Other analyzes suggest the possibility of an effect mediated by cultural aspects that may affect the readiness to change. However, recent events such as the world situation derived from the SARSCOV2 virus pandemic and its impact on work dynamics, suggest the need to advance in complementary studies to the one carried out by the authors and presented in this article, since the Work activities have migrated for many people from the context of the company to the context of the home, which highlights other variables that could affect the relationship investigated here. Keywords: age, engagement, organizational change, disposition to organizational change, positive organizational psychology, human resources management.