Mobilizing Professors’ Support of Digital Change: Multi-Level Insights on IT Resources as a Boundary Condition

The success of top-down digital change initiatives in higher education institutions (HEIs) largely depends on the support of professors as change recipients and catalysts within their departments. For effectively managing change, a better understanding of how process factors under management control (i.e., vision communication, change facilitation, participation opportunities, change coordination) simultaneously relate to professors’ cognitive and behavioral change support is crucial. Moreover, we examine how department-level IT resources as a context factor shape process–reaction relationships. Based on data from 1,400 professors nested in 258 departments within German HEIs, multilevel regression analyses support the relevance of vision communication, change facilitation, and participation opportunities — but not of change coordination. As department-level IT resources increase, vision communication more strongly relates to cognitive change support, pointing to unexplored higher-level boundary conditions of vision communication. Our study advances knowledge about mobilizing change support and managing top-down change with limited top-down influence to impose change.