Managerial Cynicism and Affective Commitment to Change in Nigerian State Universities: The Moderating Role of Bureaucratic Culture - A Conceptual Framework.

Organizational change initiatives in universities of northwest Nigeria frequently yield suboptimal outcomes despite extensive structural and policy reforms. Prior scholarship attributes these failures primarily to employee attitudinal responses rather than technical deficiencies. This study proposes a relationship between managerial cynicism and employees' affective commitment to change, incorporating bureaucratic culture as a moderating contextual variable. The study intends to propose a conceptual framework of the moderating effect of bureaucratic culture on the relationship between managerial cynicism and employee affective commitment to change in Nigerian Universities. The study adopts a conceptual research design grounded in an integrative review and theoretical synthesis of some management science literatures in the field, sourced from web of Science, Google Scholar, Research Gate and internets. Commitment to change theory and organizational culture typology were also reviewed in this study in relation to conceptual analysis of related studies. The study recommends among others that Future research should focus on assessing the moderating role of Bureaucratic Culture in the relationship between managerial cynicism and employee affective commitment to change. The study is expected to contribute to the theoretical understanding of how affective commitment to change in public university systems in Nigeria is impacted by managerial cynicism.