The Role of Leadership Political Skills in the Context of Organizational Change

Abstract

In this research, we measured the impact of leaders’ political skills on employee behavioral support for organizational change and the latter's effect on change fatigue and change outcome. Organizations nowadays face dynamic environments that require constant change. Therefore, leaders should develop the political skills necessary to gain employee behavioral support for organizational change, manage employees' change fatigue, and ultimately achieve positive change outcomes. We based our study on a sample of 197 participants from Canadian organizations and used structural equation modeling to test our research hypotheses. We found that leader networking ability and apparent sincerity positively affect employees’ intentions to support change, whereas interpersonal influence and social astuteness do not. In turn, employees’ intentions to support change positively affect change outcome, although it has no significant effect on employees’ change fatigue. Finally, we found that change fatigue negatively affects change outcome. The findings have implications on organizations' HRD practices to facilitate effective change management efforts and have a theoretical contribution.