When leadership meets organizational change: the influence of the top management team and supervisory leaders on change appraisals, change attitudes, and adjustment to change

Abstract

Despite the importance of adaption and change for firm survival, the failure rate of organizational change efforts remains alarmingly high (Beer and Nohria, 2000; Kotter, 1995) In a recent global survey of over 3,000 executives, Meaney and Pung (2008) reported that two-thirds of executives indicated that their firm had failed to successfully implement organizational changes Similarly, academic researchers have also concluded that difficulties in implementing and managing organizational change efforts often precipitate organizational crises (Probst and Raisch, 2005). As a result, attention has been directed to identify the factors that improve the likelihood of successfully implementing organizational change efforts. While there has been practitioner-oriented discussion around the pivotal role of workplace leaders in reducing resistance to change, only a limited number of empirical studies have examined relationships between leader behavior and employee change altitudes (e.g., Bommer, Rich, and Rubin, 2005; Herold, Caldwell, and Liu, 2008; Nemanich and Keller, 2007; Oreg and Berson, 2011 ). However, Miller, Johnson, and Grau (1994) argued that while the failure to successfully implement planned change may be attributed to many factors, few issues are as critical as employees' attitudes toward change. In this chapter, we examine the role of top management team (TMT) transformational leadership and supervisory transformational leadership on employees' appraisals and attitudes about change, and, ultimately, on their adjustment to a large-scale organizational restructuring. Our study makes a number of contributions to the change and leadership literatures. First, the proposed research model (see Figure 7 1) enables a fine-grained analysis of the processes through which leaders, at two hierarchical levels, infiuence employees' adjustment to large-scale organizational changes. More specifically, we identify two types of psychological uncertainty and two change attitudes as mediating relationships among leadership and employee adjustment to change. Furthermore, our model explicitly acknowledges that employees experience a range of potentially confiicting attitudes when confronted with organizational change events. Despite the theoretical importance of change attitudes (Armenakis and Bedeian, 1999; Miller et al., 1994), we could not identify any studies that have simultaneously examined relationships among leadership and confiicting employee attitudes such as openness to change and cynicism about organizational change. However, it is likely that managers and employees experience a range of conflicting and contradictory responses to organizational change events (Kiefer, 2002; Piderit, 2000). As a first step, we discuss the different demands and roles of the TMT and supervisory leaders within an organization and then define transformational leadership. Next, we develop hypotheses concerning relationships among TMT and supervisory transformational leadership and psychological uncertainty.