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Leading Change in the New Professional Service Firm: Characterizing Strategic Leadership in a Global Context

Professional Service Firms

ISBN: 978-0-76231-302-0, eISBN: 978-1-84950-407-2

Publication date: 26 June 2006

Abstract

This chapter examines the impact of adopting a global strategy upon leaders’ roles and identities in an engineering consultancy firm. Drawing upon process and social practice perspectives on leadership; our results explain leaders’ resistance to changing practices despite major process changes as due to the threats to their identity caused by the new role requirements to implement a global strategy. Our emerging process and social practice model of leadership highlights the complementary nature of process and practice change, creates a distinction between good and malign ambiguity in professional services firms and has implications for regulating the pace and timing of major changes which impact upon professional identities.

Citation

Fenton, E. and Pettigrew, A. (2006), "Leading Change in the New Professional Service Firm: Characterizing Strategic Leadership in a Global Context", Greenwood, R. and Suddaby, R. (Ed.) Professional Service Firms (Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Vol. 24), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 101-137. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0733-558X(06)24005-9

Publisher

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Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2006, Emerald Group Publishing Limited