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This chapter provides a review and extension of research pertaining to the respective roles of leaders, managers, and human resource management (HRM) practices on employee reactions to organizational change. Particular focus is given to the differential effects of these factors on employee commitment and resistance to change. A review of organizational change research between 2001 and 2011 revealed these outcomes to be two of the most commonly studied and consequential employee reactions to change. The review also demonstrates that research lacks precision in the treatment (conceptualization and measurement) of these constructs. For instance, sometimes the leadership and management of change are clearly differentiated, other times equated, and yet other times blurred. Arguments are presented that encourage researchers to refine theory and tests of leading and managing change, as well as their respective implications for change-related HRM. A specific case is made for the academic and practical utility of theory and practice that explicitly integrates leadership and management roles and responsibilities. Doing so will more closely align with and capture the inherent complexity of organizational change and employees’ experience. The intent is to urge both scholars and practitioners of change to adopt broader, yet more precise and practical, perspectives on how to influence employee reactions and change outcomes. To this end, special attention is paid to roles of leaders, managers, and HRM practices.

Employee involvement (EI) is a major part of high-performance work systems (HPWS) that have successfully transformed a large number of organizations and have become standard practice in many new organizations. Despite the proven benefits of EI, however, it is still not as widely utilized as it could be even when accounting for industry and organization differences in its applicability. We suggest that EI implementation is limited in part by the change management challenges it presents. We review the recent research on EI and HPWS, and suggest ways in which change research and theory can inform our understanding of why EI practices have fallen short of their potential and how they can be effectively implemented.

The flexibility of corporations to adapt their strategy to a fast-changing environment can be a major source for competitive advantage and survival. While research mainly focuses on outcomes of this ability, little is known of how to foster it in organizations. Thus, by building on the upper echelons theory, the authors assume that the strategic flexibility of the company depends on the willingness and permission to change of the chief executive officer (CEO). To support the hypotheses, the authors apply the dimensions of commitment to change and work autonomy to the CEO and test for moderation under conditions of technological turbulence. The authors’ results based on medium-sized organizations in Germany show significant effects of both dimensions on strategic flexibility. In particular, under conditions of high technological turbulence, commitment based on loyalty and not on pressure together with autonomy on control and evaluation criteria is best suited to increase strategic flexibility. These insights extend the research literature and provide guidelines for CEOs and their supervisors alike.

It has generally been assumed that effective leadership is a key to successful change. But, as some authors have noted, there is a dearth of empirical research regarding the impact of leadership on organization change. In this chapter, we review the empirical evidence from the past 20 years in an attempt to determine the impact of leadership on the conduct and outcomes of organizational change. Our conclusions indicate that the leadership of change is more complex than envisioned, involving multiple forms of leadership engaged in different approaches, behaviors, and activities, only some of which are effective.

Recent emphasis in research and theory building on compassion in organizations has not yet received sustained attention by organization development and change scholarship. Compassion at work, however, has been reported as instrumental in coaching, ad hoc organizing, prosocial behavior during challenging times, and other processes central to developing and changing organizations. It also has been theorized to bring about an untapped organizational capability, contribute to fostering a climate of workplace forgiveness, and to facilitate development of social entrepreneurship. In this essay, we begin to outline what the recent advances in the compassion literature offer researchers and practitioners of organization development and change. We briefly review how compassion is defined across different contexts, how it can be seen through a positive lens and within broader lines of inquiry on social and emotional dynamics at work, and how interpretive approaches to studying compassion might fit with the study of change. Seeing compassion scholarship as more than a specialized trend in positive organizational behavior, we offer ample opportunities for diverse and novel inquiry into development and change at work.

The vast majority of interventions during organizational change tend to focus on individually-held attitudes toward change. However, groups often form collective attitudes that are distinct from those held by its individual members, and organizational change often necessitates collective attitude change within teams, work units, or even the entire organization. We challenge the dominant view that collective attitudes to organizational change merely reflect an aggregation of individual attitudes by considering how and why collectively-held change attitudes are formed and activated. Drawing on social network theory, we propose an alternative approach toward an understanding of change. Acknowledging and detailing attitude formation as a social response to change – a social system of interaction among change recipients – we explain how collective attitudes to organizational change emerge. With this stance, individuals may hold broad and differing attitudes, but as a group can come together to share a collective attitude toward change. Using this approach, we explain how collective attitudes and individual attitudes are linked through top-down or bottom-up processes, or a combination of both. Developing this alternative perspective improves our understanding of how collective attitudes to change develop and evolve and enables both scholars and practitioners to better manage and influence the formation of change-supportive collective attitudes.

Leaders derive their capacity for driving institutional change from their power over organizations, but prior research says little about how leaders with limited power over a dominant intraorganizational group can acquire such a capacity for institutional action. This chapter develops a multilevel model that helps to understand how leaders of public service organizations were able to introduce “contract organization” form of organizational governance that enabled them to outsource the provision of public services to private firms. By doing so, this chapter adds to existing accounts of how power and political processes can give rise to organizational and institutional change.

Published studies of the relationships between personality, affect, and organizational change have been overwhelmingly quantitative, while clinical and psychodynamic approaches have seldom dealt with the context of organizational change. We used semistructured interviews to explore the “middle ground”, by researching how participants in change believed aspects of their personalities contributed to their responses, particularly on an affective level. We found that traits such as openness to experience, resilience, pragmatism, change self-efficacy, and locus of control influenced participants' perceptions of how they reacted to organizational change. The findings point to the important role that qualitative research into personality can play in improving understanding of emotional responses to organizational change.

This chapter focuses on the middle level of organizations. It is a critical synthesis level for culture. The authors explain how this level is influenced by the higher and lower levels of the organizational culture. The authors discuss how factors from the higher and lower levels may affect this level. It is at this level that culture has the greatest effect on an organization’s business capabilities, and therefore its operations and performance.

Purpose – We build a theoretical lens that draws on an emerging theory of positive work relationships to examine whether constructive emotional expressions in work relationships influence changes in individuals' affective commitment to their organization.

Design/methodology/approach – Using longitudinal data collected from full-time employees, we employed a latent-difference-score (LDS) approach to examine whether changes in emotional carrying capacity could account for changes in organizational commitment.

Findings – The findings support this hypothesis and suggest a new perspective on the ways in which a change in relationship capacity may create changes in people's commitment to an organization.

Research limitations – The main limitation concerns the use of self-report, albeit time-lagged, data.

Practical implications – Developing higher levels of employee affective commitment is a key challenge for many organizations. Our study can help managers in recognizing the importance of building a relational space in which employees are able to express emotions frequently and openly, as well as engaging with other employees in listening to their emotional experiences and responding in a constructive manner.

Originality/value – This study contributes to an emergent body of literature that adopts a positive psychology lens to the study of employee experiences at work, by investigating the capacity to express emotions in general and its influence on people's affective commitment to the organization.