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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.

Our conception of the ideal organization has changed from the machine-like efficiency of Weberian bureaucracy to a post-industrial ideal (Bell, 1973) in which organizations spurn the bureaucratic form to become more adaptive, receptive and generative. Such ideal organizations, we are told, will exhibit strong employee involvement and will rely on self-organizing autonomous teams. Hierarchy will be abandoned in favor of flatter organizational structures, and authority relations will be based upon individual capability and expertise rather than position. Put simply, organizations of the future will cure all of the ills of Weber's bureaucracy while preserving the ideals of precision, speed, discretion, knowledge and, above all, efficiency.