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This paper aims to extend the consideration of distributed leadership in health-care settings. Leadership is typically studied from the classical notion of the place of single leaders and continues to examine distributed leadership within small teams or horizontally. The purpose is to develop a practical understanding of how distributed leadership may occur vertically, between different layers of the health-care leadership hierarchy, examining its influence on health-care outcomes across two hospitals.

Using semi-structured interviews, data were collected from 107 hospital employees (including executive leadership, clinical management and clinicians) from two hospitals in Australia and the USA. Using thematic content analysis, an iterative process was adopted characterized by alternating between social identity and distributed leadership literature and empirical themes to answer the question of how the practice of distributed leadership influences performance outcomes in hospitals?

The perceived social identities of leadership groups shaped communication and performance both positively and negatively. In one hospital a moderating structure emerged as a leadership dyad, where leadership was distributed vertically between hospital hierarchal layers, observed to overcome communication limitations. Findings suggest dyad creation is an effective mechanism to overcome hospital hierarchy-based communication issues and ameliorate health-care outcomes.

The study demonstrates how current leadership development practices that focus on leadership relational and social competencies can benefit from a structural approach to include leadership dyads that can foster these same competencies. This approach could help develop future hospital leaders and in doing so, improve hospital outcomes.

Organizational change in an evolving technological age is reconsidered here. Extant organization theory focuses largely on technologically‐induced transformation. This paper argues that this focus is inappropriate. With the proliferation of information technology in the workplace, change literature propounds a particular view of the organization: a lean, flat and networked organization. Reevaluating future change and future shock literature prediction, we establish a more realistic account of technology and the organization and question the accuracy of the “altered organization” expectation. In developing a conceptualization of a “limited reality of change,” we imply that predicted changes are not as clear cut as certain proponents would have us believe. Though there is a willingness throughout technology change literature to slip into the language of organizational transformation, this paper indicates that the reality of change is far more restrictive than has largely been previously acknowledged We conclude by proposing the coexistent organization as an alternative—arguing that hierarchical organizational forms can coexist with a networked organization—and discuss implications for organization change theory.

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.

Organizational change theorists tend to focus on substantive changes and frequently ignore or underplay the significance of the features of structural inertia. The effect of this preoccupation has minimized our understanding of frequently occurring patterns of limited structural change. The purpose of this paper is to encourage theorizing and debate about limited structural change.

This paper presents a conceptual explanation of the different patterns of limited structural change that arise in organizations undertaking change. It reviews and comments on how different patterns occur at the organization level as a result of the adjustment of component forces around pattern profiling centers of gravity.

A pervasive finding in change literature is that organizations tend to fall back on more of the same, even when they undergo some major structural change. The paper proposes a framework encapsulating four competencies that synergistically complement each other as a foundation for explaining different patterns of limited structural change.

The paper argues for advancing theory accounting for limited structural change, moving away from the dichotomy of change as normal and limited change as atypical. Normative rational change actions and bounded change actions interact and coexist in parallel. A focus on explaining limited change is a starting point for advancing our understanding of this coexistence.

This chapter assesses the accuracy of the assumption that organizational change research is too thematically narrow. The proposition is explored by assessing the nature of articles on change, published since 1947, in eight representative management and organization journals (n=454). Results indicate that more research on change is being published but has not lead to significantly more developed knowledge, as it increasingly relies on refinement rather than idea overthrow, and is largely made up of themes that received most of their critical attention up to a decade ago. The critique concludes by highlighting further development and career challenges for change researchers.

Jean M. Bartunek is the Robert A. and Evelyn J. Ferris chair and professor of organization studies at Boston College as well as a Fellow (since 1999) and a past president (2001–2002) of the Academy of Management. Her Ph.D. in social and organizational psychology is from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her substantive research interests focus on organizational change, conflict associated with it, and organizational cognition, and her methodological interests center around ways that external researchers can collaborate with insider members of a setting to study the setting. She is an associate editor of the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science and on the editorial boards of multiple other journals. She has published more than 100 journal articles and book chapters and 5 ([co]authored or co-edited) books.

Applying affect-as-information theory, this research analyzed the relationship of leader affective presence and employee proactive customer service performance (PCSP) in hospitality organizations. It further explored when and how leader affective presence influenced employee PCSP.

Taking a sample of 110 teams with 361 pairs of leaders and employees in Chinese hotels, a moderated mediation model was tested across individual and team levels using hierarchical linear modeling.

This study found that leader positive affective presence (LPAP) had a positive effect on employee PCSP, whereas leader negative affective presence (LNAP) had a negative effect on employee PCSP. Employee prosocial motivation mediated the relationship between leader affective presence and employee PCSP. The employee power distance value weakened the LNAP–employee prosocial motivation relationship, which subsequently mitigated the negative indirect effect of LNAP on employee PCSP through employee prosocial motivation.

The sample was drawn from one hotel group in China, which may limit external validity.

Hospitality organizations should emphasize the affective traits of leaders in employee initiatives. Leader affective presence should be considered during recruitment and promotion. Management should pay more attention to employee emotional management and value alignment.

The findings provide deeper insight into the role of LPAP and LNAP in influencing employees’ PCSP. It sheds new light on the mechanisms and conditions through which leader affective presence might heighten or hinder employee PCSP.