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This research contributes to understanding emotional and political challenges experienced by middle managers as they work with contradictions inherent in leading change from the middle. Focus group data from 27 such middle managers based in the UK indicate that, once they have been assigned roles and tasks for leading change, underlying dynamics and processes influence the degree to which they become capable (or unable) to shape and navigate that change. A proposed conceptual framework, illustrated by a case vignette, provides a base of existing knowledge for understanding and explaining these dynamics. We also construct a model of the key tensions that are integral to middle managers leading change. A further contribution to practice involves elaborating the importance of collaborative effort across hierarchical and vertical boundaries, despite emotional and political tensions that undermine middle managers’ roles as change agents.

This chapter explores the unique role of leadership in organizational innovation. Drawing from the investment theory of creativity (Sternberg & Lubart, 1995), we show that organizational innovation begins with a leadership decision. Based on a review of the creativity, organizational, and leadership literatures, the key components of organizational innovation are examined from individual, group, and organization-wide perspectives. Leading innovation is conceptualized as a special case of leading organizational change, which requires creative leadership skills applied to social systems. Establishing an organizational environment that supports innovation in the current market environment increases systemic paradoxes that must be managed by leaders. We conclude that leading innovation increases the creative demand on the leadership system, which requires leaders who have a developed understanding of the process of innovation and its environmental requirements.

This chapter presents a theory for developing an adaptive high commitment, high performance system of organizing, managing, and leading. It is a synthesis of my 50 years of action and field research presented in my books and articles. It operationalized and makes actionable the ideas of Lewin and systems theorists. Its features are three organizational outcomes that must be achieved simultaneously, features of the system that must be targeted for change, six silent barriers to change, a governance system for continuous learning, change in large complex systems, and elements of a system that needed to immunize it against ultimate destruction.

Much has been theorized about what change strategies to employ given particular types of organizational change. Organizational theorists have linked participative strategies with culture change, strategies based on logic and reason with new technology implementations, and power strategies with the introduction of new laws and legislation. However, to what degree are these suggested recommendations carried out in organizations? In this paper, we explored the extent to which change recipients perceive the use of theorist recommended strategies when undergoing specific types of organizational changes. Using survey research (N = 88), we investigated the perceived relationship between two components of change: change content and change strategy. The results partially follow the ideals proposed by previous theorists, but they also highlight a significant relationship between power-coercive strategies and episodic change events that is contrary to those ideals. For practitioners, our findings draw attention to the connection between change content and change strategy in the hope of offering some guidance to those change agents who must determine how to lead a particular change initiative. Additionally, since our investigation is original and exploratory, we incite future research aimed at understanding the congruency between change content and change strategy formulation.

The Perception of Change Strategy Scale (PCS) measures an individual’s perception of the change strategies being used by change agents during an organizational change. To ground the reader in the tool’s history, two published studies are briefly discussed: one in which the measure was developed and a second in which the tool’s reliability was appraised. In a third study presented here a confirmatory factor analysis was conducted to test the theoretical framework and to select the best fitting model amongst several competing models of the constructs identified in the PCS. The results support a three-factor model as the best fit for a change strategy framework based on Chin and Benne’s (1961) three-part conceptualization for leading change: empirical-rational, power-coercive, and normative-re-educative.

The field of organization development is about change and development of organizational systems. One of the major barriers to system change is organizational silence, the fear of lower level to speak truth to power, and senior leaders' reluctance to seek the truth. Consequently, senior leaders whose role is to orchestrate strategic change that will develop the organization's capabilities do not know the whole truth about their system's capabilities to achieve its purpose and strategy and live to its values. Thirty years of enabling leaders to transform their organization through safe honest, collective, and internally public conversations using a structured process called the Strategic Fitness Process (SFP) has led to insights about why such conversations are powerfully transformative. After a brief description of the SFP, this chapter describes insights and supporting grounded data about why honest conversations were transformative when leaders fully embrace the practice and spirit of SFP. These insights were gained from facilitating and observing hundreds of honest conversations in progress. The findings have implications for how leaders aided by consultants can accelerate strategic change that will improve effectiveness and performance while simultaneously transforming trust and commitment.

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.