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Contemporary organizations are facing an operating environment characterized by volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous, and “permanent whitewater.” To sustain high performance in this context, organizations must be able to change and develop as efficiently and effectively as possible. Within organizations, there are actors who catalyze and advance change in this manner; these actors are known as “champions.” Yet the scholar who wishes to conduct research concerning champions of change and organizational development is likely to be met by a highly fragmented literature. Varying notions of champions are scattered throughout extant research, where authors of articles cite different sources when conceptualizing champions; often superficially. Furthermore, many types of highly specific and nuanced non-generalizable champions have proliferated, making it difficult for practitioners and researchers to discover useful findings on how to go about making meaningful changes in their context. The purpose of this study was to address these problems for practitioners and researchers by engendering thoroughness, clarity, and coherence within champion scholarship. This was done by conducting the first comprehensive, critical yet insightful review of the champion literature within the organizational sciences using content analysis to re-conceptualize champions and develop a meaningful typology from which the field can be advanced. The chapter first suggests a return to Schön (1963) as the basis from which to conceptualize champions and, second, offers a typology consisting of 10 meta-champions of organizational change and development – Collaboration, Human Rights, Innovation, Product, Project, Service, Strategic, Sustainability, Technology, and Venture Champions – from which change practice and future research can benefit.

This paper seeks, from the perspective of the significant change (SC) champion, to explore the motivation behind why an individual willingly adopts SC. This research attempts to identify the key motivational traits that inspire these early change adopters.

An in‐depth case study is used to research and identify key early adopters traits. This is followed by a survey based on APEX emotional intelligence profiling traits to do an in‐depth investigation.

The SC‐champion has an interest to re‐affirm one's importance in the organization as well as enhance his/her respect, which is not necessarily linked to longevity. There is an emphasis on intrinsic values favoring team involvement. Of the APEX identified four profiles, the red‐performers are the least preferred.

Because qualitative methodologies are used and a limited survey respondent pool (n=25), caution is advised in freely generalizing these findings. The research on the subject matter is offered as a means to substantiate or refute the propositions. The intent is to offer the findings for possible transferability where logic and reality can assist.

The need to deal with SC is becoming crucial to the ongoing success of organizations. By identifying and investigating the motivational factors behind early acceptance, the organization can begin to deal with change urgency and optimize the benefits from change transformations.

Since change is recognized as an ongoing phenomenon, looking at the motivation behind the early adopters will aid organizations in identifying those key traits that aid in optimizing successful SC transformations.

The purpose of this paper is to examine male and female executives as leaders “championing” gender change interventions. It problematizes current exhortations for male leaders to lead gender change, much as they might lead any other business-driven change agenda. It argues that organizational gender scholarship is critical to understanding the gendered nature of championing.

This paper draws on a feminist qualitative research project examining the efficacy of a gender intervention in a university and a policing institution. Interviews with four leaders have been chosen from the larger study for analysis against the backdrop of material from interviewees and the participant observation of the researcher. It brings a social constructionist view of gender and Acker’s gendering processes to bear on understanding organizational gender change.

The sex/gender of the leader is inescapably fore-fronted by the gender change intervention. Gendered expectations and choices positioned men as powerful and effective champions while undermining the effectiveness of the woman in this study.

Further research examining male and female leaders capacity to champion gender change is required.

This research identifies effective champion behaviors, provides suggestions for ensuring that gender equity interventions are well championed and proposes a partnership model where senior men and women play complementary roles leading gender change.

This paper is of value to practitioners and scholars. It draws attention to contemporary issues of leadership and gender change, seeking to bridge the gap between theory and practice that undermines our change efforts.

The research aims to investigate the impact of transformational leadership on employee championing behavior and to determine the mediating effect of work engagement in the context of organizational change.

This is a quantitative approach, which is based on cross-sectional data. In total, 300 available cases are processed through structural equation modeling in order to infer the results.

The results indicate that transformational leadership is significantly related to championing behavior during organizational change. Moreover, work engagement fully mediates the relationship between transformational leadership and championing behavior in the context of organizational change.

Managers should emphasize the practice of the transformational leadership approach, as well as should stress the antecedents of work engagement in order to foster the employee championing behavior in the context of organizational change.

The research contributes to the change management and human resource management literature by providing a plausible explanation of the mediating role of work engagement in connecting transformational leadership and employee championing behavior in the context of organizational change.

In the context of organizational change, identifying, and organizing the various roles of change agents remains a challenge for practitioners and scholars alike. This chapter examines how different agents can enable an effective change process. Empirical evidence from three hospitals illustrates the process of transformation and its underlying arrangements to identify agents and their roles. The findings underline the importance of designing a coherent system of agents, determining where they come from, their role during the process, and how this may change throughout the change process. Managerial choices in the cases are discussed, leading to implications for theory and practice.

The purpose of this paper is to test the relationship between organizational antecedents, pricing capabilities, and firm performance.

Quantitative survey of 748 managers from mostly large companies globally.

It was found that the following five key organizational resources (the 5 Cs) – center-led price management, organizational confidence, championing behaviors, organizational change capacity, and pricing capabilities – positively influence firm performance. Furthermore, it was found that center-led price management, organizational change capacity, and championing behaviors act as important antecedents to pricing capabilities and, except for the former, to organizational confidence. The authors also examine interaction and mediation effects.

The results thus suggest that generic organizational factors – namely center-led price management – as well as highly idiosyncratic firm, specific capabilities – namely organizational confidence, championing behaviors by top management, organizational change capacity, and pricing capabilities – are key requirements to increase firm performance via pricing.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a conceptual framework for ensuring employee championing behavior (ECB) during organizational change for business organizations in Bangladesh.

On the basis of previous literature, this paper proposed a framework for ensuring ECB during organizational change.

This paper proposed transformational leadership (TL), which enhances the championing behavior of the employee. In addition, valence, work engagement and trust in leadership act as potential mediators between TL and championing behavior. This paper also proposed organizational alignment (OA) as a potential moderator that influences ECB in the context of organizational change.

This paper highlights numerous influential factors that enhance ECB. This proposed conceptual framework will be validated by the empirical evidence in future research.

This paper provides new insights for business leaders to understand the importance of ECB during organizational change. Moreover, this research underlined the effectiveness of valence, work engagement and trust in leadership and OA to nurture ECB in the time of organizational change, which helps managers of the business organizations to make efficient strategies to tackle organizational change.

This paper adopted Kurt Lewin’s change management theory and integrated with different factors associated with organizational change (TL, valence, work engagement, trust in leadership and OA) to propose a model to understand the mechanism of enhancing ECB in the context of change in Bangladesh’s business organizations.

Executives and strategists have long recognized the value of knowledge as a primary driving source for a firm’s sustainable competitive advantage – hence the creation by many firms of a position called the chief knowledge officer (CKO). However, many people have proposed differing perspectives and models relating to the concept of knowledge management. In this paper differing knowledge management viewpoints are examined, by examining and integrating theories relating to the diffusion of innovations and change agents. The roles of change agents, innovators, and opinion leaders, such as CKOs, are explored in terms of effective knowledge management strategies and techniques. A model and strategies are proposed that can serve as a framework for CKOs and other knowledge management change agents to effectively facilitate the acquisition and use of knowledge in the firm by effectively using an organizational memory system.

As is the case of all organizations, the academic library is a body reflecting the contribution of its core employees. As such, the roles performed by academic librarians are crucial to its development and existence. The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of academic librarians as change champions in an information age that has been, still is, and is expected to be continuously pervaded by varying and widespread changes in librarianship and scholarship coupled with the ever changing and expanding user needs and expectations. The paper also identifies a framework to perform this role.

This paper is informed by opinion and draws on relevant literature to highlight the current climate and what is being perceived as valuable to the future direction of academic libraries in order to bring credence to its trajectory.

Academic librarians must readily accept, be responsive to, and anticipate change to maintain and justify their relevance to stakeholders. Yet, anecdotal evidence suggests that not all librarians are prepared to embrace change.

Academic librarians must understand how their roles influence the decision-making processes of the stakeholders and vice versa.

The paper advances five principles or 5As to guide the change process in academic libraries: alignment, accountability, agility, accessibility, and assessment. Very briefly, it discusses the relevance of a concept referred to as the competition-collaboration continuum to further academic librarianship. These notions serve to assist academic librarians in determining the appropriate actions to be taken now.

This research aims to provide a historical example of how an innovation champion radically changed the operations of the circus industry by incorporating both the rational and actuation models in his scaling-up innovations. The innovations to the logistics and operations of the P. T. Barnum Circus, “The Greatest Show on Earth”, created by William C. Coup in response to the massive technological development of integrated railroad systems offer new insights into how management effectuation operates through the capabilities and experiences of an innovation champion.

The authors use a theoretically anchored longitudinal study that captures the mechanisms and processes of innovation by adopting an explorative, inductive research design in the form of a single in-depth case analysis.

Coup’s contributions show how the management innovation process works and adds detail with regard to how a champion of change may succeed in an effectuation process. Coup’s management innovation was in scaling-up others’ innovations. In an effectuation process similar to what entrepreneurs must do when their new ideas find a growing market acceptance, Coup repeatedly scaled-up others’ ideas in ways that changed how his industry operated.

Although there is some agreement on how management influences innovation in their organizations, research identifying the characteristics of managers that cause them to be innovation champions is still evolving and this current work adds to this endeavor. This work provides a rich illustration of an innovation champion’s use of effectuation as a process of experimentation to discover pragmatic and effective solutions to problems arising from the use of new technology or scaling business models to levels never before imagined.