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JOCM
12,2
80
Transformational leadership
in the context of organizational
change
Regina Eisenbach, Kathleen Watson and Rajnandini Pillai
College of Business Administration, California State University,
San Marcos, USA
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to occur. Leaders may not need to create dissatisfaction with the present, but Transformational
instead may provide a vision of a possible future that is attractive and
leadership
engaging (Kouzes and Posner, 1988).
Even without dissatisfaction or crisis, both literatures suggest it is critical
that the leader be a change champion who can assemble and motivate a group
with enough power to lead the change effort (Kotter, 1995). The change
85
literature also suggests that a leader's ability to effectively use inducements
and interventions that get people to change is only effective if people have an
active need that the change can satisfy.
As described in the change literature, in order to pull or attract followers to
different change possibilities (see Ford and Ford, 1994), the leader must craft an
appealing vision that takes into consideration the underlying needs and values
of the key stakeholders. Once this vision is developed, the leader must
implement the change. This could be done through intellectual stimulation,
whereby the leader sets challenging goals for the employees and motivates
them to rethink old ways of doing business. The leader frames the change by
appealing to follower needs for achievement and growth that induces the
follower to find the change attractive. The process may also be facilitated if the
leader shows individualized consideration where he or she provides support,
coaching and guidance to the employees. Coaching and guiding behaviors are
particularly important in large-scale transformation and in the development of
self-managing work teams. A number of modern corporations are adopting the
team approach to structuring the organization, which in itself is a major
transformation of the culture.
A transformational leader would be a good facilitator of this process by
promoting the creation of a culture that encourages team-decision making and
behavioral control (Manz and Sims, 1990). Individualized consideration would
also play a role in neutralizing the inevitable resistance that is bound to
accompany the transformational process. The leader must work at getting
large numbers of people in the organization involved in the transformation
process. Otherwise, it is likely to be greeted with cynicism and strong
resistance from key constituents, which is a sure-fire route to failure. This idea
that the transformational leader creates a culture which embraces change is
consistent with the change literature research by Brown and Eisenhardt (1997).
Their description of the three key characteristics of successful managers in
continuously changing organizations proposes that the successful leader
creates a system (i.e. an organizational culture) that is neither too rigid (overcontrolling the change process) nor too chaotic (so the change process falls
apart).
Throughout the transformation process, the leader should set high
performance expectations and reward behaviors that are directed toward
fulfillment of the vision. It is also important that the leader models the
behaviors that are required to institutionalize the change and sets the
standards for the rest of the organization to emulate. As Kotter (1995) argues,
change sticks only when it becomes ``the way we do things around here'', when
JOCM
12,2
86
it seeps into the bloodstream of the corporate body. This is similar to Sastry's
(1997) conclusion that enforcing a waiting period after every significant change
in strategic orientation is necessary to maintain competence. The
transformational leader can play a critical role in communicating how the
changes have led to better performance and ensuring that the next generation
of top management personifies the new approach (Kotter, 1995).
Transformational leadership in the context of change
The papers in this special issue all seek to bridge the gap between the change
management and transformational leadership literatures. More importantly,
they attempt to answer the basic question of how leaders deal with change and
why transformational leadership may be a successful way to enact change.
From a theoretical perspective, these articles may potentially advance research
in both the leadership and change areas because they address the following
issues:
.
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