Leadership And Organizational Culture

Leadership is the need of an hour in any organization, as it is one of the important elements that are needed for the efficient management of the organization. In this research study, the author illustrates about the leadership and the reactions of the employees towards any organizational change. The topic is new and carries potential of attracting the attention of practitioners, as leadership is a most researched topic in the current time. Although this topic falls within the research area that aims at determining the attributes and conditions that are related with successful organization, it is different as focus is on the aspects linked with the reactions of employees to change.

The research is aimed to understand the how leaders’ attributes can be explained through the intentions of the employees for resisting a large-scale organizational change. Nowadays, many of the studies that are aiming towards explaining the successful change in the organization, adopts the macro perspective which mainly focuses on the factors like, structure of the organization, environment and strategy etc. The research conducted thus concluded that the employees’ flexibility and acceptance is must for the success of any change that is to be implemented in any organization.

The author of the research study has taken up a multi level analysis of the data, which he collected from 75 school principles and 586 teachers. According to Carpenter, Geletkanycz, & Sanders (2005), the leader’s personal attributes’ relation to the employee reactions can be explained by implementing two sets of process. According to Goksoy (2015), the choices and decisions of the leaders vary according to the personal attributes of the leaders and hence also have impact on the decisions they will be making in the organization. Such attributes of the leaders also affects the attitudes and beliefs of their followers.

Giberson et al. (2009) believes that the decision which is influenced, by the attributes of the leaders, includes mainly two factors, firstly the actions and performance that must be recognized and rewarded and secondly the recruitment decisions of the organization that also include the release of the employees.

Avolio, Zhu, Koh, & Bhatia (2004) believe that later process values how the beliefs and attributes of the follower are influenced by the decision of the leaders.  The leader’s values are expected to be positively related to the intentions of employees to resist the change based on what the author knows about the relationship in between the leader’s value and followers reactions. For better analysis, author framed hypothesis for these statements.

• Hypothesis 1a: Conservation values of the leaders positively associate themselves with the intentions of employees to resist change.
• Hypothesis 1b: The intention of the employees to resist change is negatively associated with the openness towards change.

The author discusses about that various ratings and reactions on the studies of the leaders’ traits are their presence in the leadership literature.

Oreg, Nevo, Metzer, Leder, & Castro (2009) stated that the change due to dispositional resistance has been linked with the varied conclusions which comprises of professional preferences and interest, technology adoption and the intentions of resisting the specific organizational changes. The author portrays that the leader’s dispositional resistance is correlated with the employee’s intentions of resisting change (Oreg & Nov, 2008).

• Hypothesis 2: The intentions of employee’s resistance are positively associated with the dispositional resistance to the change of employees.

 Bommer, Rich, & Rubin (2005) in his study identified that transformational leadership behavior gets negatively associated with cynicism of employees regarding the organizational change. For better introspection of the results, author critically thought of analyzing the results of the data, analysis of the above study and for this purpose, he framed another hypothesis.

• Hypothesis 3: The intention of the employees to resist will be negatively associated with the transformational leadership behavior.

Through a strong vision researcher has articulated that transformational leadership reduces the ambiguity which is associated with the organizational change by offering undeniable visions of the future.  (Kihlstrom, 2013).

Hypothesis 4: The relationship of employee’s dispositional resistance to change and intention to resist will be moderated by Transformational leadership.

The author has been successful in conducting the research analysis with the public school system of Israel, which was followed by decline in the student performance over the past years. For efficiency in methodology, 40-item portrait value questionnaire were utilized to measure personal values.

The focus of the study was kept on the leaders and the reactions of the employees to organizational change. The author portrayed that personal emphasis of leader on the stimulation and novelty are negatively related with the intention of the followers for resisting the organizational change.

The research done by Lau & Woodman (1995) shows the correlation among the openness values and dispositional resistance to change and also the outcomes overlaps in their effects. Liao and co- authors (H & M, 2008)supports the research study and says that conceptualization in respect of the transformational leadership focuses on the high order constructs. The transformational leadership scale comprises of the inspirational scale, intellectual scale and individual scale.

Gaziel (1994) portrayed in his study that Israeli school system has conservative climate and has hierarchical structure and because of that, differences in the leader’s personal conservation has less significant impact on the followers, in comparison to the differences in the leader’s stress on the creativity and innovative ideas. Although not hypothesized but it is anticipated to determine certain relationship in between the leader’s transformational leadership behaviors and attributes. The author reveals that one can expect the change to be accepted easily by appreciating it and emphasizing the sincerity to change value and low level of dispositional resistance towards the change (Groves, 2005).

After data analysis, researcher identified that the intention of teachers was negative towards the principal’s candidness to change value and the transformational leadership behavior and it is positively related to his dispositional resistance towards the change. Moreover, the author portrays that the principal’s transformational leadership behavior moderates the relationship in between dispositional resistance of teachers and intentions to resists to the change. Relationship between conservative values like compliance have been found for exhibiting weaker relationship with the behaviors in comparison to the relationship in between opened standards and behaviors. In this particular paragraph, the author has shown the theoretical contributions that the findings offer. First, the study unites the two highly deliberated, aspects of the organization. Organizational scholars associate leadership, in transformational leadership with motivating employees for responding positively to the change. By explicitly focusing in such a link, the author has successfully filled the conceptual gap in literature.

The findings of the study critically expand how the forming of attitude of employees towards the change is affected by the situational factors interaction with the personal factors.  In line with the study of Ross (L & RE, 1991), the author suggests that the personality of the employees have varied effects on the leadership environment in which they merely work. The study successfully allows examining the large number of organization where the given changes were introduced. This literature mainly focuses on the change within the single organization although the organizations initiated a number of changes and at different stages the data was collected during the entire implementation process.

The research study implies that the characteristics which leader holds are able to create serious impact on the change reactions. The performance of the employees enhances as and when they are able to assess the self-awareness conclusions of their personality. Though the leaders of the organization can successfully use the traits of the transformational leadership in their working for overriding the resistance to change but still other means can be considered, for the same, by the officials of human resource department like facilitating a trend that endorse the change by selling issues in the various organizational activities like workshops.

This research study shows that the transformational leadership’s managerial advantage suggests specific benefits. In particular, the followers, dispositional difficulty that some of them have in times or during organizational change can be compensated by charismatic leader.

This research study has successfully taken on integrative framework within which some of the factors of the organizational outcome are incorporated and examined, in comparison to other previous studies, which have restricted themselves to investigation of trait or motives only. In particular, the study shows that the interaction in between the leader’s behavior and followers traits mentions the circumstances under which the followers are influenced by the transformational leadership.

The main weakness in the study concern is about the external validity. Firstly, the sample of the study was selected through convenient sampling, thus constructing the assurance of the representative of the population of schools in Israeli. Additional research is needed to be conducted in other sectors and industries. The effects analyzed by the author in the country in which the data was collected, it appeared to be weaker in countries with great homogeneity in individual’s perspective towards the change. This research fails in analyzing the cultural level changes and its reactions, so further research is needed for meaningful proposition about the validity of models of cross-cultural differences.

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Bommer, W.H., Rich, G.A. & Rubin, R.S., 2005. Changing attitudes about change: longitudinal effects of transformational leader behavior on employee cynicism about organizational change. Journal of Organiztaional Behaviour, 26(7), pp.733-53.

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