5 pages Leadership paper due Monday 4pm pst

I really need good writing and good english. 

Grammatical mistakes will not be accepted. 

 Instructions: 5 Full Pages (not including tittle & reference page) APA Graduate level essay. Instructions and required scholarly resources attached.

Number of Pages: 5 Pages

Deadline: 1 days
Academic Level: Post-graduate

Paper Format: APA 

Instructions

Leaders play a critical role in the change management process. As change agents, leaders have the opportunity to transform their respective organizations through human capital, technology and other resources. For this assignment, select a leader of your choice who has acted as a change agent and who has positively impacted their organization through change.

Provide an analysis in which you,

· Analyze the issues and constraints faced by the organization that prompted the need for change

· Explain the role of the leader in the change management process

· Evaluate the implemented change as being sustainable in order to create a competitive advantage.

Support your paper with a minimum of four (4) scholarly resources. In addition to these specified resources, other appropriate scholarly resources, including older articles, may be included.

Length: 5 full pages, not including title and reference pages

Your synthesis should demonstrate thoughtful consideration of the ideas and concepts presented in the course by providing new thoughts and insights relating directly to this topic. Your response should reflect scholarly writing and current APA standards.

Required Supporting Articles and Scholarly Sources are attached on Zip Folder and below!!!

Four Things Leaders Must Do In A Crisis –

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ricksmith/2014/09/10/caught-between-ray-rice-and-a-hard-place-4-things-leaders-must-do-in-a-crisis/#c42e57110f1f

Every Leader Must Be A Change Agent Or Face Extinction –

https://www.forbes.com/sites/glennllopis/2014/03/24/every-leader-must-be-a-change-agent-or-face-extinction/#6374b81a4e0f

Assignment Resources/From Support to Mutiny

FROM SUPPORT TO MUTINY: SHIFTING LEGITIMACY
JUDGMENTS AND EMOTIONAL REACTIONS IMPACTING THE

IMPLEMENTATION OF RADICAL CHANGE

QUY NGUYEN HUY
INSEAD

KEVIN G. CORLEY
Arizona State University

MATTHEW S. KRAATZ
University of Illinois

Based on a three-year inductive study of one organization’s implementation of radical
organizational change, we examine the critical role played by middle managers’
judgments of the legitimacy of their top managers as change agents. Our analysis
revealed middle managers’ shifting judgments of the change agents’ legitimacy that
arose with their emotional reactions and produced rising resistance to the change
effort. Our inductive model illustrates the dynamic, relational, and iterative relation-
ships among change recipients’ legitimacy judgments of change agents and arising
emotional reactions in various phases of planned change, which explain recipients’
emergent resistance to the change effort. Our model allows us to contribute to theory
on radical organizational change, resistance to change, and legitimacy judgments.

Organizational scholars have long recognized the
severe challenges involved in organizational trans-
formation efforts and the necessary role that indi-
vidual agents play within them (Amis, Slack, &
Hinings, 2004; Hinings & Greenwood, 1996; Huy,
2002; Singh, House, & Tucker, 1986). Planned rad-
ical organizational change (PROC), which funda-
mentally alters the power structure, culture, rou-
tines, and strategy of the entire organization, often
appears to be the only option available in dire
circumstances (Miller & Friesen, 1980; Tushman &
Romanelli, 1985). As such, scholars have generally
treated radical change as an inherently volitional
phenomenon and placed change agents at the cen-
ter of their theories and empirical research (Bar-
tunek, 1984; Pettigrew, 1985). These agents can, in

principle, emerge from anywhere inside the organ-
ization (e.g., Plowman, Baker, Beck, Kulkarni, So-
lansky, & Travis, 2007); however, top managers
(TMs) have been the conventional focus—and for un-
derstandable reasons. These actors play a readily vis-
ible and public role in many change initiatives and
are often hired for the express purpose of transform-
ing failing organizations. In addition, they appear to
possess many of the resources that are most necessary
for this task, such as formal decision authority, con-
trol over resources, and centrality (e.g., Denis, Lang-
ley, & Cazale, 1996; Romanelli & Tushman, 1994).

Over the last two decades, scholars have exam-
ined many different instances of radical change and
presented ample evidence that supports an agentic
view of the process. They have also provided many
useful insights about change agents’ role within
this process and some prescribed requirements for
success in the job (e.g., Tushman & Romanelli,
1985; Wiersema & Bantel, 1992). Despite its many
important contributions, a closer examination of
this literature reveals at least one fairly systematic
and seemingly significant oversight: existing theory
and research seem to have mainly focused on the
early stages of the radical change process and given
insufficient attention to the challenges that change

This research was funded by the Social Science and
Human Research Council of Canada and INSEAD Re-
search. We would like to thank Alex Bitektine, Christiane
Demers, Ann Langley, Henry Mintzberg, Leigh Tost,
Frances Westley, Spencer Harrison, as well as audiences
at Harvard Business School, Wharton Business School,
IE Business School, and IESE for helpful comments on
previous versions of this article. We would also like to
acknowledge the exemplary editorial guidance we re-
ceived from Jason Colquitt.

1650

� Academy of Management Journal
2014, Vol. 57, No. 6, 1650–1680.
http://dx.doi.org/10.5465/amj.2012.0074

Copyright of the Academy of Management, all rights reserved. Contents may not be copied, emailed, posted to a listserv, or otherwise transmitted without the copyright holder’s express
written permission. Users may print, download, or email articles for individual use only.

agents face during its later stages—especially im-
plementation. This striking imbalance is likely due
in part to the opacity and complexity of implemen-
tation processes, especially in light of the difficulty
researchers have in gaining deep access into organ-
izations to study the PROC process closely and
longitudinally (Van de Ven, 1992; Ford, Ford, &
D’Amelio, 2008). It may also reflect, however, a
more basic misunderstanding about the nature of
these laborious processes, or, even, a bias toward
an overly strategic perspective of them.

Regardless of the causes, though, there does seem
to be a clear need (and opportunity) for research
and theory that delve into the implementation of
radical change and illuminate the role that change
agents play therein. This need becomes all the more
apparent when one considers implementation as a
critical dimension within the larger process of rad-
ical change and the inherently agentic nature of
this process itself. Radical change efforts frequently
fail as a result of implementation problems (Beer &
Nohria, 2000; Nag, Corley, & Gioia, 2007), yet there
is no logical reason to believe that change agents
should suddenly lose their ability to facilitate the
process as it passes into this critical stage. This
paper reports a study designed to examine this
puzzle and meet the need (and opportunity) for
more theory in this area.

Our qualitative, inductive study followed a rad-
ical change initiative undertaken at “Tekco,” a
large and historically successful company that fell
into a deep performance crisis in the wake of de-
regulation and associated changes in its competi-
tive and technological environments. Given our
general interest in implementation and executive
change agents, we followed Tekco’s change effort
over its full three-year course and conducted mul-
tiple waves of interviews with its new top manage-
ment team (TMT) (which had been recently hired
from outside), as well as with a large number of the
company’s middle managers (MMs). We ap-
proached these MMs as if they were the “lieuten-
ants” who would execute the TMT’s orders, and the
“lynchpins” of the larger radical change process
(two metaphors common in the literature—e.g., Ba-
logun & Johnson, 2004; Huy, 2002).

Over the course of our time at Tekco, we ob-
served a fairly remarkable turn of events. Within a
short time after their arrival, the company’s new
TMT successfully formulated a plan for change and
rallied substantial internal support. This plan soon
lost momentum, however, and ultimately failed
during its implementation phase. This overall pat-

tern of events clearly affirmed our orienting beliefs
about the critical importance of implementation, and,
as we will later suggest, represents a contribution in
its own right. Its main function, however, was to
provide a foundation for our inductive analyses to
explain this critical stage of the process and develop
a grounded theory about the aspects that change
agents (continuously) influence within it. Our data
revealed that MMs frequently seemed to analyze their
superiors’ statements and actions as if they were look-
ing for clues about their motivations, intentions, and
capabilities—that is, engaging in continuous judg-
ment of Tekco’s senior change agents. These judg-
ments were interlaced with emotional reactions that
often influenced their action–response to those judg-
ments. Over time, these perceptions seemed to co-
alesce into more holistic, person-centered judg-
ments—ones that had important implications for the
larger change process. Specifically, we found that
MMs’ beliefs about their bosses were closely associ-
ated with their beliefs about the larger change effort
and the nature of their participation therein. The ex-
istence of this relationship became most apparent in
the final days of Tekco’s radical change initiative,
when a final affront from the TMT caused MMs’
emotions to boil over and to stage an open revolt that
collectively rejected the authority of their bosses.
This led to the TMT’s rapid departure and brought an
abrupt end to the change effort.

These findings were not easily interpretable
through the lens of existing theory on PROC. In
addition to under-examining implementation, rad-
ical change scholars have not investigated deeply
enough the more general problem of change agents
obtaining and maintaining support from change
participants. We came to realize that our findings
could be explained with a clearer focus when we
turned to the large, multidisciplinary literature on
legitimacy. Scholars dating back to Max Weber
have recognized that power stands in constant need
of legitimation, and also emphasized that the for-
mer is apt to quickly disappear in the wake of the
latter (as with political uprisings and mutinies).
Legitimacy scholars have also assembled a large
body of theory and evidence that illuminate the
various sources of legitimacy and hypothesize
about the process through which it is amassed—
and depleted (e.g., Suchman, 1995; Tost, 2011; Ty-
ler, 2006). The inductively generated theory of
change agent legitimacy that we present in this
paper emerged as we delved into this literature and
brought its various insights to bear on our qualita-
tive data about Tekco’s PROC efforts.

2014 1651Huy, Corley, and Kraatz

Our study’s main theoretical contribution is to
highlight the importance of change agent legiti-
macy within the process of PROC, which ulti-
mately provides a relatively detailed mechanism to
explain shifting resistance to change via evolving
legitimacy judgments. A key theoretical insight
concerns the multiple and shifting bases of change
agent legitimacy. Drawing from the legitimacy lit-
erature and our data, we identify several aspects of
legitimacy judgment content and explain why they
are apt to shift over the course of a PROC effort.
Evolving judgments of change agent legitimacy pro-
vide a much-needed theoretical mechanism to sup-
port a dynamic (rather than static) and pluralistic
(rather than single-sided) explanation of shifting re-
sistance to change (Ford et al., 2008). Another impor-
tant insight concerns the holistic and actor-centered
nature of these judgments. Though judgments of
change agents may involve various types of content,
we posit that these typically congeal into a summary
judgment of legitimacy that has significant influence
on change participants’ behaviors.

Additionally, our emergent insights add empirical
texture to emerging conceptual work on legitimacy
judgments (Bitektine, 2011; Tost, 2011). Specifically,
we empirically demonstrate that legitimacy judg-
ments of human agents exist and can change rap-
idly, in part because they can be highly emotion-
laden (in contrast to legitimacy judgments of more
impersonal forms and structures that tend to be
slow-changing and unemotional). Emotional reac-
tions can trigger fast and abrupt changes in legiti-
macy judgments and influence the information that
becomes noticeable to evaluators. These insights
extend the nascent literature on legitimacy judg-
ment (which is dominantly cognitive) with an af-
fective dimension, showing how both cognition
and emotion can co-arise and influence evaluators’
subsequent interpretation and behaviors. Our study
thus bridges several key literatures—radical organ-
izational change, resistance to change, institution-
alism, and emotional reactions to change—with a
pluralistic and relational perspective to provide
deep insight into the implementation of PROC.

THEORETICAL GROUNDING

Planned Radical Organizational Change

The PROC process is generally characterized by
sudden and intense change actions that fundamen-
tally disturb various groups’ roles, identities, and
interests that have co-existed for a long time (Bar-

tunek, 1984; Pettigrew, 1985). While agents of
PROC can, in principle, emerge from many places
in and around organizations (Battilana, 2006; Plow-
man et al., 2007), TMs often appear to be the most
suitable candidates for the job. These individuals
occupy positions that provide many of the material
and symbolic resources most necessary to the task
of radical transformation, including the formal au-
thority to alter structure, reallocate capital, hire and
fire personnel, and publicly proselytize for cultural
change (Finkelstein & Hambrick, 1996; Tushman &
Romanelli, 1985; Wiersema & Bantel, 1992). It is
not surprising, then, that a significant portion of the
large and theoretically diverse literature on PROC
has focused on the role that top management
change agents play in initiating and directing it
(Battilana, Leca, & Boxenbaum, 2009; Kraatz &
Moore, 2002; Miller, 1991; Pettigrew, 1987; Ro-
manelli & Tushman, 1994).

Nearly all forms of major change pose implemen-
tation challenges and require some degree of sup-
port and participation at lower levels (Sonenshein,
2010). These challenges are particularly severe in
the case of PROC, which involves simultaneous
change in multiple core organizational elements.
Moreover, external constituencies such as inves-
tors, regulatory agencies, and customers hold high
expectations for rapid performance improvement
(e.g., Amis et al., 2004; Romanelli & Tushman,
1994). All these factors impose severe constraints
on change agents facing both high time pressure
and reduced resources to address challenging ten-
sions (e.g., Huy, 2002; Sastry, 1997); failure to ad-
dress these tensions could exacerbate organization-
al decline and even cause organizational mortality
(Singh et al., 1986).

Intriguingly enough, the PROC literature has
tended to assume that TMs’ authority to lead
change is largely unproblematic and that they typ-
ically perform a beneficial change agent role. Tush-
man and Romanelli (1985: 173–180), for instance,
contend that “only executive leadership can medi-
ate between forces for convergence and forces for
change” and “implement the set of discontinuous
changes” inherent in radical change efforts. Even
though the literature on MMs has documented their
active contribution to innovation in incremental or
continuous change contexts (Kanter, 1983; Floyd &
Wooldridge, 1992), the PROC literature tends to
de-emphasize the role of MMs and to portray them
in a self-effacing role (for an exception, see Huy,
2002). Likewise, most normative models of strategy
tend to accord MMs a supporting role at best

1652 DecemberAcademy of Management Journal

(Shrivastava, 1986); executives are advised to re-
duce equivocality and establish control systems
(Simons, 1994) so that MMs can comply with and
act on executives’ clear directives.

Coincidentally, the resistance to change litera-
ture has tended to assume a favorable view of TM
change agents and treats resistance to change by
lower-level employees as dysfunctional (Ford et al.,
2008). In fact, resistance to change is often seen as
problematic to PROC (Hinings & Greenwood,
1996). Thus, this stream of research tends to focus
on what change agents can do to overcome resis-
tance. Relatedly, resistors tend to be construed as
individuals with constrained psychological or so-
cial attributes, or motivated by narrow self-interests
that inhibit them from seeing and accepting the
reasons for and benefits of the proposed change.
Implicit in this literature is a largely static, one-
sided (agent-centric) and judgmental view of resis-
tance to change.

Likewise, the prescriptive PROC literature has
suggested relatively simple, generic prescriptions
to aid change agents, such as creating a sense of
urgency and a compelling vision, performing pro-
cedural and interactional justice, participation and
cooptation of lower levels, and project leader cred-
ibility and trustworthiness to overcome resistance
to change (e.g., Bartunek, Balogun, & Do, 2011;
Kotter, 1995). As intuitively commonsensical as
these prescriptions may appear, empirical research
has underexplored and even questioned how feasi-
ble or realistic it is for change agents to act success-
fully on these prescriptions, particularly in the con-
text of PROC (Furst & Cable, 2008).

Because of challenges inherent to PROC, success
often depends in part on employees voluntarily
cooperating with TMs to realize radical change.
Adherence to the spirit of the change goals, rather
than just the letter, is necessary to overcome un-
foreseen complications (Huy, 1999). Since discre-
tionary cooperation, rather than mechanical com-
pliance, is necessary to creatively address
difficulties that emerge during the implementation
process (Amason, 1996), even a modest amount of
resistance or passive apathy can harm the success
of PROC. Studies have shown that MMs often func-
tion as “linking pins” who play a critical role in
interpreting and implementing top-down changes
and fostering discretionary cooperation (e.g., Floyd
& Wooldridge, 1992; Huy, 2002). Thus, MMs can
serve as a decisive force in “making or breaking”
radical change efforts. Unfortunately, few empiri-
cal studies have taken an in-depth look at the exe-

cution challenges faced by TMs in enacting these
seeming straightforward prescriptions, and, more
importantly, their interactions with and depen-
dence on MMs for assistance in implementing rad-
ical change.

Resistance to Change

In light of the complexities of PROC and the
fertile conditions for the emergence of resistance to
PROC (e.g., Bartunek, 1984; Ford et al., 2008; Furst
& Cable, 2008), it should not be surprising that
research on resistance to change has blossomed
over the years. This literature has explored various
strategies that managers can use to reduce em-
ployee resistance to organizational change, such as
sanction, persuasion, participation, or communica-
tion (e.g., Kotter & Schlesinger, 1979; Nutt, 1986).
Unfortunately, after decades of research, findings
about their effectiveness remain inconclusive (see
Bartunek et al., 2011; Furst & Cable, 2008). For
instance, inviting employees to participate in plan-
ning a change has been found to increase employee
support for change (e.g., Coyle-Shapiro, 1999) and
to reduce support for change (e.g., Bruhn, Zajac, &
Al-Kazemi, 2001). Similarly, using sanctions and
edicts to force employee support for a change has
been effective in some cases (Poole, Gioia, & Gray,
1989) and ineffective in others (e.g., Nutt, 1986).

As many scholars reviewing this literature have
noted (Bartunek et al., 2011; Ford et al., 2008; Pid-
erit, 2000), research on resistance to change has
tended to take (a) a favorable view of change and
change agents and (b) a dominantly individualistic
and cognitive view of change resistors. Indeed, this
literature has tended to take the unquestioned
stance that change is good and resistance to change
is bad (Huy & Mintzberg, 2003), and, thus, that
change agents occupy a legitimate and beneficial
organizational role. Consequently, this stream of
research takes the implicit stance that resistance to
change is dysfunctional and explores what change
agents can do to overcome it. Second, and relat-
edly, resistors tend to be construed as individuals
with constrained psychological or social attributes.
Thus, they resist change because of personal cog-
nitive and social limitations such as cognitive ri-
gidity, conflicting schemas, low openness to
change, risk aversion, and protection of self-inter-
ests (see Ford et al., 2008, and Piderit, 2000, for
overviews).

Ford et al. (2008) have challenged this traditional
line of thinking and argued for a relational perspec-

2014 1653Huy, Corley, and Kraatz

tive on resistance to change (see Bartunek, Rous-
seau, Rudolph, & DePalma, 2006), one that advan-
tages neither change agent nor change recipient,
but, instead, focuses on their interactions. In this
view, the presence of resistance to change is neither
inherently good nor bad, nor is it solely to be
blamed on either change recipients or agents. The
key is to understand how the reciprocal actions of
both agents and recipients work together to foster
or inhibit resistance to change. Employees may re-
spond differently to similar managerial actions de-
pending on how they interpret the change agents’
motives. Thus, some scholars have started examin-
ing how the quality of interpersonal manager–em-
ployee relationships could influence whether em-
ployees judge the information conveyed by their
manager as supportive and credible, or as manipu-
lative and selfish (e.g., Ferris & Judge, 1991; Furst &
Cable, 2008). How employees make positive or neg-
ative attributions about leaders’ motives, or experi-
ence positive or negative emotional reactions to-
ward their bosses, could impact their behaviors
toward the proposed changes, irrespective of
whether these proposals are intrinsically beneficial
or harmful. The resistance to change literature has
tended to confound resistance to the change con-
tent (what is to be changed) with resistance to
change agency (leaders or agents of change) (see
Ford et al., 2008). Thus, there is a need to distin-
guish resistance to the change agent from resistance
to the proposed change content. Whether employ-
ees accept a controversial change might depend on
the extent to which they evaluate the change con-
tent and/or the change agent as legitimate or not.

Legitimacy

Legitimacy is widely recognized as a critical so-
cial phenomenon, and scholars across the social
sciences have evinced a longstanding concern with
understanding its nature, origins, and conse-
quences (Beetham, 1991; Jost & Major, 2001; John-
son, Dowd & Ridgeway, 2006; Deephouse & Such-
man, 2008). Integrating the vast institutional and
psychological literatures on the topic (e.g., Such-
man, 1995; Tyler, 1997), Tost (2011: 688) defines
legitimacy as “the judgment that an entity is appro-
priate for its context.”1 One critical outcome of

such judgments is the decision to accept existing
power structures and obey managerial directives.
When people believe that their superiors are enti-
tled to their positions, they will also generally feel
obligated to follow their orders and requests (Sel-
znick, 1969; Tyler, 1997; Weber, 1978).

Recent conceptual advances in the literature on
legitimacy judgments (Bitektine, 2011; Tost, 2011)
have stressed the importance of looking at the con-
tent of legitimacy judgments; that is, “the substan-
tive perceptions and beliefs that underlie the judg-
ment of an entity as legitimate or illegitimate”
(Tost, 2011: 687). Synthesizing the large and frag-
mented literature on legitimacy content, Tost
(2011: 693–694) argues that there are three main
dimensions of content underlying active or “eval-
uative” legitimacy judgments: (1) instrumental, (2)
relational, and (3) moral. Instrumental legitimacy is
present when the entity (in our study, the TM
change agent) is “perceived to facilitate the indi-
vidual’s or group’s attempts to reach self-defined or
internalized goals or outcomes” such as “percep-
tions related to the effectiveness, efficiency, or util-
ity of the entity.” Relational legitimacy exists when
the entity is “perceived to affirm the social identity
and self-worth of individuals or social groups and
to ensure that individuals or social groups are
treated with dignity and respect and receive out-
comes commensurate with their entitlements,”
such as perceptions of “fairness, benevolence, or
communality.” Finally, “an entity is perceived as
legitimate on moral grounds when it is perceived to
be consistent with the evaluator’s moral and ethical
values.” She also notes that these three dimensions

1 In the fragmented literature on organizational
change, we note concepts that are close to “legitimacy,”
such as credibility, trustworthiness, or fairness. For ex-

ample, “credibility” has been defined as the quality of
being believable or trustworthy. This concept has re-
ceived very little scholarly attention relative to legiti-
macy. Because legitimacy also portrays dimensions of
believability or trustworthiness, we thus focus on the
more encompassing legitimacy concept. Moreover, a few
studies have looked at how top teams experience de-
clined credibility due to their inability to achieve polit-
ical support or substantive change outcome, but in the
eyes of constituencies who have power equal or superior
to that of the top team, such as the board of directors,
rather than subordinating MMs (see Denis, Lamothe, &
Langley, 2001; Denis et al., 1996). As for “fairness,” Tost
(2011: 690) argues against some scholars’ tendency to
conflate legitimacy with fairness, which is only one di-
mension of the content that underlies legitimacy judg-
ments. Other dimensions of legitimacy exist, and fairness
can be an antecedent or outcome of legitimacy judgment
(see Tost, 2011).

1654 DecemberAcademy of Management Journal

are not mutually exclusive, in that they may over-
lap and that an entity could be evaluated simulta-
neously on all three dimensions or some subset of
the dimensions.

In addition to making active legitimacy judg-
ments based on these three dimensions, Tost (2011:
695–696) also suggests that people often assess le-
gitimacy in a more “passive mode.” These judg-
ments occur through some combination of two
other proposed cognitive processes. In the first,
people use “validity cues” as cognitive shortcuts
and base their own judgments entirely on the en-
dorsements of other observers. In the second, they
simply accept entities that display appropriate
symbols and conform to cultural expectations. Be-
cause people tend to approach judgment tasks in
ways that minimize effortful cognitive processing,
this more passive mode is expected to be operative
much of the time (Lieberman, 2003). This form of
legitimacy judgment is also present in situations
where an entity is accepted merely because it be-
longs to a generic category that is culturally “taken
for granted” as good, familiar, or non-problematic
(irrespective of its behaviors, outputs, or demon-
strated competencies—Bitektine, 2011).

Legitimacy has long been recognized as a vital
resource for power-holders looking to develop and
maintain authority and extract high-quality com-
pliance from their subordinates (Beetham, 1991;
Tyler, 2006; Zelditch, 2001). In its absence,
would-be authorities are unable to elicit voluntary
cooperation from their subjects, and are, instead,
forced to rely on costly and self-limiting coercive
tactics. In more extreme circumstances, the loss of
legitimacy can destabilize existing structures and
lead to a wholesale loss of power itself (as in mu-
tinies and political uprisings). Though previous
theory and research on PROC has said very little
about the legitimacy of radical change agents, its
potential role within the radical change process
is not difficult to recognize. Attention to change
agent legitimacy seems all the more important
given the significant problems that change agents
are likely to face in gaining and maintaining it.
Because these individuals must generally ask their
subordinates to make significant and often disrup-
tive changes in their identities and routines, and to
accept significant sacrifices on behalf of the organ-
ization, their legitimacy is likely to be rather prob-
lematic and subject to ongoing scrutiny.

Another key benefit of bringing legitimacy theory
to bear on PROC is that it provides a more encom-
passing, nuanced, and ideologically balanced lens

through which to explore resistance to change and
agent–recipient interactions. In particular, it opens
a window into factors that are external to the or-
ganization, and provides a way to integrate macro,
institutional considerations alongside micro, social
psychological insights (e.g., Tost, 2011). It also avoids
the managerial bias that is evident in much of the
prior research on resistance to change (Ford et al.,
2008). When the relationship between change agents
and change recipients is approached from a legiti-
macy perspective, managers are not inevitably the
“good guys” and resisting employees are not neces-
sarily irrational, selfish, or obstructionist (Bitektine,
2011; Tost, 2011). Finally, the legitimacy framing also
invites needed attention to the role of interpersonal
dynamics and emotional reactions (both of which
have received insufficient attention in the extant
PROC literature—Huy, 1999; Lazarus, 1991).

Emotional Reactions

Emotion refers to a feeling state with an identi-
fied cause or target that can be expressed verbally
or non-verbally (Elfenbein, 2007). The question of
what is an emotion and what is a “borderline”
emotion is still debated by emotion scholars
through various terms such as anger, excitement,
hope, compassion, frustration, disappointment, or
surprise (for an elaborate discussion, please see
Lazarus, 1991: 82–83); thus, we use the term “emo-
tional reactions” to include both emotions and bor-
derline emotions. Lazarus’s (1991, 1993) emotion
theory suggests that people typically experience
emotional reactions as they evaluate the signifi-
cance of an event in relation to their own goals and
concerns. If they appraise the consequence as ben-
eficial, pleasant feelings arise. They experience un-
pleasant feelings if they appraise the consequence
as (potentially) harmful. Thus, to the extent that
people appraise the legitimacy of their superiors
who have an important say about the nature of their
jobs or who lead change that is potentially impor-
tant to the realization of people’s important goals
and values, engaging in legitimacy judgment can
arouse strong emotional reactions.

Emotional reactions often generate a change in
readiness to act that prepares people to take action
(Frijda, 1996). People determine a potential action
response as they evaluate their own abilities to deal
with the event. If they determine they have ade-
quate resources to deal with the event, they are
more likely to respond actively. Otherwise, they
may adopt a passive/avoidance approach, which

2014 1655Huy, Corley, and Kraatz

could be interpreted as a form of resistance to
change. As emotional reactions can impact both
thinking and behavior (Elfenbein, 2007), they could
influence subsequent legitimacy judgments and re-
sistance to change. Research has under-explored
how exactly emotional reactions emerge during the
implementation of PROC, or how they interact with
legitimacy judgments and resistance to change to
help steer the course of PROC implementation. Our
inductive study seeks to explore these critical gaps
in our understanding.

METHODS

Research Setting

Our data collection efforts focused on radical
change at “Tekco,” a large information technology
(IT) company that enjoyed a dominant market po-
sition for more than 50 years.2 Starting as a small
venture more than a century ago, by the 1990s,
Tekco had become a large provider of IT and com-
munication services, with more than 50,000 full-
time employees and a market value of more than
$12 billion dollars. Over time, its growing market
power attracted the attention of governmental reg-
ulatory agencies that required the quasi-monopoly to
provide universal and affordable service in the mar-
kets it dominated. The company’s strength relied on a
highly skilled engineering staff that provided com-
plex, reliable, and state-of-the-art services. The com-
pany enjoyed decades of revenue and profit growth,
and could thus provide employees with generous
company benefits, life job security, and well-estab-
lished career development paths.

While the company had been historically profit-
able and stable, it faced an increasingly threatening
competitive, technological, and institutional envi-
ronment in the years leading up to our study. By
the late 1990s, advancements in computing power
and IT posed a severe threat to Tekco’s established
business model and suggested a need for funda-

mental change. The government, acting in response
to changes in technology and the political environ-
ment, also made a decision to deregulate the indus-
try. This deregulation paralleled changes that took
place in many other industries and countries dur-
ing the 1980s and 1990s as market logics gained
increasing influence. As a result of these converg-
ing technological and ideological changes, Tekco
faced more new competitors, including both de
novo firms and foreign technology companies.

These contextual changes also exerted pressure
on Tekco’s established culture. The company had
historically been engineering dominated and in-
ward focused. A number of government officials
and major customers felt that Tekco had not been
responsive enough in terms of innovation and pric-
ing, while some of its executives were becoming
too arrogant, yet risk averse. These new pressures
manifested themselves in the company’s declining
market share and profits, and also subjected it to
harsher criticism and scrutiny from investors and
securities analysts.

In response, the board of directors appointed a
new CEO from outside of the company—John Max-
well, who had held several senior management po-
sitions with high-technology firms—and directed
him to turn Tekco around. Maxwell began by mak-
ing sweeping changes to the TMT, splitting the
monolithic bureaucratic structure into multiple
business units with profit-and-loss accountability,
changing the company’s incentive system, reduc-
ing its cost structure by shedding 25% of the work-
force, and recruiting large numbers of new manag-
ers to quickly develop new sales and marketing
skills for competitive markets (see Table 1 for a
timeline of Tekco’s change efforts).

To enact these changes, the new TMT enlisted an
initial group of about 40 veteran senior MMs in the
formulation of radical change plans to generate
what specifically should be changed to restore prof-
its. MMs are generally important in organizational
transformation processes (e.g., Balogun & Johnson,
2004; Huy, 2002), and occupy a particularly impor-
tant role in the case of Tekco. At the request of
these MMs, TMs contracted a prestigious external
consulting firm, “Binary,” famous for quantitative
analysis. Binary consultants helped MMs perform
extensive quantitative analyses and bring external
benchmarking information to them, so as to deter-
mine the best areas for work reengineering. This
initial group of championing MMs then enlisted
more than 500 other MMs across a wide array of
work units—selected because of their work experi-

2 The names of the organization and its members, eth-
nic origins, geographical locations, and specific technol-
ogies have been disguised to protect the confidentiality
of this publicly traded organization. The exact names of
change programs have also been modified, although we
tried to convey the spirit of the disguised names. In the
same spirit, some numbers and calendar dates have been
altered. These adjustments in the presentation of the data
do not affect how the data have been interpreted to ex-
plain the proposed theoretical concepts.

1656 DecemberAcademy of Management Journal

ence and high influence with their respective peer
groups. The goal was to propose various change
initiatives that would allow the company to in-
crease revenues and cut costs quickly, with a target
economic payback of three years as a key criterion
for obtaining funding. MMs suggested about 250
change projects to improve Tekco’s operations and
profit, of which about 150 were funded. These proj-
ects were collectively referred to as the Corporate
Transformation (CT) program and involved reengi-
neering work processes and the heavy use of IT (for
more details on these CT projects, see Huy, 2002,
2011). To fund these projects, the company set
aside $1.2 billion of restructuring costs over the
next three years, with a goal to achieve a pre-tax
annual cash flow of $700 million by December
31, 2006.

Data Collection

As part of a three-year research project examin-
ing Tekco’s three-year radical change, which in-

cluded the first author having unfettered access to
observe meetings and interact with employees, we
conducted both formal and informal conversations
with employees at all levels of the company. For-
mal interviews consisted of semi-structured discus-
sions about the general change effort and instances
of change management specific to the informant;
interviews lasted for about an hour. Following the
tenets of purposeful sampling (Lincoln & Guba,
1985), these interviews often ended with suggestions
for at least two other employees considered influen-
tial in one or several aspects of the change effort. Of
particular interest were those who might have a dif-
ferent viewpoint, so as to help maximize diversity
and depth of perspectives, although our techniques
also sought confirmatory data (Charmaz, 2006).
Perspectives were included in our analysis when
provided by at least two informants (Laumann &
Pappi, 1976).

This process resulted in the first author inter-
viewing the incumbent CEO 3 times, the two pre-
vious CEOs once each, 12 executives 26 times, and
114 MMs3 192 times, in addition to many lower-
level employees and union officials. About half of
MMs interviewed belonged to the change champi-
oning group, and the other half belonged to the
change recipient group (although this categoriza-
tion is a rough one in practice, because a MM could
be a change agent of a particular change project
while being the recipient of another change proj-
ect). To get a more general perspective, we typically
interviewed senior MMs who supervised other ju-
nior MMs. As Eisenhardt and Graebner (2007) sug-
gest, interviewing informants from diverse groups
and perspectives reduces the risk that all these
informants would engage in biased, convergent ret-
rospective sensemaking and/or impression man-
agement. The real-time data collection used in this
study also mitigated rationalization biases. Re-
search in real time is recommended for longitudi-
nal research because it allows researchers to see
events in a way that is closer to that actually expe-
rienced by the participants, and that is sensitive to
current activity and concerns.

In addition to these formal interviews, the first
author conducted informal conversations with

3 MMs are two levels below the CEO and one level
above first-line supervisors. There are many levels of
middle management at Tekco, so one senior MM in the
line groups could be in charge of 2,000–5,000 frontline
workers. TMs include the CEO and the level of execu-
tives above MMs.

TABLE 1
Key Events in Tekco’s CT Program

Year 1 Market share: 76%
January ● John Maxwell becomes CEO and starts replacing

senior executive team.
March Strategy formulation phase begins.

● Select group of MMs and consulting firm to
analyze and quantify proposed change projects.

December ● Complete new senior executive team in place.
Year 2 Market share: 70%
January [Data collection begins.]
March Strategy implementation phase begins.

● Announcement of CT plan to reduce workforce
by 13,000 in parallel with 150 change projects
championed by MMs.

June ● Announcement of terms of voluntary separation
program and support mechanisms. Downsizing
begins.

Year 3 Market share: 64%
June ● Major decline in customer service known

throughout the company.
December ● Implementation challenges have caused

concerns about major delays and
underperformance of various major change
projects, in turn causing concerns that financial
and customer service improvement targets
might not be met.

Year 4 Market share: 59%
August Change evaluation phase begins.

● Implementation challenges continue to surface,
causing concerns that originally forecasted
financial targets will not be met. TMT then
decrees involuntary layoff of 3,000 people.

September ● CEO Maxwell resigns. TMT dissolved. New CEO
appointed.

2014 1657Huy, Corley, and Kraatz

close to 200 employees. These informal discussions
were useful in corroborating what he saw and
heard in the formal interviews and observations, as
well as in triangulating various processes of
change. The informal conversations also allowed
him to screen potential new informants for addi-
tional formal interviews who had been suggested
by previous informants; those informal conversa-
tions that raised new insights, or potentially diver-
gent viewpoints led to requests for formal, recorded
interviews. Finally, the first author also gathered
internal documents related to change project status,
employee surveys, and internal HR efforts. These
secondary data sources, as well as the results of
observations and the perusal of confidential archi-
val data, allowed the triangulation of findings from
diverse sources to build stronger interpretations
(Charmaz, 2006).

Data Analysis

Initially, narratives of the change effort were de-
veloped from the perspective of both TMs and
MMs. Key dates and milestones were placed into
flow diagrams so that the dynamics of TM and MM
actions and interactions could be better modeled
(Langley, 1999; Pentland, 1999). Initially, these di-
agrams looked very complex, because we tried not
to discard too prematurely any factor that might
turn out to be consequential and that might be
repeated across narratives (pattern matching). Two
consistent themes that began to emerge from the
MM change narratives were (1) the waning accep-
tance and support for the TMT over time and (2) a
corresponding increase in descriptions of resis-
tance to change. As we delved into the literature to
understand these emerging themes, it became ap-
parent that, while scholars understand each phe-
nomenon individually, we have almost no theory
on their interrelationship.

We then began “open coding” (Corbin & Strauss,
1990) individual interviews for perceptions of le-
gitimacy and resistance to change on the basis of
“in vivo” descriptions—or those offered by the in-
formants—as the basis for establishing first-order
codes (see Van Maanen, 1979). Legitimacy judg-
ments of the change agents are manifest in what
respondents said (expressing their thoughts and
feelings) when they evaluated TMs’ actions and
non-actions; resistance to change is coded in terms
of what respondents said (expressing their thoughts
and feelings) and what they did (or did not do) in
regards to acceptance or support of the change

agent or the change effort. Building from these first-
order codes, we then coded for similarities and
differences within and across our informant groups
to detect conceptual patterns (Glaser & Strauss,
1967), as well as with the extant literature to ensure
that themes previously discussed in the literature
were correctly attributed (e.g., legitimacy—Tost,
2011; resistance to change—Ford et al., 2008; emo-
tional reactions to change—Huy, 2002) and new
themes were properly specified.

One of those new themes was the presence of
various emotional reactions to the change and ac-
tions of the top team. Following prior empirical
examinations of emotional reactions to change
(e.g., Huy, 2002), we initially relied on the “cir-
cumplex” model of emotions (Larsen & Diener,
1992) to explore the wide range of emotional reac-
tions people can experience during change. Ac-
cording to this model, emotions share two basic
dimensions: one dimension reflects the hedonic
valence (pleasant–unpleasant) while the second re-
fers to the intensity of arousal (high versus low
intensity). Together, the four dimensions capture
almost the full range of emotional reactions (Bartel
& Saavedra, 2000). Thus, the hybrid category of
pleasant, high-intensity emotional reactions in-
cludes enthusiasm and excitement, while pleasant,
low-intensity emotional reactions include calm
and comfort. Unpleasant, high-intensity emotional
reactions include anger, anxiety, and fear, while
unpleasant, low-intensity emotional reactions in-
clude disappointment, shame, or dejection.

Beyond noting explicit emotion terms such as
“afraid” or “excited” for coding emotional reac-
tions, we also identified implicit emotional reac-
tions by relying on Lazarus’ (1991) core relational
themes and cognitive appraisal theory of emotion
(e.g., Smith & Ellsworth, 1985). These scholars ar-
gue that the experiences of specific emotions (e.g.,
anger, disappointment) are reliably associated with
particular core relational themes (Lazarus, 1991) or
appraisals (e.g., Smith & Ellsworth, 1985). For ex-
ample, when people feel disappointed (unpleasant,
low intensity), they tend to report thinking that the
situation is unpleasant, that results are below ex-
pectations, and that they are certain about what is
happening (e.g., outcomes). When people report
perceiving the situation as harmful, they perceive
having some control over others who intend to
cause harm, anger (unpleasant, high intensity)
could be inferred (Roseman, 1991; Tiedens & Lin-
ton, 2001). Ultimately, though, we aggregated these
emotional reactions into higher-order constructs,

1658 DecemberAcademy of Management Journal

positive and negative emotional reactions, which
are sufficient to explain the key elements of our
inductive model.

With a rich set of emergent themes in hand, we
went back to our initial narratives and began map-
ping those themes on to the dynamics we had un-
covered in the TM and MM descriptions of the
change effort (Langley, 1999). This mapping af-
forded us the opportunity to compare dynamics
such as legitimacy judgments, emotional reactions,
and resistance to change behaviors across different
time periods or stages of planned change, as well as
contextual factors (e.g., cultural norms, staff
changes, unexpected internal events, external po-
litical and economic developments) surrounding
these dynamics. Ultimately, this allowed us to be-
gin establishing the boundaries of a longitudinal
model for how legitimacy of change agents, emo-
tional reactions, and resistance to change interre-
lated over time. Figure 1 represents our emergent
data structure of MM responses to the change effort,
illustrating the first-order concepts, second-order
themes, and aggregate dimensions that serve as the
foundation for our theorizing (Gioia, Corley, &
Hamilton, 2013). In this way, Figure 1 provides a
structured illustration of the links between our raw
data and the emergent theorizing that forms the
cornerstone of our theoretical contribution. The fol-
lowing sections detail those themes and dimen-
sions, and begin tying them together into a coherent
understanding of how judgments of change agent
legitimacy judgments, emotional reactions, and re-
sistance to change interrelate in PROC.

FINDINGS

As Tekco’s change effort unfolded, it became in-
creasingly evident to us that the initial acceptance
of the change effort and positive regard the new
leaders enjoyed in the first months of their tenure
(during the change formulation phase) would not
last. Near the end of Tekco’s self-declared imple-
mentation phase, our data provided such a clear
picture of growing resistance to the change program
that a single empirical question stood out for us:
What happened to alter the initial acceptance of
radical change into resistance to change among the
MMs in this organization? We attempted to empir-
ically answer this question by tracking the status of
three emergent dimensions (legitimacy judgments,
emotional reactions, and resistance to change) over
the course of Tekco’s PROC effort. As our data
revealed, MMs evolved in the extent to which they

judged TMs as legitimate change agents. Our cod-
ing revealed, for each phase of PROC (formulation,
implementation, evaluation), shifts in MMs’ legiti-
macy judgments that coincided with (a) shifts in
the emotional reactions MMs had toward TMs
and the change program and (b) a growing resis-
tance to the change that culminated in open defi-
ance of the TMs’ directives.

Figure 2 represents a summary of how the key
aspects of our emergent data story interrelated dur-
ing each phase, and thus provides a structure for
our telling the story of Tekco’s PROC effort. For
each phase, we list TMs’ attributes and/or actions
and change outcomes (descriptive aspects of our
case), along with MMs’ judgments and emotional
reactions to TMs and the resulting shifts in their
acceptance/resistance to the change (from our induc-
tive analysis). We begin with a brief, albeit important,
examination of the formulation phase to establish the
high level of legitimacy and low levels of resistance
that existed early in the PROC effort. We then spend
considerably more time examining the interrelated
dynamics found in the implementation phase, and
conclude our data story with the dissolution of the
PROC effort in the evaluation phase.

Change Formulation: Favorable Legitimacy
Judgments and Low Resistance

Our informants marked the beginning of the
change formulation phase with Maxwell’s pro-
nouncement of the need for a radical change. Max-
well and his new team not only had to sell the need
for change, but also the need for change quickly,
due to fast-declining market share (from close to
90% only three years earlier down to 75% and
dropping) and profits (a projected decline of approx-
imately 70% the following year). As one executive
explained, “The financial markets were clamoring for
blood.” As a result, time scarcity underpinned MMs’
felt urgency to improve the company’s financial sit-
uation and reduce its cost structure, as well as the
decision to forego lengthy detailed strategic planning
to achieve major restructuring quickly in three years.
Table 2 provides data examples for this phase (as a
way to save space for the theoretically more interest-
ing implementation phase).

Legitimacy judgments: Dominantly cognitive.
As the quotes in Table 2 illustrate, MMs assessed
their new leaders as desirable, legitimate agents of
PROC dominantly on the basis that new TMs be-
longed to a generic category of people who are
presumed to be appropriate for leading radical

2014 1659Huy, Corley, and Kraatz

F
IG

U
R

E
1

D
at

a
S

tr
u

ct
u

re
of

C
h

an
ge

R
ec

ip
ie

n
t

R
es

p
on

se
s

to
C

h
an

ge
E

ff
or

t

change. This category can be described by several
attributes: as newcomers, they were not tied to the
old regime and they had experience in relevant
industry sectors. These attributes were seen by
MMs as conforming to cultural expectations set by
external consultants and industry analysts, thus
suggesting cognitive legitimacy judgment. Many
veteran MMs noted disruptive changes occurring in
the broader environment and conceded that radical
change was unavoidable, and that it was more ap-
propriate for outsiders to lead radical change than
incumbent executives. The “old guard” suffered a
severe and precipitous loss in status while outsid-
ers, in contrast, were taken for granted to be desir-
able leaders of radical change and were presumed
to have skills to fight competition successfully.
MMs’ cognitive legitimacy judgment was also
aligned with the thinking of Maxwell himself; in
his first year alone, he replaced about half of the

company’s top 27 executives, in effect establishing
a new symbolic basis of authority within Tekco.

In addition to MMs forming cognitive legitimacy
judgments, they also actively interpreted the in-
strumental and relational legitimacy of specific ac-
tions taken by TMs. Newcomer TMs also performed
several additional symbolic actions (Pfeffer, 1981;
Zott & Huy, 2007) that reinforced MMs’ prior pos-
itive judgment. These actions included involving
MMs in defining the content of the CT program
changes (which can be interpreted as enhancing
TMs’ relational legitimacy). Additionally, the top
team was seen as effectively handling the first
planned layoff in the long history of Tekco, a pro-
posed downsizing of 13,000 positions that repre-
sented around 25% of the workforce. It was feared
the consequences would be devastating to employ-
ees who had what amounted to lifetime job secu-
rity. Yet, this proposed change won the acceptance

FIGURE 2
Interactions between TMs and MMs through Three Phases of Planned Radical Change

2014 1661Huy, Corley, and Kraatz

T
A

B
L

E
2

D
at

a
E

xa
m

p
le

s
fo

r
F

or
m

u
la

ti
on

P
h

as
e

L
eg

it
im

ac
y

Ju
d

gm
en

ts
E

m
ot

io
n

al
R

ea
ct

io
n

s
R

es
is

ta
n

ce
to

C
h

an
ge

C
og

n
it

iv
e

ju
d

gm
en

t
●

“M
os

t
m

an
ag

em
en

t
gu

ru
s

h
av

e
af

fi
rm

ed
th

at
th

e
m

aj
or

it
y

of
se

n
io

r
m

an
ag

er
s

in
p

ro
te

ct
ed

fi
rm

s
li

ke
ou

rs
w

er
e

u
n

ab
le

to
m

an
ag

e
in

th
e

n
ew

co
m

p
et

it
iv

e
co

n
te

xt
an

d
sh

ou
ld

be
re

p
la

ce
d

.
.

.
M

an
y

ve
te

ra
n

ex
ec

u
ti

ve
s

w
il

l
be

re
p

la
ce

d
,

bu
t

th
is

is
O

K
.”

●
“[

P
ri

or
ex

ec
u

ti
ve

s’
]

ye
ar

s
of

ex
p

er
ie

n
ce

w
er

e
al

l
u

n
d

er
on

e
se

t
of

ru
le

s
w

it
h

on
e

se
t

of
or

ie
n

ta
ti

on
an

d
,

fr
an

kl
y,

a
ve

ry
n

ar
ro

w
vi

ew
of

th
e

w
or

ld
.

S
o

it
w

as
ra

th
er

[n
ew

]
ex

p
er

ie
n

ce
th

at
w

e
w

en
t

to
bu

y
in

th
e

m
ar

ke
tp

la
ce

.”
●

“I
f

yo
u

be
li

ev
e

th
e

ex
p

er
ts

on
co

rp
or

at
e

tr
an

sf
or

m
at

io
n

,
m

os
t

w
ou

ld
af

fi
rm

th
at

in
cu

m
be

n
t

ex
ec

u
ti

ve
s

w
ou

ld
be

u
n

li
ke

ly
to

m
ak

e
th

e
tr

an
si

ti
on

,
so

th
e

on
ly

vi
ab

le
so

lu
ti

on
is

to
re

p
la

ce
th

em
.”

●
“I

be
li

ev
e

th
at

ex
p

er
ts

w
h

o
ca

n
te

ac
h

u
s

h
ow

to
be

co
m

e
m

or
e

co
m

p
et

it
iv

e
d

o
n

ot
co

m
e

fr
om

th
e

in
si

d
e.

”
●

“W
e

w
an

te
d

to
ch

an
ge

th
e

ol
d

T
ek

co
m

on
op

ol
is

ti
c

cu
lt

u
re

.
.

.
M

os
t

of
th

e
n

ew
ex

ec
u

ti
ve

s
w

h
o

ca
m

e
in

d
id

n
ot

co
m

e
fr

om
m

on
op

ol
ie

s,
so

th
at

’s
go

od
.

M
os

t
of

th
em

ca
m

e
fr

om
fr

ee
m

ar
ke

t,
fr

ee
en

te
rp

ri
se

in
d

u
st

ri
es

li
ke

G
E

an
d

IB
M

.”

R
el

at
io

n
al

ju
d

gm
en

t
●

“I
tr

u
ly

be
li

ev
e

th
e

w
ay

T
ek

co
d

ow
n

si
ze

d
[s

h
ow

s
th

e
or

ga
n

iz
at

io
n

]
h

as
be

en
a

ve
ry

go
od

co
rp

or
at

e
ci

ti
ze

n
.

If
yo

u
lo

ok
ar

ou
n

d
,

th
ei

r
te

rm
in

at
io

n
p

ac
ka

ge
s

ar
e

as
go

od
as

an
yb

od
y’

s.
”

●
“I

li
ke

ve
ry

m
u

ch
th

at
to

p
m

an
ag

er
s

h
av

e
gi

ve
n

m
e

th
e

op
p

or
tu

n
it

y
to

sh
ow

w
h

at
I

am
ca

p
ab

le
of

,
th

is
is

ve
ry

ex
ci

ti
n

g
an

d
I

w
as

re
co

gn
iz

ed
by

m
y

co
ll

ea
gu

es
.

I
re

al
ly

li
ke

d
th

e
fa

ct
th

at
I

am
va

lu
ed

by
th

e
co

m
p

an
y,

by
m

y
bo

ss
es

,
so

I
am

ve
ry

ex
ci

te
d

an
d

m
ot

iv
at

ed
to

d
ri

ve
th

is
ch

an
ge

”
[a

ls
o:

im
p

li
ci

t
p

os
it

iv
e

h
ig

h
ac

ti
va

ti
on

em
ot

io
n

in
fe

rr
ed

th
ro

u
gh

ap
p

ra
is

al
of

p
er

so
n

al
w

el
fa

re
,

be
n

ef
it

s
fr

om
be

in
g

va
lu

ed
by

su
p

er
io

rs
]

●
“T

h
e

n
ew

C
E

O
h

as
d

on
e

h
im

se
lf

so
m

e
re

al
ly

go
od

se
rv

ic
e

by
ge

tt
in

g
ou

t
p

u
bl

ic
ly

,s
h

ow
in

g
p

eo
p

le
w

h
o

h
e

is
as

p
re

si
d

en
t

of
T

ek
co

..
.H

e
al

so
vi

si
te

d
so

m
e

lo
ca

ti
on

s
an

d
m

et
li

n
e

em
p

lo
ye

es
.

.
.

P
eo

p
le

li
ke

d
h

im
an

d
tr

u
st

th
at

h
e’

s
go

in
g

to
d

o
th

e
ri

gh
t

th
in

g”
[a

ls
o:

im
p

li
ci

t
p

os
it

iv
e

em
ot

io
n

in
fe

rr
ed

th
ro

u
gh

ap
p

ra
is

al
of

p
ot

en
ti

al
be

n
ef

it
fo

r
th

e
fi

rm
w

it
h

a
li

ka
bl

e
an

d
tr

u
st

w
or

th
y

C
E

O
]

●
“I

th
in

k
m

an
y

of
u

s
h

er
e

w
er

e
se

le
ct

ed
fo

r
ou

r
ab

il
it

y
.

.
.

ou
r

in
te

re
st

in
m

ak
in

g
ch

an
ge

s,
an

d
ac

h
ie

vi
n

g
a

ch
al

le
n

ge
an

d
be

in
g

ve
ry

go
al

fo
cu

se
d

.
.

.
W

e
h

av
e

se
en

th
e

im
p

or
ta

n
ce

of
th

es
e

in
it

ia
ti

ve
s

fo
r

th
e

fu
tu

re
,

an
d

w
e

h
av

e
be

en
re

co
gn

iz
ed

[b
y

to
p

m
an

ag
er

s]
fo

r
d

oi
n

g
th

at
.

S
o

th
at

fe
ed

s
m

an
y

of
u

s
.

.
.

be
ca

u
se

w
e

ar
e

go
al

fo
cu

se
d

an
d

ac
h

ie
ve

m
en

t
or

ie
n

te
d

”
[i

m
p

li
ci

t
p

os
it

iv
e

em
ot

io
n

in
fe

rr
ed

th
ro

u
gh

ap
p

ra
is

al
of

p
er

so
n

al
be

n
ef

it
s

fr
om

be
in

g
va

lu
ed

by
su

p
er

io
rs

]
●

“W
e

ar
e

ge
tt

in
g

in
cr

ea
si

n
gl

y
co

n
fi

d
en

t
th

at
w

e
ca

n
ov

er
co

m
e

m
os

t
th

in
gs

th
at

ca
n

ge
t

th
ro

w
n

at
u

s.
W

e
h

av
e

su
ff

ic
ie

n
t

d
et

er
m

in
at

io
n

to
d

ea
l

w
it

h
it

”
[i

m
p

li
ci

t
p

os
it

iv
e

or
n

eu
tr

al
em

ot
io

n
in

fe
rr

ed
th

ro
u

gh
ap

p
ra

is
al

of
n

o
p

er
so

n
al

h
ar

m
,

an
d

ev
en

so
m

e
op

ti
m

is
ti

c
co

n
fi

d
en

ce
in

ta
ki

n
g

ri
sk

an
d

ov
er

co
m

in
g

ch
al

le
n

ge
s]

●
“I

tr
u

ly
be

li
ev

e
th

e
w

ay
T

ek
co

d
ow

n
si

ze
d

[g
iv

in
g

co
m

p
et

it
iv

e
be

n
ef

it
s]

to
be

a
re

al
tr

ib
u

te
to

a
ca

ri
n

g
or

ga
n

iz
at

io
n

”
[i

m
p

li
ci

t
p

os
it

iv
e

or
n

eu
tr

al
em

ot
io

n
in

fe
rr

ed
th

ro
u

gh
ap

p
ra

is
al

of
ca

ri
n

g
or

n
o

h
ar

m
]

●
“P

eo
p

le
si

m
p

ly
tr

u
st

th
e

[n
ew

]
C

E
O

th
at

h
e’

s
go

in
g

to
d

o
th

e
ri

gh
t

th
in

g
an

d
w

il
l

fo
ll

ow
h

im
.”

●
“W

e
be

li
ev

e
w

e
d

o
h

av
e

ex
ce

ll
en

t
ch

an
ge

in
it

ia
ti

ve
s

h
er

e,
th

ey
ar

e
th

e
ri

gh
t

so
lu

ti
on

s
to

im
p

ro
ve

ou
r

op
er

at
io

n
s.

W
e

h
av

e
d

ev
el

op
ed

th
em

an
d

be
li

ev
e

in
th

em
.

T
h

es
e

ch
an

ge
s

ar
e

go
in

g
to

m
ak

e
a

d
if

fe
re

n
ce

[t
o

th
e

qu
al

it
y

of
ou

r
se

rv
ic

e
an

d
re

d
u

ce
ou

r
co

st
].

W
e

w
an

t
to

m
ak

e
th

es
e

ch
an

ge
s

h
ap

p
en

an
d

se
e

th
em

th
ro

u
gh

.”
●

“I
w

ou
ld

h
av

e
th

ou
gh

t
th

at
it

w
ou

ld
be

h
ar

d
er

to
br

in
g

p
eo

p
le

al
on

g.
B

u
t,

to
m

y
gr

ea
t

su
rp

ri
se

,
I

se
e

p
eo

p
le

go
al

on
g

w
it

h
ch

an
ge

.
I

th
ou

gh
t

th
at

m
om

en
tu

m
w

ou
ld

be
sl

ow
at

th
e

be
gi

n
n

in
g,

on
e

h
ad

to
sh

ow
p

os
it

iv
e

re
su

lt
s

fo
r

m
om

en
tu

m
to

sl
ow

ly
p

ic
k

u
p

.”
●

“W
e

ar
e

ex
tr

em
el

y
co

n
vi

n
ce

d
ab

ou
t

th
e

n
ee

d
fo

r
a

co
m

p
re

h
en

si
ve

tr
an

sf
or

m
at

io
n

of
th

e
co

m
p

an
y,

w
e

u
n

d
er

st
an

d
ve

ry
w

el
l

ou
r

[d
ir

e]
fi

n
an

ci
al

si
tu

at
io

n
.”

●
“W

e
ar

e
n

ow
fa

ci
n

g
n

ew
m

ar
ke

t
co

n
d

it
io

n
s,

th
e

en
tr

y
of

in
te

rn
at

io
n

al
co

m
p

et
it

or
s,

n
ew

cl
ie

n
t

ex
p

ec
ta

ti
on

s,
so

w
e

d
on

’t
h

av
e

m
u

ch
ch

oi
ce

ab
ou

t
n

ot
ch

an
gi

n
g

d
ra

st
ic

al
ly

.”
●

“W
e

fe
el

th
e

an
xi

et
y

an
d

th
e

u
rg

en
cy

fo
r

ch
an

ge
in

th
is

h
ig

h
ly

co
m

p
et

it
iv

e
en

vi
ro

n
m

en
t.

W
e

bo
u

gh
t

en
ti

re
ly

in
to

th
e

n
ee

d
fo

r
ch

an
ge

an
d

w
an

t
to

h
el

p
it

su
cc

ee
d

.”

and support of MMs, thanks, in large part, to pro-
mulgated symbolic principles by the CEO and his
top team (again, see Table 2 for data examples). In
addition to offering relatively generous compensa-
tion to the victims of the downsizing, Maxwell also
decreed: “We are going to remove the work before
we remove the job.” This symbolic pronouncement
also helped generate support among MMs, who
were involved in designing their own cost-cutting
projects based on promised new IT and believed
that the CEO’s promise that work would be re-
moved before people would not materially reduce
the quality of customer service, a key component of
Tekco’s identity to this point (which could be in-
terpreted as enhancing instrumental legitimacy).
An HR survey of employees reported that many
affected employees viewed the downsizing rules to
be “fair” and “kind,” even though the implicit psy-
chological contract of lifetime job security had been
violated (relational legitimacy). TMs’ additional
symbolic actions thus conveyed various types of
legitimacy in addition to the dominant cognitive
legitimacy.

Emotional reactions. As could be expected in
the wake of positive judgments, MMs’ emotional
reactions toward TMs were largely positive to neu-
tral. More specifically, for MMs who championed
change projects, collective emotions were largely
positive, including such emotions as excitement to
realize new projects that they proposed and hope
for a better future for their professional develop-
ment and for the improved performance of the com-
pany. Other MMs—in particular, those in the oper-
ating line groups who would implement the
changes proposed by their colleagues while trying
to maintain the quality of customer service—dis-
played calm (positive), resignation, and neutral
emotions (neither positive nor negative) toward
TMs. Overall, MMs’ emotional reactions toward
TMs were positive or neutral, with very little neg-
ative emotions toward TMs or the PROC effort.

Actions. Contrary to intuitive expectations and
research about MMs resisting major change due to
self-interest (e.g., Biggart, 1977; Tichy & Sherman,
1994), there was little discernible resistance to
change, even from MMs who did not belong to the
change formulation groups. A company study
showed that more than 80% of the surveyed em-
ployees agreed that Tekco’s financial performance
had to improve if it was to survive in a competitive
environment. A veteran senior MM in HR summa-
rized the results of her company’s employee survey
near the end of the formulation phase thus: “The

[new CEO] has done a very good job as our leader
and external ambassador. He’s doing extremely
well and employees in [Tekco] look to him as being
their leader.”

Despite these positive judgments and actions
from MMs, two critical commitments were made
during this formulation phase that would prove
problematic in later phases: (1) Maxwell’s very vis-
ible pledge to remove work before removing jobs
and (2) TMs’ promise to deliver to the board of
directors (and shareholders) $700 million annual
net income at the end of a three-year change effort.
When asked why the three-year implementation
period was chosen, CEO Maxwell explained:

Two years is too fast to go from implement and
achieve; five years is too long. You had to be pres-
sured by time schedule. You could only put in the
window the period of time you could sell to your
shareholders. So everybody accepted the three-year
plan, and that becomes the base around which we
measure ourselves to the outside world and to the
shareholders and investment community.

Change Implementation: Shifting Legitimacy
Judgments and Increasing Resistance

Ironically, many of the same factors that pro-
duced high legitimacy and low resistance during
the formulation phase came back to haunt execu-
tive change agents in the implementation phase.
Our analysis suggests that emerging and protracted
challenges related to the implementation of various
radical change projects led MMs to reassess their
original legitimacy judgments in the face of mount-
ing implementation problems and heightened neg-
ative emotional reactions. Over the course of the
implementation phase, these negative emotions
and modified legitimacy judgments fueled a grow-
ing resistance to the change that eventually led to
the downfall of the PROC program.

Interim change outcomes. Despite positive feed-
back from external analysts and an increase in
stock price from $28 to $39 in less than a year,
employees began to see cracks in Maxwell’s change
plans: a random telephone survey of about 1,800
employees showed that only 38% of employees felt
that the company had a sincere interest in their
wellbeing, 61% rated their morale from fair to very
poor, and only 34% believed that customer focus
would be better off at the end of the three-year
change effort. Underlying this internal concern was
the realization among MMs that many CT projects
were meeting delays or producing lower than ex-

2014 1663Huy, Corley, and Kraatz

pected benefits. Recall that the design of the change
projects was done very quickly and superficially
during the formulation phase. MMs now blamed
TMs for not giving them adequate face time and
support to resolve these difficulties effectively and
quickly.

As one operations MM championing a number of
change projects reported:

My [senior executive] stayed at a very high level,
wanted to manage the numbers, to understand some
of the solutions, but really did not provide time to
do that. It was very difficult . . . He would always tell
us that he’s available anytime, but he was so busy
that you’d get a half an hour here, and, two weeks
later, you’d get an hour there . . . We sensed that he
really didn’t understand, not because he wasn’t ca-
pable of understanding, but that he wasn’t focusing
on some of the more detailed [aspects].

Another operations MM added:

We did not succeed in getting our bosses to go out to
rally our employees. Most of their communication
was written, formal communication. We were think-
ing of a training package to help them improve face-
to-face communication.

Rapid launch of change projects that generated
MMs’ favorable judgment of TMs as competent
change agents during the formulation phase thus
began to hinder the smooth implementation of var-
ious change projects, foreshadowing real prospects
of underperformance and threatening MMs’ sense
of self-worth. MMs needed to regularly justify to
other colleagues that their championed projects re-
mained economically and operationally viable, and
they blamed TMs for having created this undesir-
able time scarcity and performance pressure envi-
ronment. Rapid launch in the formulation phase—
desirable in the eyes of both TMs and MMs—now
became a source of disappointment and anxiety.
“Failure in not an option” (a line from the movie
Apollo 13) was often repeated in MMs’ project re-
view meetings. As one MM in the control group
observed:

When these targets were set, there was nothing left
we could do except to try to make things work, to
deliver these projects while we were locked in some
kind of a time box, with unrealistic schedules and
[financial] benefits. This immediately created much
tension between the [recipient line] groups who
must endorse these benefits and [the change agent
groups who proposed these benefits].

Project MMs tried desperately to realize their
change projects, and any suggestion to evaluate the

interim results in mid-course, to re-prioritize re-
sources, or to re-adjust plans was unwelcome. As
one manager, analyzing the evolution of the port-
folio of change projects, said:

It’s like 155 lottery tickets all winning on December
31, 2006 . . . There’s now a huge organizational
resistance to [re-adjustment]. We don’t like to go
back and say we made a mistake. We’re going to
waste valuable company time, dollars, and skills.
People are dedicated to just doing their own proj-
ects, and they worry about whether their initiative
will get [enough resources to be] implemented, as
opposed to [asking themselves], “Have I got the right
initiative?”

This lack of engagement with MMs was also rec-
ognized by TMs. After having initiated CT and
putting a control structure in place, CEO Maxwell
devoted most of his time on external stakeholders.
He described his focus in a private interview as
follows:

I expect that [people below] will deliver. My role
now becomes one of managing from altitude the
work, explaining to the public what Tekco is all
about and where it’s going. Explaining to the gov-
ernment, talking to investors, and trying to keep
myself up to date with where the industry is going.
That keeps me fairly well employed.

While Maxwell assumed that other senior exec-
utives would spend much of their time champion-
ing and selling the change efforts inside Tekco, this
did not take place. These executives reported in
private interviews that they were also over-
whelmed with tasks similar to those of the CEO.

To make matters worse, the generous downsizing
compensation terms planned in the formulation
phase also generated unintended effects on the op-
erations groups: 16,000 employees opted to leave,
3,000 more than planned. Remaining employees
felt overly burdened, especially supervising line
MMs who were responsible for customer service.
Even though top executives were not directly re-
sponsible for this unexpected event, MMs still held
them responsible as heads of the company and for
forcing them to cut employees and costs to meet the
financial targets as per the initial time schedule.
TMs’ promise “not to remove people before work”
had not been respected. All this caused a growing
change fatigue among employees from having to
work so hard, so fast in such a compressed time
frame. As one customer service representative la-
mented on behalf of her colleagues: “There’s so
much information that we’ve become saturated.

1664 DecemberAcademy of Management Journal

We’ve become so saturated that we’ve become stu-
pid. So very simple things become difficult.” A
senior project manager in charge of many projects
that required major IT development also noted the
effect this fatigue had on the implementation effort:

There is a lot of fatigue, the problems are enormous,
I don’t know many people who work less than 70 to
80 hours a week . . . People in [IT] Systems Devel-
opment work very hard, for long hours, and many of
them fell sick physically and mentally. Many de-
pleted their energy because they could not sustain
such an intense level for such a long time.

Some MMs in HR and operations knew the grav-
ity of such actions and had been pleading with the
top team to issue a public and honest explanation,
but this did not take place (moral judgment).

Emotional reactions: Shifting to negative.
These mounting implementation problems resulted
in MM emotional reactions shifting from positive/
neutral to negative emotions such as disappoint-
ment, anxiety, and frustration. There were subtle
differences in MMs’ emotional reactions depending
on the dominant role they performed, however.
MMs as change project champions felt disap-
pointed because they were not getting adequate
interaction and support from TMs (relational judg-
ment). MMs attributed their mounting difficulties
in implementing their change projects to insuffi-
cient TMs’ support. This anticipation of underper-
formance, which could have negative identity and
career consequences, also led to anxiety in dealing
with TMs. One MM described the emotional reac-
tions of the change group as follows:

People are so scared not to deliver. They are no
longer asking the real questions, not only because
they don’t know what they are, they’d rather not
think about them . . . we are playing a little bit the
ostriches . . . people will try to deliver at all costs.

In aggregate, there was mounting shared frustra-
tion that their company was going in circles and
wasting resources in the change process, especially
in the wake of the top team’s inability to articulate
a meaningful change goal for the organization after
the first year’s learning grace period had elapsed.
As an MM in operations voiced in frustration:

There’s a lack of understanding [about] what the
future is going to hold, and how we’re going to deal
with it. There’s a big void . . . People are frustrated.
Like, are we just doomed?

Meanwhile, MMs in the role of pure change re-
cipients—typically, in operations groups charged

with customer service—felt disappointed by TMs
not keeping their promise of not removing employ-
ees before work was first streamlined. These line
operations MMs were under intense pressure to
deliver good customer service while managing the
collective anxiety and resentment of their line em-
ployees who were learning new competencies
while at the same time subject to downsizing. For
instance, a business unit composed of about 3,500
customer service representatives had to go through
a major downsizing and geographical consolidation
effort. One MM in charge of about 800 of those
representatives reported:

Our customer representatives are getting tired from
all this long traveling [due to centralization of cus-
tomer service centers in major metropolitan areas]
and this situation will not be sustainable in the long
run. Many are mothers with young children. As a
result, sales revenues are going down: senior man-
agement asked me to put the screws on them even
more. I feel stuck . . . I have to sell this change to my
employees but they don’t believe me.

As one line MM described her employees’ emo-
tional reactions:

Employees told us to stop saying that change would
be faster, we were making their lives more difficult
by moving them around, yet they did exactly the
same job as before, they answered the customers the
same way as before, so nothing important in their
work has changed . . . They only see that they have
less resources, less time to devote to customers, less
time for training . . . We had tremendous difficulty
in delivering good service this year.

These employees’ emotional reactions clearly
had an emotional effect on their supervising MMs.
These MMs, who were emotionally neutral and
accepted the need for radical change during the
change formulation phase, became increasingly
critical of both TMs and other MMs who promoted
radical change. Their emotional reactions could be
best described as resentment. As one MM said,
“They say that the greatest priority is our custom-
ers. Yet all the actions demonstrate that the highest
priority is short-term financial results . . . People
are not that naïve.”

Collective anxiety also prevailed among these
recipient line MMs, as one MM made very clear:
“Everybody right now is feeling highly insecure,
they are wondering if they would continue to have
a job in a year from now”; and, again: “This creates
a very high level of stress. Some of us are stressed,
de-energized, fed up . . . We are in hell.” Another

2014 1665Huy, Corley, and Kraatz

senior HR MM validated this widely shared emo-
tional reaction of MMs toward TMs: “I’m disap-
pointed on a lot of counts. I’m disappointed be-
cause the leadership of this company, at the very
senior levels, has not delivered on its responsibili-
ties.” These MMs’ negative judgments and emo-
tions were validated by the CEO himself in a pri-
vate interview toward the end of the second year
of CT:

Over the last three months, I went out and began
touching some of the people and I didn’t like what I
was hearing. It showed me that the senior executives
in this company didn’t stay in touch with the peo-
ple. I didn’t stay focused enough with the senior
executives . . . We left the employees on their own.
I think that’s a huge mistake.

Emotional censorship. MMs’ moderately nega-
tive emotional reactions were exacerbated by the
top team’s deliberate and public banning of any
expression of doubt and cynicism by MMs (as those
negative emotions were deemed too high a risk for
demoralizing lower-level workers). An executive
memo was circulated to MMs decreeing that “Cyn-
icism will not be tolerated; we are in a position of
leadership and must project hope and confidence
in difficult times.” This formal articulation of a
norm that was already intuitively known by many
MMs puzzled them, but effectively served to shut
off any legitimate outlet for expressing negative
emotions to the top team. At the lower-worker lev-
els, the feeling of emotional censorship was less
acute because many MMs organized venting ses-
sions. However, such sessions were considered
risky. Those who had managed to survive the lay-
offs thus far dared not express their true feelings
lest they be taken advantage of one day. As one MM
in operations described, “You have to show enthu-
siasm for a new idea even if you don’t believe in it,
so you have to fake your enthusiasm.” This, in turn,
reduced dialogue for understanding between the
top team and MMs.

Legitimacy judgments: Dominantly relational
and moral. The shift to more moderate negative
emotional reactions fostered mounting unfavorable
judgments about the top team’s legitimacy to lead
change. For instance, disappointment about the
progress of the change projects and anxiety about
their underperformance caused MMs to start mak-
ing negative attributions about TMs’ motives, such
as when they expressed concerns that TMs were
focused on “short-term mandates to make a lot of
money” or acted as “mercenaries of change.” These

attributions were so prevalent that even the CEO
became aware of them: he mentioned these phrases
in a private interview. These attributions marked a
shift in MM legitimacy judgments, from the domi-
nantly cognitive base of the formulation phase to
more of a concern with the relational and moral
aspects of legitimacy.

Relational legitimacy. Judgments involving how
a social entity communicates with others in a way
that accords them respect, dignity, and status
within their social milieu constitute the basis of
relational legitimacy (Tyler & Lind, 1992). If people
perceive that their self-worth and identity are en-
hanced in this interaction, they will perceive rela-
tional legitimacy to be high (Tost, 2011). MMs who
were co-opted by top executives to design the con-
tent of radical change felt well supported by their
superiors during the formulation phase and thus
had assumed this high level of support to continue
during the implementation phase. But top execu-
tives’ lack of engagement and implementation mis-
cues reduced MMs’ sense of support and gradually
impacted the sense of respect and status felt ac-
corded to them by senior change agents. Disap-
pointment with change project progress and per-
ceived insufficient TMs’ support also led some
MMs to make harsh attributions of the top team’s
motives. One MM shared this negative appraisal:
[Executives were] “jerking them around all the
time,” and that, “they are here just for the short
term . . . [they] appear ready to do anything to
achieve short term results.” Relational and moral
judgments can blend: If people feel they are treated
with disrespect, they can make an additional judg-
ment that the disrespectful person is low in moral
character. Not fully aware that TMs were over-
whelmed with external constituencies such as gov-
ernment agencies and major customers, MMs
tended to attribute insufficient two-way, authentic
communication either to TMs’ personal reluctance
for honest dialogue or to their under-appreciation
of the importance of communicating about change.
As one MM from HR conveyed harshly:

[Executives] will tell you over and over again, “You
can’t communicate enough.” But, here they are,
these champions of change, and, for whatever rea-
sons, they don’t have the time to share their per-
sonal thoughts with employees on the state of
change. I think it’s defensive. Their fear of exposing
themselves. It’s fascinating that over 70% of the
employee body believes that they have enough in-
formation, yet they still feel disconnected and say
they don’t trust [senior management].

1666 DecemberAcademy of Management Journal

Moral legitimacy. Judgments of moral legiti-
macy involve the extent to which a social entity
conforms to moral values and ethical principles
(Scott, 2001). Early symbolic pronouncements that
conferred high legitimacy to top executives during
the change formulation phase would come back to
constrain them in the subsequent implementation
phase. The strongest example of this involved the
principle “removing work before people,” a princi-
ple heavily supported by change agents and recip-
ients because it enabled recipient groups to accept
cost cutting associated with downsizing on the as-
sumption that customer service would not be sig-
nificantly affected (“Tekco’s values revolve around
the belief that the customer is king,” avowed one
HR MM). While many change initiatives involved
reengineering of work processes, in which tradi-
tional routine work was first streamlined then au-
tomated with the introduction of new IT systems
(meaning less employees would be needed for the
same quality of work output), several issues arose
during implementation. Remember that the design
of change projects was done quickly and superfi-
cially during the formulation phase. High-level
agreements made during the formulation phase be-
came points of conflict during implementation.
That is, when it came down to agreeing with each
smaller unit manager on the specific employees to
be cut in their units, disagreement surfaced about
the number of employees and timing of their de-
parture, resulting in lengthy negotiations as opera-
tions unit managers were concerned about the im-
pact of their employee cuts on customer service. To
make matters worse, unexpected events occurred.
For instance, the IT infrastructure on which many
new productivity improvements were supposed to
be implemented was found to have serious capacity
problems and needed to be fundamentally rede-
signed with unplanned investment of hundreds of
millions of dollars and years of development. This
discovery sent a chill throughout the operations
groups, as this implied that employees would need
to be cut to meet the scheduled cost-reduction ob-
jectives while the customer service groups had no
new IT technologies, as promised, to alleviate the
work burden of remaining employees.

Under pressures of time scarcity and meeting
interim financial targets on time, oftentimes coer-
cion was ultimately used to arbitrarily cut a certain
number of employees to meet the cost-cutting ob-
jectives, whether the new IT system was in place or
not. This increased the burden of work on the re-
maining operations employees, de-energizing them

and causing decline in customer service. As one
operations MM said, “The company had to force
the customer service groups to accept a change
initiative [and cut their personnel]. This is very
difficult and creates a very high level of stress for
many of us.” These coercive actions led to employ-
ees complaining to their MMs that top executives’
initial promise of “removing work before people”
had not been respected. The expression “do not
walk the talk” often arose in interviews as a reason
for the loss of the TMT’s credibility in the eyes of
operations and HR MMs. As one senior MM in
operations reported, “I received a lot of letters from
employees that we were not walking the talk . . . We
are saying that customer service is [our] number
one priority while we are cutting [employees] and
service is deteriorating.” Then he added, “The
change program does not match the company’s
mission statement. We are focused only on cost
reduction, not on improving customer service. We
are sending out conflicting signals to both [employ-
ees and customers].”

Much of the top team’s rhetoric seemed well
intended but not acted upon in the eyes of the
subordinates, such as the CEO’s well-accepted ini-
tial mission statement that emphasized customer
service being followed by an almost exclusive focus
on financial results by arbitrarily downsizing ser-
vice employees. Another senior MM made the fol-
lowing harsh judgment about TMs’ motivation in
keeping words and actions aligned:

Because [executives] were being judged on the basis
of their cost reduction, not on the basis of keeping
their word. Nobody called them in for their perfor-
mance appraisal and asked, “Have you kept your
words in the last twelve months?” They were [mea-
sured] on reducing headcount and cost. The other
stuff is just noise.

A MM in charge of 300 customer service employ-
ees summed up the views of many MMs we spoke
with this way: “I think the top team has a short-
term restructuring mandate. I have no confidence
that they will make long-term decisions.”

When asked about this issue a year after it took
place, the CEO claimed ignorance but seemed to
realize its deleterious effect: “I should stand up and
address that . . . you do lose credibility if that
happens. I haven’t heard it before, by the way,
because I am removed from the people who do the
work right now.” However, neither he nor the top
team ever publicly addressed the issue of why peo-
ple were removed before work, which caused their

2014 1667Huy, Corley, and Kraatz

legitimacy to decline even further. As one senior
MM monitoring communication inside Tekco de-
plored, “They should have conceded that they
might have got it wrong, that some things have been
done in zeal, inappropriately, and that they will be
fixed. You’ve got to rekindle the trust.” Another top
executive privately noted that, “It was a mistake for
the CEO to have made this promise. Removing
work before people would have never worked be-
cause human beings by nature would create other
work for themselves.” In this way, the top team’s
legitimacy was damaged twice by the same deci-
sion: first, for violating their espoused principle,
and then again for failing to explain or even ac-
knowledge the obvious inconsistency (despite sub-
ordinates’ expressed concerns about it).

Emergence of instrumental legitimacy judg-
ments. Negative relational and moral judgments
and co-arising negative emotional reactions also
made salient to MMs the protracted inability of the
top team to produce a meaningful strategic vision,
which exacerbated MMs’ judgments of the top
team’s low change competence: judgment of instru-
mental legitimacy started to emerge. Information
that was not salient in prior MMs’ judgments of
TMs suddenly became a major point of concern. As
one HR MM described, “Employees feel that top
executives don’t know what they are doing . . . [We
don’t have] a sort of driving thrust that people can
all sort of anchor themselves to.” In addition, dis-
appointment with the progress of their change proj-
ect and attributed insufficient TMs’ support (rela-
tional legitimacy) made salient to MMs that the top
team did not acquire sufficient operating knowl-
edge as their tenure progressed. Such detailed op-
erating knowledge, including the importance of
customer service and what it takes to deliver it
(instrumental legitimacy), could have been devel-
oped by frequent interactions with MMs. Instead,
the top team remaining invisible to a large majority
in the organization increasingly bothered MMs. As
one MM in operations complained, “They’re not
listening to customers. They’re not listening to em-
ployees who serve customers. How can they listen
when they don’t even come out of their offices to
meet with us and talk to us? How can they know
anything?” As an HR MM reported: “Employees
feel as if the executives are completely discon-
nected from them and from the reality of the world
of customers and employees.” Thus, negative emo-
tional reactions co-arising with emerging negative
relational and moral judgments prompted MMs to
reevaluate their early positive cognitive judgment

of newcomers as more competent to lead radical
change than incumbent executives, ironically fo-
cusing on TMs not having an adequate operating
knowledge of the company and not appreciating
the company’s distinctive competence: customer
service. Judgments of TMs’ instrumental legitimacy
started to emerge, and to reach its peak in the next
evaluation stage, as we will describe.

MMs’ growing unfavorable evaluation of TMs
seemed to reflect the large-scale dissatisfaction of
their employees about radical change and TMs. A
random sample survey of about 2,000 employees
(conducted by the company) reported that only
40% of employees felt that senior management was
open and honest; only 22% felt that leadership was
well known and visible; 46% felt valued as em-
ployees; less than 25% of employees believed that
the quality of customer service would improve at
the end of the transformation program, and 47%
believed it would be worse; and only 36% agreed
that the changes made today would make the com-
pany a better place to work in the future.

Actions: Growing resistance to change. Under
the combined weight of all these factors (MMs’
shifting negative emotional reactions, unfavorable
judgments of top executives’ actions and non-ac-
tions, attribution of unfavorable motives—all of
which could not be discussed openly due to emo-
tional censorship), it is not surprising that subtle
resistance to change began to surface. As an MM in
corporate communications who monitored the sit-
uation described, “Explicit resistance to change is
hardly visible . . . People just take no initiative, they
follow instructions to the letter, they are not real
partners to change, they express no objection be-
cause it is taboo in this new culture.” MMs
were not just questioning the competence and mo-
tives of the top team, and feeling disappointed
about this situation; they were not actively comply-
ing and supporting top executives in implementing
their change directives. One MM reported foot-
dragging by his colleagues:

One (newcomer) [TM] wanted a certain change to be
implemented in the company, so all the [MMs]
around the table said, “Yes, no problem.” [Several]
months later, when he asked [“Why it is not done
yet?”], they just told him, “Well, it’s not quite in
place yet” . . . They privately chuckled, “We said
‘yes,’ but we did not promise when we will do it.”

Many MMs thus reduced their support and ac-
ceptance of the top team by delaying implementa-
tion of change directives they disagreed with. As

1668 DecemberAcademy of Management Journal

one MM noted: “When people don’t agree with a
directive, they just ignore it. It’s faster to ignore
[than to argue with the decision].” The seeds of
behavioral disobedience from the middle manage-
ment rank had started to grow and contributed to a
legitimacy deficit that ultimately proved insur-
mountable for the top team.

Change Evaluation: Delegitimation and Intense
Resistance to Change

The deadline for delivering economic and opera-
tional benefits at the official end date of the
three-year CT program made evaluation of con-
crete outcomes of radical change imperative to
both external (e.g., investors) and internal stake-
holders (e.g., TMs and MMs). From the top exec-
utives’ perspective, they had no choice but to put
pressure on the organization to deliver the com-
mitted profit and cost-reduction targets. A top
executive explained:

If you don’t deliver the three-year plan, you lose
credibility . . . Boards are willing to let you do things
as long as you deliver your commitments. As long as
you do that, they will give you the benefit of the
doubt. If the board loses confidence in your ability
to deliver, they will second-guess you constantly.
They will stop you from doing things you want
to do.

Change outcomes. Unfortunately, this unrelent-
ing pressure to deliver on the financial goals with
decreasing resources exacerbated a sense of change
fatigue among employees, straining their ability to
deliver quality customer service, as we described
previously. In addition, the expected underperfor-
mance of many change projects championed by
MMs was ultimately reflected in the disappointing
end results. Due to the imposed deadline of Decem-
ber 31, 2006, the initial scope of many large reen-
gineering projects had to be scaled down. As an
executive change agent described:

The original cost estimate of each big project tended
to start at $10 million and over. At each project
review, costs increased by another $5 million. At
some point in time, we said, “Enough is enough.”
We started to remove features to meet the deadline
and budget. So the scope was much reduced. The
line recipients became dissatisfied; they said that,
“You guys promised to deliver us a Cadillac and we
got a Volkswagen.”

Another MM close to many IT projects expanded
on the narrow behaviors adopted by this single
focus on meeting the deadline:

The only thing that change agents really cared about
was the delivery date, without defining what and
why they wanted certain things, what they were
going to change, and what benefits these changes
were going to bring about. So we mobilized a lot of
people to develop all kinds of scenarios, to develop
critical path charts on detailed activities that re-
mained to be defined. Once these were defined, they
realized this was not exactly what they wanted, but
we were still working toward the same date, and,
because the date was the most important criterion,
you redefine the end product in mid-course just to
meet the date. Think about it for a minute: this is
expensive, because you make all kinds of compro-
mise just to meet the date!

The net effect is that, near the end of the offi-
cial radical change program, an initial corporate
forecast suggested that expected end-of-year
profit objectives promised to shareholders
would not be met: “The reality is that these $700
million won’t be attained. It’s going to be longer
than three years . . . Time is a critical factor and we
didn’t have a lot” (Senior executive). This led to the
top team’s decision to quickly cut an additional
3,000 service employees to meet the promised fi-
nancial targets. A top executive stated privately,
“We went through a very quick fix that was driven
by financial considerations predominantly, to get
the cost down.”

Emotional reactions: Negative. Although the
size of the additional layoff was relatively small
in comparison to the 16,000 employees involved
in the first downsizing, it produced dispropor-
tionately strong negative collective emotional re-
actions—“What felt like a cold shower to me and
for all of our employees was the announcement of
the additional cuts of 3,000 employees . . . my
emotional state right now is utter disappoint-
ment” (Operations manager). The main com-
plaint of MMs who remained was that it was
perceived as a panicky move by a top team that
did not know where it was going (building on
growing concerns about lack of a strategic vision
in the implementation phase), and the affected
groups of operations employees— customer ser-
vice support—showed the top team’s lack of
knowledge of the operating details of the busi-
ness and disregard for the quality of customer
service, which had been deteriorating. Execu-
tives had thought these support groups were ad-
ministrative overheads, while, in fact, they were
directly supporting customer-serving employees.
One senior HR MM who received the directive

2014 1669Huy, Corley, and Kraatz

to implement this expeditious layoff described
the reasons for this directive and his judgment
of it:

Senior executives had taken any job title that
sounded like it wasn’t a direct customer-facing job
and concluded it was overhead and support. Many
of the targeted employees either deal directly with
customers or are right next to the people who deal
with the customer . . . They had this condescend-
ing attitude toward the service people, saying that
these people don’t know how to manage
competently.

Emotionally, it was the last straw for many:
“Employees are very worried, they are fearful of
another wave of downsizing and want to leave the
company . . . this announcement created total panic
in the company” (Operations manager).

Legitimacy judgments: Final shift to instrumen-
tal criterion. Recall that instrumental legitimacy
judgments are present when the entity is perceived
to help others attain their goals, which can be
linked to effectiveness or efficiency (Tost, 2011).
TMs’ rushed layoff command showed operations
MMs, who had hitherto given the top team the benefit
of the doubt, that, when “push comes to shove, these
guys are really short-term oriented and only share-
holders’ interests really count” (Operations man-
ager). This perception of declining trustworthiness
further validated attributions of incompetent lead-
ership of change (related to instrumental legitimacy
judgments) that began to emerge in the prior imple-
mentation stage: “All credibility and vision are
gone” (HR manager). The perceived disorganized
and abrupt manner in which the second layoff di-
rective was issued proved a fatal blow to the legit-
imacy of the top team:

It came like a flash to us that the top managers who
initiated this action are completely disconnected
from the customers and therefore are also discon-
nected from the front-line employees. This action
will kill customer service, and this company is go-
ing to live or die on service.

(HR manager)

In essence, operations and HR MMs felt that this
final action risked destroying what they believed
was one of Tekco’s few remaining competitive ad-
vantages: good customer service. Instrumental le-
gitimacy judgments, based on evaluations of the
entity’s material results (Tost, 2011), became dom-
inant in this phase. MMs had been struggling to
balance the reduction in customer service employ-
ees with maintaining the quality of customer ser-

vice, even when the promised IT applications
had not been delivered, and this rushed employee
reduction was too much for them to absorb. As one
HR MM reported, “By saying that there may be
other actions like this [in the future] and this is
going to be the new way to manage has removed all
of our confidence [in the top team].”

Actions: Intense and explicit resistance to
change. Following in the wake of these unfavor-
able judgments of the top team’s legitimacy, collec-
tive anger (negative emotional reaction) toward the
top team began to develop. Anger is generally elic-
ited when targets appraise intention to cause harm
by the other party, they are certain about the unde-
sirable situation, and that they have the means to
deal with the harming entity (perceived control).
Anger tends to prompt aggressive action tendencies
(Ellsworth & Scherer, 2003), as was the case in
Tekco as collective anger energized many MMs to
resist TMs’ authority and the change effort itself
more openly and intensely. HR MMs reported
that many operations MMs delayed or refused to
implement the layoff directive (a disobedience
pattern that had started emerging toward the end
of the implementation phase). Open, public defi-
ance had set in—the TMT’s power to exact obe-
dience was effectively neutralized, thus hamper-
ing its ability to meet the year-end financial
objectives that were committed to the board.
Shortly after the firestorm that erupted in the
wake of the additional 3,000 layoffs, CEO Max-
well suddenly quit. The hastily appointed in-
terim CEO retained only one previous senior ex-
ecutive, effectively dissolving Maxwell’s top
team. Operations MMs largely treated the news
with relief—“It’s about time. He has done his
time”—and resolution—“They had to make the
unpopular but necessary moves, like the cuts, but it’s
time for them to move on.” In sum, MMs’ resistance
to top executives, which was mainly passive and
covert in the implementation phase, became active
and overt in the evaluation phase. This active and
overt resistance was energized by highly charged neg-
ative emotional reactions that hastened the final dele-
gitimation of the TMT as radical change agents and
their precipitous exit from the firm. Departing TMs
acknowledged the mixed instrumental outcomes of
the radical change effort and some of their causes, as
one TM privately shared with us prior to his exit:

The company was completely focused on making its
financial targets. So [the development of future capa-
bilities] gets lost in the necessity to make the financial

1670 DecemberAcademy of Management Journal

targets . . . CT helped us to get the costs down, but it’s
not transforming the company . . . We’re now ac-
knowledging the enemy and he is us . . . In the
interest of stopping the bleeding, we went through a
very quick fix . . . It was driven by financial consid-
erations predominantly, to get the cost down . . .
Tekco needs truly transformational programs and it
needs them quickly.

EMERGENT THEORETICAL MODEL

Our analysis revealed a set of emergent themes
across our MM and TM informants involving recip-
rocal interactions between the attributes and ac-
tions of the TM change agents and the legitimacy
judgments and emotional reactions of MM change
recipients. Our data uncovered a heretofore-un-
theorized dynamism in how recipients’ legitimacy
judgments and emotional reactions shifted during
the radical change process and fueled mounting
resistance to the change effort. As shown in Fig-
ure 3, we propose an inductive model that links the
emergent relationships of change recipients’ legiti-
macy judgments with their co-arising emotional
reactions toward the change agents, and how these
in turn energize recipients’ behaviors that impinge
on various interim change outcomes. The following

sections illustrate how Tekco progressed through
this process model in each of the three phases of
the change effort; although the model emerged from
the data, we also cite relevant literatures wherever
possible to enhance the plausibility of the relation-
ships among various constructs proposed in our
model (Eisenhardt & Graebner, 2007; Golden-
Biddle & Locke, 1993).

Formulation Phase

During the initial phase, the new top team effec-
tively communicated the need for radical change,
and stressed their attributes, such as “outsiders”
and “new blood,” as “validity cues” (Tost, 2011)
and performed a number of symbolic actions that
suggested their change competence. MMs’ initial
sensemaking largely reflected a realization that rad-
ical change was necessary and that the former top
team was not a legitimate option to lead such a
change. In this way, MMs relied on cognitive legit-
imacy judgment of TMs’ attributes (e.g., not at-
tached to old firm; relevant industry experience) as
a form of heuristic processing to quickly evaluate
newcomer TMs. Relying on these dominantly cog-
nitive judgments (with other legitimacy criteria as

FIGURE 3
Emergent Process Model

2014 1671Huy, Corley, and Kraatz

secondary factors—desirable but not necessary4),
MMs judged the top team as having high legitimacy
as radical change agents (link 1A in Figure 3).

Co-arising with these favorable legitimacy judg-
ments, MMs’ emotional reactions toward the new
top team and their proposed radical change were
positive or neutral (links 1B and 2); as MMs ap-
praised TMs as providing the resources necessary
to implement the various change projects they
championed (relational or instrumental legitimacy
judgments), they experienced positive emotions to-
ward TMs. Such positive affect in turn helped fa-
cilitate global attributions of TMs’ trustworthiness,
and energized behaviors of support and lowered
resistance to radical change (link 3). At the end of
this phase, the interim change outcome was the
quick start of the implementation of radical change
by MMs (link 4). Interestingly, much of the resis-
tance to change literature cites early-stage resis-
tance as the most critical to overcome (e.g., Sonen-
shein, 2010); but our case shows how early, high
change agent legitimacy can minimize that initial
resistance.

Implementation Phase

As the change progressed from formulation to
implementation, TMs began shifting their focus to
external pressures. This led them to devote less
time to MMs’ championed change projects and not
following through on their early promises—thus
violating expectations MMs had for their leaders at
the beginning of implementation (link 1C in Fig-
ure 3). Additionally, unforeseen (yet typical PROC)
problems in implementation emerged and threat-
ened the hoped-for success of MMs who promoted
change, prompting reconsideration of TMs (link 5).
These MMs began experiencing shifts in their emo-
tional reactions, from positive in the formulation
phase to negative (disappointment, anxiety, frustra-
tion) in the implementation phase (link 7), and also
began exhibiting shifting judgments of TMs’ com-

petence as change agents, relying on dominantly
relational and moral judgments (link 6). Exacerbat-
ing these shifts was a mutually influential relation-
ship between MMs’ emotional reactions and legit-
imacy judgments (link 2). Negative emotional
reactions (e.g., disappointment) signal a problem-
atic state of affairs and that more detailed cognitive
processing and rapid remedial actions are required
(Bless, 2000), thus activating process-based criteria
focused on closer observation of TMs’ behaviors.
Change championing MMs quickly attributed part
of the causes of implementation difficulty to TMs.
Also, hitherto-skeptical recipient MMs noticed
concrete evidence that their initial doubt of TMs
was justified, and thus also experienced mounting
anxiety that customer service quality (Tekco’s per-
ceived core competence) would be harmed by lead-
ers whom they (increasingly) perceived as caring
only about short-term finance. MMs saw TMs’ in-
consistency not only as a sign of questionable cred-
ibility, but also (and increasingly) as evidence of
opportunism and dubious intent (recall, for in-
stance, the expressed perception that the TMT were
“mercenaries” operating with a strictly short-term
orientation).

While there seemed to be some opportunity in
the implementation phase for TMs to reverse the
growing resistance to change (link 3), they unfortu-
nately decreed a climate of emotional censorship
instead, such that MMs who expressed negative
emotional reactions about the progress of the
change effort were viewed as unfit for leadership
positions. Emotion-laden issues, thus, were bottled
up and negative emotional reactions toward TMs
accumulated and continued to elicit negative judg-
ments of TMs (link 2). The combined perceptions
of decreasing legitimacy and negative emotional
reactions fueled a growing resistance among MMs,
even if that resistance was not immediately visible
to TMs (link 3). As resistance spread, underper-
forming change outcomes (such as growing change
fatigue, delayed projects, and reduced learning) be-
gan to emerge with more frequency and effect (link
4), prompting further unfavorable judgments of the
legitimacy of TM change agents (link 6) and nega-
tive emotional reactions (links 7 and 2).

Evaluation Phase

Ultimately, accumulating negative change out-
comes led to the ultimate radical change outcome
that economic benefits were well below what was
committed to shareholders. This led TMs to take

4 We argue these additional actions were more like
“icing on the cake” (desirable but not necessary) in the
sense that, had newcomer TMs used a more command-
ing, coercive, and less generous approach in the begin-
ning—actions that could be justified on the basis of Tek-
co’s rapid decline of resources and the need to change
quickly through a commanding approach (Huy, 2001)—it
seems very likely that they would still be perceived as
having high legitimacy because of dominant cognitive-
based judgments discussed above.

1672 DecemberAcademy of Management Journal

drastic actions to maintain their credibility with
the board (link 5 in Figure 3), such that they de-
creed another massive layoff in the final evaluation
phase. This drastic action further violated MMs’
expectations (link 1C), creating both MMs’ unfavor-
able legitimacy judgments (link 1A) and negative
emotional reactions (link 1B) with both feeding
each other (link 2). In the face of self-imposed tight
deadlines and formal final evaluations, recipients’
legitimacy judgments shifted to largely instrumen-
tal criterion. Combined, negative legitimacy judg-
ments and emotional reactions fueled overt resis-
tance to the change as change recipients lost all
faith in the change agents (link 3), thus leading to
the departure of the top team (link 4).

Contributions to Theory

We began our paper by noting we lack a granular
theoretical and empirical understanding of how
PROC is implemented and the role played by
change agent legitimacy during that implementa-
tion process. In making sense of what our data were
illustrating as the PROC effort unfolded at Tekco,
we were faced with a challenging empirical ques-
tion: What happened to alter the initial acceptance
of radical change into resistance to change among
the MMs in this firm? Our empirical answer to that
question is a dynamic model involving the reciprocal
relationship between the cognitive legitimacy judg-
ments and emotional reactions of MMs in response to
the attributes and actions of TMs across the different
phases of PROC. Thus, our study’s central contribu-
tion is to show the mechanisms underlying the “gen-
eralized” perceived legitimacy of the change agent as
a function of dynamic judgments by change recipi-
ents involving shifting content. These evolving judg-
ments allow us to explain resistance to change as an
emerging, situational phenomenon, rather than a
static, initial, and predictable obstacle as often por-
trayed in the resistance to change literature (Ford et
al., 2008). By offering a pluralistic (rather than single-
sided) account of resistance to change, we illuminate
the heretofore-underexplored nature and sources of
change agent legitimacy and reveal its significance
within the larger process of PROC. These insights
provide an empirical basis for modeling how the
change agent–recipient relationship unfolds over
time and the factors critical to that evolution (e.g.,
legitimacy judgments and emotional reactions). This
emergent model (Figure 3) provides us the where-
withal to theoretically contribute to several domains

of organizational study; most prominently, theory on
PROC, resistance to change, and legitimacy.

Advancing our Understanding of PROC

We began this paper with the aim of examining
the theoretically and practically important phe-
nomenon of radical organizational change imple-
mentation. As we noted, this literature has tended
to focus on the initial, rather than later, phases of
planned radical change, and to view the authority
of TM change agents as largely unproblematic be-
cause of the typically severe organizational under-
performance that justifies a top-down, command-
ing approach (Huy, 2001; Tushman & Romanelli,
1985). Our emergent model addresses the hereto-
fore-under-theorized relationship between change
agent legitimacy and change recipient resistance
during the under-explored yet critical implementa-
tion phase, and delivers a compelling answer to the
question: “How do we explain why change recipi-
ents accept or resist change agent efforts to effect
radical change?”

Judgments of change agent legitimacy. Our
findings bring to the forefront the important role of
MM legitimacy judgments in the successful imple-
mentation of PROC. While the uninformed view of
what happened at Tekco is simply one of poor
decision making and mismanagement of resistance
to change, our emergent model suggests a more
subtle yet compelling account of change agent ac-
tions and change recipient legitimacy judgments
and emotional reactions coalescing to create a dy-
namic process playing out over the course of the
entire change effort. The shifting bases of MM le-
gitimacy judgments (heavily influenced by chang-
ing emotional reactions) and their reciprocal rela-
tionship with TM change efforts suggest that we
must think differently about how radical change
proceeds and how its path toward effective imple-
mentation is more complex than previous theory
explains (see Bartunek et al., 2011). At the heart of
our theoretical contribution is the insight that the
legitimacy of change agents is central to their abil-
ity to lead change and that legitimacy can be con-
strued as a sequence of interim accomplishments
involving continuous social interactions (rather
than just as an entity with stable characteristics—
Suchman, 1995). Consistent with developing re-
search into the psychology of legitimacy judgments
(Jost & Major, 2001; Tost, 2011; Tyler, 2006), our
emergent findings suggest that the bases underlying
legitimacy assessments can be more or less stable

2014 1673Huy, Corley, and Kraatz

during finite time periods, but that, over time, they
shift in ways that provide for potential changes in
the level of voluntary cooperation provided by sub-
ordinates. Helpfully, our data demonstrate that
these shifts in legitimacy bases emerge from shifts
in the expectations that change recipients have for
agents of change. That is, as radical change begins
to unfold, there is an increasing expectation that
change agents will grow in ability: people expect
leaders to display increasingly specific knowledge
of the company and how it operates. This comes in
part from increasing dialogue with key stakehold-
ers, such as employees (relational legitimacy), and
acting in ways that are compatible with stakehold-
ers’ norms of propriety (moral legitimacy). Further-
more, as the change effort progresses, there is an
increasing expectation for change agents to deliver
results (instrumental legitimacy), perhaps most es-
pecially when specific promises have been made
(Gioia, Nag, & Corley, 2012).

While our description of the gradual delegitimation
of Tekco’s executives might be enlightening, we
do not believe that changing bases of legitimacy al-
ways result in delegitimation, nor even a linear pro-
gression of high-to-low legitimacy or vice versa. In-
stead, what is important is that the underlying bases
of legitimacy can and do shift over time (perhaps
especially in times of radical organizational change)
and that these shifting bases result in different per-
ceptions of legitimacy at different points in time.
Likewise, we do not claim, nor believe, that shifting
bases of change agent legitimacy always result in
failed attempts at organizational transformation. It is
just as likely that shifts in change agent legitimacy
can facilitate change efforts, such as when a new
executive team begins without “cultural authoriza-
tion” but subsequently gains legitimacy through the
use of appropriate processes and demonstrated effec-
tiveness (for illustration, see Huy, 2001).

Nonetheless, one upshot of our findings is that
future theorizing about PROC should be cautious
about the assumed unproblematic coercive power of
TMs to lead PROC—even during times of crisis that
justify this type of approach—and about the pre-
sumed sustained submissive behavior of direct sub-
ordinates. For instance, our research fundamentally
questions the appropriateness of the well-worn
metaphor of the “ice cube”—unfreeze–change–re-
freeze (Lewin, 1947)—that pervades much of our
scholarly thinking and teaching about managing
change (see Kotter’s (1995) eight-step model as an
example), and suggests that we should not construe
change recipients as inanimate “ice cubes” that

skillful change agents can manipulate at will.
Rather, theories of change in general, and PROC in
particular, can be enriched by shifting our change
metaphor to one of a teacher–student relationship.
That is, in as much as teachers guide students and
evaluate their learning, students also continuously
monitor the effectiveness of their teachers and eval-
uate them. Like Tekco’s MMs, students might ini-
tially assume that teachers are qualified to teach
them based on the school’s appointment (cognitive
judgment). As the course progresses, students
likely evaluate their teachers on what they have
learned (instrumental judgment), but also on how
the teachers engage them (relational judgment) as
well as their ethical behaviors (moral judgment).
Likewise, students’ emotional reactions (positive or
negative) about their teachers, together with vari-
ous types of judgment, likely aggregate in rating
evaluations that, over time, determine the relative
status of the teachers.

Emotional aspects of radical change. The liter-
ature on PROC has also under-investigated how
emotional factors influence implementation of rad-
ical change. Save a few exceptions (e.g., Bartunek et
al., 2006; Huy, 2002), there is still a dearth of em-
pirical research that examines the role of emotion
in organizational change, and almost nothing on
how emotional reactions interact with legitimacy
judgments to influence change implementation.
Our study demonstrates how emotional reactions
can trigger qualitative shifts in legitimacy judg-
ment, priming from a positive evaluation (“glass is
half full”) in the formulation phase to a negative
one (“glass is half empty”) in the implementation
phase. This fits with what we know about emotions
and how people tend to use affect as an additional
source of information under time scarcity (e.g.,
Fredrickson, 2001; Schwarz, 1990) when they face
unfamiliar rather than familiar subjects, when
other types of information are scarce, and when
judgment is too complex for analytical processing
(Loewenstein & Lerner, 2003). Our findings from
Tekco’s implementation phase also show that emo-
tional reactions can serve not only as a source of
information, but also as facilitators and amplifiers
of change in legitimacy judgment. Emerging disap-
pointments about the progress of change projects
facilitated MMs’ shifts from heuristic processing
during the change formulation phase and suggested
that initial positive judgments might need to be
revised. In other words, MMs’ shifts in emotional
reactions from positive to negative facilitated a
marked shift from more heuristic to more detailed,

1674 DecemberAcademy of Management Journal

analytical processing, and thus helped make salient
certain aspects of TMs that had been considered
irrelevant or unproblematic during the formulation
phase (such as lack of an overarching strategic vi-
sion, lack of detailed operating knowledge, not up-
holding promises, and insufficient interaction time
with MMs). As MMs experienced repeated disap-
pointments and fears of potential failure of their
championed change projects, attribution bias ten-
dencies (Zuckerman, 1979) might have operated, in
that MMs began attributing the slow progress of
their projects partly to TMs’ now-salient limita-
tions, which were amplified through repeated dis-
appointments caused by implementation problems.
These perceived limitations facilitated a shift in
legitimacy judgment criteria from the cognitive to
the relational and moral. Ultimately, mounting dis-
appointments and collective anger about the per-
ceived instrumentality of TMs’ arbitrary downsiz-
ing command during the evaluation phase further
facilitated and amplified MMs’ negative judgments
of their bosses and culminated in overt disobedient
actions. These insights advance our understanding
of the implementation challenges of PROC by re-
vealing how emotional reactions facilitate and am-
plify changes in legitimacy criteria, which feeds a
cycle of growing resistance to change. Although
planned change scholars have noted it is an emo-
tional-laden process that requires overseeing (e.g.,
Bartunek et al., 2011; Huy, 2002), the catalyzing
(i.e., facilitating and amplifying) function of emo-
tions in regard to legitimacy judgments enriches
our understanding of the criticality of emotional
reactions in PROC.

Temporal aspects of radical change. Further-
more, even though time is integral to the nature of
change itself, there is still insufficient empirical
research that examines how temporal factors influ-
ence the process and outcome of organizational
change (for a review, see Klarner & Raisch, 2013).
Our stage-based model reveals that both change
agent’ and recipient’ actions, cognitions, and emo-
tional reactions can vary significantly in different
phases of planned change, and that recipients hold
implicit expectations of progress in the change
agent’s ability in accordance with the length of
tenure in a given role and in a given organization. It
is thus imperative that future research on planned
change become more attentive to time-based expec-
tations and variations in the constructs and rela-
tionships of interest. For example, our data reveal
that MMs expect TMs to show more knowledge and
sensitivity to the internal matters of the organiza-

tion as their tenure within the organization in-
creases, while they had low expectations about
such ability when TMs just joined. Likewise, our
data demonstrate how various types of legitimacy
judgment become more salient than others in vari-
ous stages of change.

Advancing our Understanding of
Resistance to Change

In their recent article, Ford et al. (2008) suggest a
much-needed reconceptualization of resistance to
change as a dynamic phenomenon shaped by
agent–recipient interactions. Our findings and
emergent theorizing put some empirical meat on
that conceptual bone by detailing the critical role
played by recipient judgments of change agent le-
gitimacy in helping to determine the emergence of
resistance to change. As MMs (our change recipi-
ents) progressed through their involvement in the
change effort, they continually sought to make
sense of their senior leaders’ (our change agents)
actions; a significant part of that sensemaking in-
volved judgments regarding the competence and
trustworthiness of those leaders to enact change.
Unlike much of the resistance to change literature,
then, our study empirically captures the perspec-
tives of both change agents and recipients. That is,
as opposed to the strong agent-centric flavor to
most resistance research (Bartunek et al., 2011;
Ford et al., 2008; Furst & Cable, 2008), evidence for
resistance in our study emerged directly from
change recipient interviews (with corroboration
from interviews with change agents) and was di-
rectly linked with their perceptions of agents’ legit-
imacy to lead the change. Thus, this interactive
relationship between perceptions of agent legiti-
macy and recipient resistance represents an impor-
tant advancement of theory on resistance to change
because it emerges directly from those experienc-
ing the resistance phenomenon. Resistance to
change scholars building on our research will need
to take recipient perceptions into account and shun
the traditional approach of studying resistance
mainly from a change agent perspective.

Additionally, as Tekco MMs continued to see the
need for major change to improve the company’s
performance even as their judgments of the change
agents’ legitimacy to lead that change worsened, it
is important that scholars recognize that resistance
to the actual change (i.e., change content: what is to
be changed) should be distinguished from resis-
tance to leaders of change (change agency). The two

2014 1675Huy, Corley, and Kraatz

concepts are often confounded in the literature (see
Ford et al., 2008); however, we believe our study
provides convincing evidence that it is theoreti-
cally and practically important to study accep-
tance/resistance to change content and change
agency as two separate constructs. Likewise, our
findings suggest that scholars can no longer assume
the dominance of cognitive factors in explaining
resistance to change (e.g., Ford & Ford, 1995; Furst
& Cable, 2008); instead, we should account for both
the emotional and cognitive aspects of recipients’
experience, as well as their interactions with those
leading the change.

Advancing our Understanding of Legitimacy

Our analysis also provides some important con-
tributions to the legitimacy literature. Over the past
few decades, institutionalists and social psycholo-
gists have amassed a great deal of theory and evi-
dence about the legitimacy of organizational prac-
tices, structures, and other “social entities”
(Deephouse & Suchman, 2008; Johnson et al., 2006;
Scott, 2014; Tost, 2011). They have not, however,
established an independent focus on the legitimacy
of human actors (and often appear to assume that
people judge one another using the same generic
criteria that they use to evaluate various other cul-
tural objects). Our study provides strong reason to
question this premise. It also highlights a clear
need for research that focuses specifically on actor-
centered legitimacy judgments (which are likely to
be consequential not only for change agents but for
managers and other power-holders more generally).

In addition to revealing this general need, our study
also provides some promising insights about the na-
ture and foundations of these actor-focused judg-
ments. First, they indicate that such judgments are
strongly affected by the actor’s observed behaviors (in
addition to his/her culturally valued attributes and
position in the social structure, etc.). While the latter
things are certainly important to initial judgments,
they appear to fade into the background and to be
insufficient for sustaining legitimacy over time. Sec-
ond, and relatedly, our results also highlight the es-
sentially relational character of this type of legiti-
macy. Top management change agents and other
elites clearly occupy preferred societal positions, and
enjoy many critical advantages as a result. Neverthe-
less, our findings underscore the fact that their legit-
imacy ultimately rests on the consent of their subor-
dinates (who retain the capacity to withdraw it at any
time). Researchers studying PROC (and other forms of

change as well) must take this into consideration and
not naturally assume the (ongoing) static presence of
change agent legitimacy.

Third, our study demonstrates the critically im-
portant role of attribution processes and emotional
reactions. Tekco’s MMs showed a deep and persis-
tent interest in discerning the intentions, values,
and competencies of the new TMT, and reacted
with obvious anger and indignation when their su-
periors acted in ways that indicated a deficit of
these vital but indirectly observable human quali-
ties. While these emotion-laden attribution pro-
cesses are more or less ubiquitous in interpersonal
evaluations, they are unlikely to be directed at inert
cultural objects (and are thus notably absent from
most of the contemporary legitimacy literature).

Finally, and more generally, our study also reveals
the need for a holistic and processual approach to
understanding the legitimacy of human agents.
Though subordinates’ perceptions of Tekco’s TMT
were affected by many different factors, we found that
these disparate influences ultimately congealed into
more or less unified legitimacy judgments (of the
“thumbs up vs. thumbs down” variety). We also
found that the foundations of these gestalt judgments
shifted fairly dramatically over time (moving from
“who” to “how” to “what”). This particular evolu-
tionary sequence may or may not unfold in other
instances, and future research is clearly needed to
evaluate its generalizability. However, the more basic
need to view legitimacy as a processual phenomenon
with (potentially) shifting foundations would appear
much more clear.

CONCLUSIONS

Exploring the interplay of temporal phases, emo-
tional factors, and shifting legitimacy criteria used
by different groups over the course of radical
change should continue to reveal new and impor-
tant insights. In particular, although time is integral
to the nature of change itself, there is still insuffi-
cient empirical research that examines how tempo-
ral factors influence the process and outcome of
various types of organizational change (Klarner &
Raisch, 2013). Our findings also reemphasize the
need for more empirical research bridging the lit-
erature on change recipient sensemaking and re-
sponses to change (e.g., Balogun & Johnson, 2004;
Gioia & Chittipeddi, 1991; Gioia, Thomas, Clark, &
Chittipeddi, 1994; Isabella, 1990) with the litera-
ture on resistance to change (e.g., Ford et al., 2008;
Furst & Cable, 2008) by looking at a variety of

1676 DecemberAcademy of Management Journal

reasons that cause recipients of change to evolve in
their support of, or opposition to, change agents
over time. Again, resistance to change is usefully
construed as a processual, a priori, undetermined
evolution rather than as a static snapshot largely
determined by relatively stable recipient psycho-
logical attributes, entrenched political interests, or
predetermined content of the proposed change. Fu-
ture research on resistance to change has much to
gain by taking a longitudinal and more comprehen-
sive and dynamic view of the interpretations, emo-
tions, and behaviors of both change agents and
change recipients.

Finally, our study also suggests a broader need for
additional research and theory that is explicitly fo-
cused on the legitimacy of human actors (as distinct
from other types of generic social entities or ob-
jects)—what might be called agentic legitimacy. Le-
gitimacy has been described as “perhaps the most
central concept in institutional research” (Colyvas &
Powell, 2006). Institutional theorists increasingly
highlight illegitimacy as a critical driver of institu-
tional and organizational change (Greenwood, Hin-
ings, & Suddaby, 2002; Suchman, 1995). Though we
find much appeal in the idea of a general theory of
legitimation (Tost, 2011), we believe that people are
likely to apply a very different (or at least much more
dynamic) set of evaluative criteria in judging the le-
gitimacy of their fellow humans. Societal influences
and taken-for-granted beliefs may be sufficient to en-
sure the continued acceptance of many important
social practices, structures, and forms. But, the indi-
vidual people who populate and administer these
social entities are likely to face a distinct (and ongo-
ing) set of challenges in establishing and maintaining
their own legitimacy.

REFERENCES

Amason, A. C. 1996. Distinguishing the effects of functional
and dysfunctional conflict on strategic decision making:
Resolving a paradox for top management teams. Acad-
emy of Management Journal, 39: 123–148.

Amis, J., Slack, T., & Hinings, C. R. 2004. The pace,
sequence, and linearity of radical change. Academy
of Management Journal, 47: 15–39.

Balogun, J., & Johnson, G. 2004. Organizational restruc-
turing and middle manager sensemaking. Academy
of Management Journal, 47: 523–549.

Bartel, C. A., & Saavedra, R. 2000. The collective con-
struction of work group moods. Administrative Sci-
ence Quarterly, 45: 197–231.

Bartunek, J. M. 1984. Changing interpretive schemes and

organizational restructuring: The example of a reli-
gious order. Administrative Science Quarterly, 29:
355–387.

Bartunek, J. M., Rousseau, D. M., Rudolph, J. W., & De-
Palma, J. A. 2006. On the receiving end: Sensemak-
ing, emotion, and assessments of an organizational
change initiated by others. Journal of Applied Be-
havioral Science, 42: 182–206.

Bartunek, J. M., Balogun, J., & Do, B. 2011. Considering
planned change anew: Stretching large group inter-
ventions strategically, emotionally, and meaning-
fully. Academy of Management Annals, 5: 1–52.

Battilana, J. 2006. Agency and institutions: The enabling
role of individuals’ social position. Organization,
13: 653–676.

Battilana, J., Leca, B., & Boxenbaum, E. 2009. How actors
change institutions: Towards a theory of institu-
tional entrepreneurship. Academy of Management
Annals, 3: 65–107.

Beer, M., & Nohria, N. 2000. Cracking the code of change.
Harvard Business Review, 78: 133–145.

Beetham, D. 1991. The legitimation of power. Atlantic
Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International.

Biggart, N. W. 1977. The creative–destructive process of
organizational change: The case of the Post Office.
Administrative Science Quarterly, 22: 410–425.

Bitektine. 2011. Toward a theory of social judgments of
organizations: The case of legitimacy, reputation,
and status. Academy of Management Review, 36:
151–179.

Bless, H. 2000. The interplay of affect and cognition: The
mediating role of general knowledge structures. In
J. P. Forgas (Ed.), Feeling and thinking: The role of
affect in social cognition: 153–177. Cambridge,
U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Bruhn, J. G., Zajac, G., & Al-Kazemi, A. A. 2001. Ethical
perspectives on employee participation in planned
organizational change: A survey of two state public
welfare agencies. Public Performance and Manage-
ment Review, 25: 208–228.

Charmaz, K. 2006. Constructing grounded theory: A
practical guide through qualitative analysis. Lon-
don, U.K.: SAGE.

Colyvas, J. A., & Powell, W. W. 2006. Roads to institu-
tionalization: The remaking of boundaries between
public and private science. Research in Organiza-
tional Behavior, 27: 315–363.

Corbin, J. M., & Strauss, A. 1990. Grounded theory re-
search: Procedures, canons, and evaluative criteria.
Qualitative Sociology, 13: 3–21.

Coyle-Shapiro, J. A.-M. 1999. Employee participation and
assessment of an organizational change intervention: A

2014 1677Huy, Corley, and Kraatz

three-wave study of total quality management. Journal
of Applied Behavioral Science, 35: 439–456.

Deephouse, D., & Suchman, M. 2008. Legitimacy in or-
ganizational institutionalism. In R. Greenwood, C.
Oliver, R. Suddaby & K. Sahlin (Eds.), The Sage
handbook of organizational institutionalism: 49–
78. London, U.K.: SAGE Publications Ltd.

Denis, J.-L., Lamothe, L. & Langley, A. 2001. The dynam-
ics of collective leadership and strategic change in
pluralistic organizations. Academy of Management
Journal, 44: 809–837.

Denis, J.-L., Langley, A., & Cazale, L. 1996. Leadership
and strategic change under ambiguity. Organization
Studies, 17: 673–699.

Eisenhardt, K. M., & Graebner, M. E. 2007. Theory build-
ing from cases: Opportunities and challenges. Acad-
emy of Management Journal, 50: 25–32.

Elfenbein, H. A. 2007. Emotion in organizations: A re-
view and theoretical integration. Academy of Man-
agement Annals, 1: 315–386.

Ellsworth, P. C., & Scherer, K. G. 2003. Appraisal pro-
cesses in emotion. In R. J. Davidson, H. Goldsmith &
K. G. Scherer (Eds.), Handbook of affective sci-
ences, vol. 29: 572–595. New York, NY: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.

Ferris, G., & Judge, T. 1991. Personnel/human resources
management: A political influence perspective.
Journal of Management, 17: 447–488.

Finkelstein, S., & Hambrick, D. C. 1996. Strategic lead-
ership: Top executives and their effects on organ-
izations. Minneapolis–Saint Paul, MN: West Pub-
lishing Company.

Floyd, S. W., & Wooldridge, B. 1992. Middle manage-
ment involvement in strategy and its association
with strategic type: A research note. Strategic Man-
agement Journal, 13: 153–167.

Ford, J. D., & Ford, L. W. 1995. The role of conversations
in producing intentional change on organizations.
Academy of Management Review, 20: 541–570.

Ford, J. D., Ford, L. W., & D’Amelio, A. 2008. Resistance
to change: The rest of the story. Academy of Man-
agement Review, 33: 362–377.

Fredrickson, B. L. 2001. The role of positive emotions in
positive psychology: The broaden-and-build theory of
positive emotions. American Psychologist, 56: 218–
226.

Frijda, N. H. 1996. Passions: Emotion and socially conse-
quential behavior. In R. D. Kavanaugh, B. Zimmerberg
& S. Fein (Eds.), Emotions: Interdisciplinary perspec-
tives: 1–27. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Furst, S. A., & Cable, D. M. 2008. Employee resistance to
organizational change: Managerial influence tactics

and leader–member exchange. Journal of Applied
Psychology, 93: 453–462.

Gioia, D. A., & Chittipeddi, K. 1991. Sensemaking and
sensegiving in strategic change initiation. Strategic
Management Journal, 12: 433–448.

Gioia, D. A., Thomas, J. B., Clark, S. M., & Chittipeddi, K.
1994. Symbolism and strategic change in academia:
The dynamics of sensemaking and influence. Organ-
ization Science, 5: 363–383.

Gioia, D. A., Nag, R., & Corley, K. G. 2012. Visionary
ambiguity and strategic change: The virtue of vague-
ness in launching major organizational change. Jour-
nal of Management Inquiry, 21: 364–375.

Gioia, D. A., Corley, K. G., & Hamilton, A. L. 2013. Seek-
ing qualitative rigor in inductive research: Notes on
the Gioia methodology. Organizational Research
Methods, 16: 15–31.

Glaser, B. G., & Strauss, A. L. 1967. The discovery of
grounded theory: Strategies for qualitative re-
search. Chicago, IL: Aldine Press Co.

Golden-Biddle, K., & Locke, K. 1993. Appealing work: An
investigation of how ethnographic texts convince.
Organization Science, 4: 595–616.

Greenwood, R., Hinings, C. R., & Suddaby, R. 2002. The-
orizing change: The role of professional associations
in the transformation of institutionalized fields.
Academy of Management Journal, 45: 58–80.

Hinings, C. R., & Greenwood, R. 1996. Understanding
radical organizational change: Bringing together the
old and the new institutionalism. Academy of Man-
agement Review, 21: 1022–1054.

Huy, N. Q. 1999. Emotional capability, emotional intel-
ligence, and radical change. Academy of Manage-
ment Review, 24: 325–345.

Huy, Q. 2001. Time, temporal capability, and planned change.
Academy of Management Review, 26: 601–623.

Huy, Q. N. 2002. Emotional balancing of organizational
continuity and radical change: The contribution of
middle managers. Administrative Science Quar-
terly, 47: 31–69.

Huy, Q., & Mintzberg, H. 2003. The rhythm of change.
MIT Sloan Management Review, 44: 79–84.

Huy, Q. N. 2011. How middle managers’ group-focus
emotions and social identities influence strategy im-
plementation. Strategic Management Journal, 32:
1387–1410.

Isabella, L. A. 1990. Evolving interpretations as a change
unfolds: How managers construe key organizational
events. Academy of Management Journal, 33: 7–41.

Johnson, C., Dowd, T. J., & Ridgeway, C. L. 2006. Legiti-
macy as a social process. Annual Review of Sociol-
ogy, 32: 53–78.

1678 DecemberAcademy of Management Journal

Jost, J. T., & Major, B. 2001. The psychology of legiti-
macy: Emerging perspectives on ideology, justice,
and intergroup relations. New York, NY: Cam-
bridge University Press.

Kanter, R. M. 1983. The change masters. New York, NY:
Simon & Schuster.

Klarner, P., & Raisch, S. 2013. Move to the beat—
Rhythms of change and firm performance. Academy
of Management Journal, 56: 160–184.

Kotter, J. P., & Schlesinger, L. A. 1979. Choosing strate-
gies for change. Harvard Business Review, 57: 106–
114.

Kotter, J. 1995. Leading change: Why transformation ef-
forts fail. Harvard Business Review, 73: 59–67.

Kraatz, M. S., & Moore, J. H. 2002. Executive migration
and institutional change. Academy of Management
Journal, 45: 120–143.

Langley, A. 1999. Strategies for theorizing from process data.
Academy of Management Review, 24: 691–710.

Larsen, R. J., & Diener, E. E. 1992. Promises and problems
with the circumplex model of emotion. In M. S.
Clark (Ed.), Review of personality and social psy-
chology: Emotion and social behavior: 25–59. New-
bury Park, CA: Sage.

Laumann, E. O., & Pappi, F. U. 1976. Networks of col-
lective action: A perspective on community influ-
ence systems. New York, NY: Academic Press.

Lazarus, R. S. 1991. Emotion and adaptation. New York,
NY: Oxford University Press.

Lazarus, R. S. 1993. From psychological stress to the
emotions: A history of changing outlooks. Annual
Review of Psychology, 44: 1–21.

Lewin, K. 1947. Group decision and social change. In
T. N. Newcomb & E. L. Hartley (Eds.), Readings in
social psychology: 340–344. Troy, MO: Holt, Rine-
hart & Winston.

Lieberman, P. 2003. Motor control, speech, and the evo-
lution of human language. New York, NY: Oxford
University Press.

Lincoln, Y., & Guba, E. 1985. Naturalistic inquiry. Bev-
erly Hills, CA: Sage.

Loewenstein, G., & Lerner, J. S. 2003. The role of affect in
decision-making. In R. J. Davidson, K. R. Scherer & H.
Goldsmith (Eds.), Handbook of affective sciences:
619–642. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Miller, D., & Friesen, P. H. 1980. Momentum and revo-
lution in organizational adaptation. Academy of
Management Journal, 23: 591–614.

Miller, D. 1991. Stale in the saddle: CEO tenure and the
match between organization and environment. Man-
agement Science, 37: 34–52.

Nag, R., Corley, K. G., & Gioia, D. A. 2007. The intersec-
tion of organizational identity, knowledge, and prac-
tice: Attempting strategic change via knowledge
grafting. Academy of Management Journal, 50:
821–847.

Nutt, P. C. 1986. Tactics of implementation. Academy of
Management Journal, 29: 230–261.

Pentland, B. T. 1999. Building process theory with nar-
rative: From description to explanation. Academy of
Management Review, 24: 711–724.

Pettigrew, A. M. 1985. The awakening giant: Continuity
and change in Imperial Chemical Industries. New
York, NY: Blackwell.

Pettigrew, A. M. 1987. Context and action in the trans-
formation of the firm. Journal of Management Stud-
ies, 24: 649–670.

Pfeffer, J. 1981. Management as symbolic action: The cre-
ation and maintenance of organizational paradigms.
Research in Organizational Behavior, 3: 1–52.

Piderit, S. K. 2000. Rethinking resistance and recognizing
ambivalence: A multidimensional view of attitudes
toward an organizational change. Academy of Man-
agement Review, 25: 783–794.

Plowman, D. A., Baker, L. T., Beck, T. E., Kulkarni, M.,
Solansky, S. T., & Travis, D. V. 2007. Radical change
accidentally: The emergence and amplification of
small change. Academy of Management Journal,
50: 515–543.

Poole, P. P., Gioia, D. A., & Gray, B. 1989. Influence
modes, schema change, and organizational transfor-
mation. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 25:
271–289.

Romanelli, E., & Tushman, M. L. 1994. Organizational
transformation as punctuated equilibrium: An em-
pirical test. Academy of Management Journal, 37:
1141–1166.

Roseman, I. J. 1991. Appraisal determinants of discrete
emotions. Cognition and Emotion, 5: 161–200.

Sastry, M. A. 1997. Problems and paradoxes in a model of
punctuated organizational change. Administrative
Science Quarterly, 42: 237–275.

Schwarz, N. 1990. Feelings as information: Informational
and motivational functions of affective states. In E. T.
Higgins & R. M. Sorrentino (Eds.), Handbook of moti-
vation and cognition: Foundations of social behavior,
vol. 2: 527–561. New York, NY: The Guilford Press.

Scott, W. R. 2001. Institutions and organizations. Thou-
sand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Scott, W. R. 2014. Institutions and organizations (4th
ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Selznick, P. 1969. Law, society, and industrial justice.
New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation.

2014 1679Huy, Corley, and Kraatz

Shrivastava, P. 1986. Is strategic management ideologi-
cal? Journal of Management, 12: 363–377.

Simons, R. 1994. How new top managers use control
systems as levers of strategic renewal. Strategic
Management Journal, 15: 169–189.

Singh, J. V., House, R. J., & Tucker, D. J. 1986. Organiza-
tional change and organizational mortality. Admin-
istrative Science Quarterly, 31: 587.

Smith, C. A., & Ellsworth, P. C. 1985. Patterns of cogni-
tive appraisal in emotion. Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology, 48: 813–838.

Sonenshein, S. 2010. We’re changing—Or are we? Untan-
gling the role of progressive, regressive, and stability
narratives during strategic change implementation.
Academy of Management Journal, 53: 477–512.

Suchman, M. C. 1995. Managing legitimacy: Strategic
and institutional approaches. Academy of Manage-
ment Review, 20: 571–610.

Tichy, N. M., & Sherman, S. 1994. Control your destiny or
someone else will: Lessons in mastering change—
From the principles Jack Welch is using to revolu-
tionize GE (1st HarperBusiness ed.). New York, NY:
HarperBusiness.

Tiedens, L. Z., & Linton, S. 2001. Judgment under emo-
tional certainty and uncertainty: The effects of spe-
cific emotions on information processing. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 81: 973–988.

Tost, L. P. 2011. An integrative model of legitimacy judg-
ments. Academy of Management Review, 36: 686–
710.

Tushman, M. L., & Romanelli, E. 1985. Organizational
evolution: A metamorphosis model of convergence
and reorientation. In L. L. Cummings & B. Staw
(Eds.), Research in organizational behavior: 171–
222. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.

Tyler, T. R. 1997. Social justice in a diverse society.
Boulder, CO: Westview.

Tyler, T. R. 2006. Psychological perspectives on legiti-
macy and legitimation. Annual Review of Psychol-
ogy, 57: 375–400.

Tyler, T. R., & Lind, E. A. 1992. A relational model of
authority in groups. Advances in Experimental So-
cial Psychology, 25: 115–191.

Van de Ven, A. H. 1992. Suggestions for studying strategy
process: A research note. Strategic Management
Journal, 13: 169–188.

Van Maanen, J. V. 1979. The fact of fiction in organiza-
tional ethnography. Administrative Science Quar-
terly, 24: 539–550.

Weber, M. 1978. Economy and society. Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press.

Wiersema, M. F., & Bantel, K. A. 1992. Top management
team demography and corporate strategic change.
Academy of Management Journal, 35: 91–121.

Zelditch, M. 2001. Theories of legitimacy. In J. T. Jost &
B. Major (Eds.), The psychology of legitimacy:
Emerging perspectives on ideology, justice, and
intergroup relations: 33–53. New York, NY: Cam-
bridge University Press.

Zott, C., & Huy, Q. N. 2007. How entrepreneurs use
symbolic management to acquire resources. Admin-
istrative Science Quarterly, 52: 70–105.

Zuckerman, M. 1979. Attribution of success and failure
revisited, or: The motivational bias is alive and well
in attribution theory. Journal of Personality, 47:
245–287.

Quy Nguyen Huy (quy.huy@insead.edu) is an associate
professor of strategic management at INSEAD. His research
on the management of strategic change and entrepreneur-
ship won multiple awards from the Academy of Manage-
ment and was published in the Administrative Science
Quarterly, the Academy of Management Review, Advances
in Strategic Management, Harvard Business Review, MIT
Sloan Management Review, Organization Science, Strate-
gic Management Journal, and Strategic Organization. He
explores the relations between social–emotional factors such
as emotion and symbolic management and macro-strategic
processes. He received his PhD from McGill University.

Kevin G. Corley (kcorley@asu.edu) is a professor of man-
agement at the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona
State University. His research interests focus on sensemak-
ing and organizing processes, especially as they pertain to
organizational change. He has applied this focus to areas of
organizational identity, image, identification, culture, and
knowledge. His research has recently appeared in the Acad-
emy of Management Review, the Academy of Manage-
ment Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, Organiza-
tion Science, and the Academy of Management Annals. His
2004 Administrative Science Quarterly article with Gioia
received the 2010 ASQ Award for Scholarly Contribu-
tion. He received his PhD from the Smeal College of Busi-
ness at the Pennsylvania State University.

Matthew S. Kraatz (kraatz@illinois.edu) is an associate
professor in the Department of Business Administration
at the University of Illinois. His scholarly interests in-
clude organizational adaptation, learning, governance,
identity, reputation, leadership, and other institutional
processes. He received his PhD from the Kellogg Gradu-
ate School of Management at Northwestern University.

1680 DecemberAcademy of Management Journal

Copyright of Academy of Management Journal is the property of Academy of Management
and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without
the copyright holder’s express written permission. However, users may print, download, or
email articles for individual use.

Assignment Resources/Is Change Management Obsolete

Is change management obsolete?

Christopher G. Worley *, Susan A. Mohrman

Center for Effective Organizations, University of Southern California, 3415 S. Figueroa St., DCC 200, Los
Angeles, CA 90089, United States

Organizational Dynamics (2014) 43, 214—224

Available online at www.sciencedirect.com

ScienceDirect

jo ur n al h o mep ag e: www .e lsev ier . co m / loc ate /o r gd yn

Too many articles about organization change begin with the
ominous: 70 percent of large-scale change efforts fail to meet
their objectives. The source of this finding may be ambiguous,
but its implication is clear: managing change in large organiza-
tions is hard. However, instead of standing back and asking the
double loop learning ‘‘is change management the right
approach?’’ question, they engage in single loop revisions of
practices, tools, or processes that are intended to drastically
increase the odds of success. Unfortunately, this may be the
practical equivalent of making a better buggy whip.

That is because in today’s world, if you ask managers
about the nature of their environmental and marketplace
demands, you are likely to get answers like ‘‘chaotic, uncer-
tain, constantly changing, disruptive, and complex.’’ The
leap in complexity, connectivity, interdependency, and
speed, compared to 20 or 30 years ago, has created an
environment that is radically different and requires new
approaches to change.

Undaunted, and in the face of a steady stream of diverse
and overlapping change requirements and uncertainty, orga-
nizations continue to employ traditional change models.
These depend on top-down executive leadership and focus,
detailed risk analysis and mitigation, carefully planned and
controlled communication, play-books that are ‘‘rolled out,’’
tools and scripts to ensure common understanding, training
people how to behave differently, and transition structures
to govern the execution of work streams according to Gantt
charts and detailed plans.

Our purpose is to provide an alternative conceptualization
of the change process and organizational capabilities needed
to effectively adapt and co-evolve with a rapidly changing

* Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 213 740 9814.
E-mail address: cworley@marshall.usc.edu (C.G. Worley).

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.orgdyn.2014.08.008
0090-2616/# 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

environment that is presenting a never-ending cascade of
new challenges. Like others, we call this state of affairs the
‘‘new normal.’’ We begin by describing and comparing the
‘‘old normal’’ environment with the ‘‘new normal’’ and
deriving the implications for change. We then describe the
‘‘engage and learn’’ model — based on our observations,
research, and practice in organization design and agility at
USC’s Center for Effective Organizations — as a new way of
thinking about organization change that complements
today’s challenges and the organization designs being imple-
mented. Finally, we demonstrate the model through the
Cambia Health Solutions case.

THE ‘‘OLD NORMAL’’

For decades, organizations have co-evolved with advances in
technology, the emergence of a global economy, changes in
societal expectations, and market shifts. We know in hind-
sight that, until recently, these environmental changes could
be described in terms of a ‘‘punctuated equilibrium.’’ That is,
any particular aspect of the environment tended to change
slowly and incrementally for a number of years and then
manifest relatively short bursts of radical advancement.

In the old normal, organization change tended to follow
this same pattern. Within and across industries, periodic
transformational episodes challenged organizations to
develop new capabilities, ways of doing work, managing
people, and organizing. For example, cumulative advances
in our understanding of human motivation and organiza-
tional behavior along with societal and governmental con-
cern for workers’ rights and well-being resulted in radical
shifts in human resource practices and high involvement
work systems. A long history of incremental increases in
efficiency were transformed into large improvements in
both productivity and employee outcomes. Economic and

http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1016/j.orgdyn.2014.08.008&domain=pdf

http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1016/j.orgdyn.2014.08.008&domain=pdf

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.orgdyn.2014.08.008

mailto:cworley@marshall.usc.edu

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00902616

www.elsevier.com/locate/orgdyn

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.orgdyn.2014.08.008

Is change management obsolete? 215

technical changes led to the sudden emergence of the global
corporation. After years of country-based economies, the
number of multinational corporations utilizing capabilities
for managing information, resources, and talent on a world-
wide basis increased dramatically. Finally, the ability to
collect, share, and analyze vast quantities of information
while simultaneously enabling customization have created
new business models, management practices, and go-to-
market tactics.

Theories of change in the old normal

Researchers studying organization change in the old normal
developed two types of models. The first type, known as
change process theories or theories of change, describe the
variables that trigger change, the variables that could affect
the pace and effectiveness of the change process, how the
variables cause the change, and the expected outcomes of
the change effort.

One of the most well-known theories of change is Larry
Greiner’s classic 1972 Harvard Business Review article, ‘‘Evo-
lution and Revolution as Organizations Grow.’’ He was inter-
ested in the stages of growth, from start-up through maturity
and increased complexity, and the need to introduce the
capabilities to manage, perform, coordinate, and collabo-
rate as organizations became larger and older. He observed
that corporations go through a predictable sequence of crises
that lead to ‘‘revolutions’’ in the way they organize and
operate. Organizational solutions or strategies applied to
achieve growth in the current period became the primary
source of problems to be solved or capabilities to be devel-
oped in a future period. For example, Hewlett-Packard Co.,
Philips, and many other organizations grew successfully
because of a decentralized product or geographic based
model but faltered when the need for coordination across
products or regions became important. Only when the pro-
blems of decentralization — the same approach that had
previously driven success — were addressed, and the cap-
ability for cross-organizational coordination was developed
did these organizations resume growth.

Researchers eventually began to view fundamental
change as triggered by factors both internal and external
to the organization, and not simply the inevitable result of
growth and age. Michael Tushman and Elaine Romanelli,
among others, argued that a set of interrelated strategic,
power, organizational, and cultural commitments became
self-reinforcing and change resistant. In the presence of
significant events, such as technological changes, executive
succession, or industry life cycle transitions, a revolution was
necessary to reconfigure the commitments. The ‘‘punctuated
equilibrium’’ model simply proposes that organization adap-
tation occurs through relatively long periods of convergence
on a particular strategy that are interrupted by relatively
short periods of fundamental change or transformation.

Fundamental change came to be understood as deep and
pervasive. It affected the cultural patterns and behaviors in
the organization, and required significant alterations to most
of the sub-systems in the organization. Scholars and practi-
tioners considered transformational change a messy nuisance
to be avoided entirely if possible; it literally put the reliable
delivery of products and services at risk and threatened the
performance capabilities of the organization.

If and when organizations needed to transform them-
selves, they would typically rent the change management
capability from consultants. There was no need to pay for
internal transformational change expertise that was rarely
used. Companies that did staff up with organizational effec-
tiveness consultants during periods of transformation often
eliminated these departments once the pressing need for
transformation subsided.

Implementation theories in the old normal

The second type of change theory focuses on changing, and in
particular on the implementation of change. Implementation
theory research focuses on the activities change agents
should perform to insure the success of a change effort.
These theories involve steps like entry and contracting,
diagnosing, planning, intervention, and evaluation. Imple-
mentation theories provide guidance to change agents
regarding the necessary activities to bring about change
successfully in organizational systems.

Importantly, the punctuated equilibrium model suggests
that organization life is dominated by stability and incre-
mental change, not transformation. During periods of con-
vergence, the environment’s demand for new solutions,
strategies, and capabilities is relatively benign, and oriented
toward increased efficiency, reliability, predictability, and
growth within an existing strategy and operating logic.

The predominant implementation theories used today
were generated to help companies during these periods of
relative calm. They were aimed at refining the adopted
business strategies and the capabilities and behaviors
required to make them a reality. Implementation could be
incremental, gradual, focused, and controlled (i.e., ‘‘man-
aged’’) through carefully architected processes of design and
implementation. These change models worked well as long as
fundamental change was episodic and infrequent.

Two of the most common implementation theories are
Lewin’s change model and the positive model. These models
and their variants have received widespread attention and
provide an important historical benchmark for our proposed
engage and learn model.

Lewin’s Change Model. Kurt Lewin conceived of change as
modification of the forces keeping a system stable. A parti-
cular set of behaviors or outcomes at any moment in time was
the result of two opposing forces: those striving to maintain
the status quo and those pushing for change. When both sets
of forces were about equal, current behaviors or outcomes
were maintained in what Lewin termed a state of ‘‘quasi-
stationary equilibrium.’’ To change that state, the organiza-
tion could increase the forces pushing for change, decrease
the forces maintaining the current state, or apply some
combination of both. Lewin suggested that decreasing the
forces maintaining the status quo produced less tension and
therefore was a more effective change strategy than increas-
ing the forces for change. Such thinking has led to a number
of theories and tools for lowering ‘‘resistance to change.’’

Lewin’s implementation theory consisted of three steps.
The unfreezing process involved preparing the organization for
change, often through processes of ‘‘psychological disconfir-
mation.’’ By introducing information that shows discrepancies
between behaviors desired by organization members and

216 C.G. Worley, S.A. Mohrman

those behaviors currently exhibited, members could be moti-
vated to engage in change activities. Today, we often talk in
terms of ‘‘burning platforms’’ or recognizing disruptions.

The moving process shifts the behavior of the organiza-
tion, department, or individual. It involves intervening in the
system to develop new behaviors, values, and attitudes
through the development of new skills and competencies
or changes in organizational structures and processes.
Finally, refreezing stabilizes the organization in a new state
of equilibrium. It is frequently accomplished through the use
of supporting mechanisms, such as organizational rewards,
that reinforce the new organizational state.

Kotter’s eight-stage process, General Electric Co.’s (GE’s)
change acceleration process, Prosci’s ADKAR model, and
other popular change management models can be mapped
onto Lewin’s phases. For example, establishing a sense of
urgency, creating the guiding coalition, developing a vision
and strategy, and communicating the change vision are key
steps in Kotter’s model that reflect the unfreezing process.
Empowering broad-based action and generating short-term
wins are part of moving. Similarly, awareness and desire (A
and D in the ADKAR model) reflect unfreezing, knowledge and
ability reflect moving, and reinforcement reflects refreezing.
Action research extended this model by suggesting that
change was more cyclical than that implied by the refreezing
stage but still held to the basic change logic.

The Positive Model. A second change model was popular-
ized in the 1980s and 1990s and represented an important
theoretical — but not practical — departure from Lewin’s
model. The positive approach to change reflected the grow-
ing ‘‘positive organizational scholarship’’ movement in the
social sciences and the notion that organizations are socially
constructed. That is, organization members’ shared experi-
ences and interactions influence how they perceive the
organization and behave in it. It also builds on the notion
that people tend to act in ways that make their expectations
occur. Thus, positive and shared expectations about the
organization can create an anticipation that energizes and
directs behavior toward making those beliefs happen.

The positive model has been applied to planned change
primarily through a process called appreciative inquiry (AI),
an intervention that encourages the development of shared
meaning and a shared positive orientation to how change is
conceived and managed. AI often follows a four-step process
of discover, dream, design, and destiny. It promotes broad
member involvement in discovering the organization’s posi-
tive core attitudes and systems and dreaming about a shared
vision of its positive potential. That shared appreciation
provides a powerful and guiding image of what the organiza-
tion could be. Designing involves developing the action plans
that will diffuse and strengthen the positive behaviors, and
destiny describes processes for making the vision real.

The theoretical shift from a focus on problems to an
appreciation of strengths and shared vision, however, did
not lead to important differences in the change process. Most
AI processes still reflect the unfreeze—move—refreeze
approach. Discovering and dreaming unfreeze the organiza-
tion, designing increases the number of positive behaviors,
and pursuing the organization’s destiny is about refreezing
around a particular vision or design. It does, however, greatly
increase focus on achieving participation and the develop-
ment of shared understanding during a change process.

Conclusion

Under ‘‘old normal’’ conditions, it is not difficult to see how
and why these traditional implementation theories or models
of change management were appropriate. They fit with the
nature and pace of environmental change reflected in the
punctuated equilibrium view of environmental and organiza-
tional change. In keeping with the belief that organization
change was mostly incremental and occurred within an
existing strategy, these change processes:

� Tended to have clear beginnings and endings; starts and
finishes.
� Were initiated by senior executives to refine and converge
on a successful strategy.
� Focused on particular systems in service of sustaining a
competitive advantage.

The implementation theories described above support a
clear focus, define clear boundaries and scope, allow a high
degree of control, and help people make sense of change.
They work effectively when there is clear alignment to a
known strategy.

THE EMERGENCE OF A ‘‘NEW NORMAL’’

More and more, managers and scholars are recognizing that
environmental change is no longer a series of disruptions
spaced by periods of relative calm. Strategy researchers,
for example, have been focusing on the decreasing longevity
of competitive advantages and how quickly established firms
can disappear. A 2014 i4cp study reported that more than
64 percent of firms indicated that they had experienced a
disruptive change in the last 24 months. Disruptions of various
sorts are happening more or less constantly. Because organiza-
tions have become more complex and interdependent, a
disruption anywhere in the system may be felt everywhere
and by everyone.

For many companies there are no more periods of calm
and incremental change. Organizations need to move from
one fundamental change to another, continuously incorpor-
ating new capabilities in response to the complexity of their
environments. Organizations are being asked to: (1) drive
performance today while changing their business models for
tomorrow; (2) leverage their current advantaged capabilities
and build whole new capability sets; (3) optimize their
current product/service portfolios and offer customized
solutions; and (4) minimize their current carbon footprint
and adopt sustainable practices by making existing processes
more efficient and by introducing disruptive innovations and
fundamentally different ways of operating.

Unfortunately, scholars have not provided organizations
and the managers who run them with the frameworks to handle
the pressure for more frequent fundamental change. When
cases of fundamental change are published, there is nary a
mention of the traditional change models. Instead, transfor-
mational change is usually attributed to effective leadership.
Case studies of the transformations at IBM, Southwest Airlines,
Herman Miller, and ABB focus on the roles of Gerstner, Kelleher,
DePree, and Barnevik; they do not highlight the frameworks of
Lewin, Kotter, Conner, Cooperrider, Beckhard, or Burke.

Is change management obsolete? 217

When traditional change models are applied to transfor-
mational efforts, the change process struggles and repre-
sents a primary source of the oft-quoted 70 percent failure
rate statistic. When the speed and pervasiveness of change
are high, when the organization is reacting to a stream of
environmental demands, and where changes in the organiza-
tion’s culture may be required to develop new capabilities,
implementation theories do not provide sufficient guidance,
tools, or examples. This leads to the conclusion that our
traditional models of change management may be obsolete.

In the new normal, there is no punctuated equilibrium.
Companies must address both incremental and fundamental,
simple and complex, shallow and deep, first-order and second-
order, and executional and transformational change simulta-
neously and repeatedly. What follows are the foundational
concepts for a new conceptualization of organization change.

A NEW THEORY OF CHANGING

Our research in organizations — primarily related to the
implementation of new designs and the pursuit of organization
agility — has led us to a new theory of changing. This is not a
‘‘change management’’ model; that implies way too much
control over the process. Rather, it is a descriptive model of
changing along with a set of organizational change routines —
the recurring processes that characterize an organization —
that allow an organization to change itself continuously. The
‘‘engage and learn’’ model is shown in Exhibit 1.

Each of the four activities or change routines in the model
derives from an understanding of the requirements for orga-
nization effectiveness in a volatile, uncertain, and disruptive
world. They are no less relevant in a relatively stable envir-
onment:

� First, organization members must be aware of the issues,
challenges, and history of the organization. Organizations
need to be good at perceiving environmental trends and

Exhibit 1 The Engage

being ‘‘pre-adapted’’ for disruption through the continual
consideration of scenarios, options, and prior change
efforts. As the pace of environmental change and disrup-
tion increases, organizations must spend increasing
amounts of time and energy in being vigilant.
� Second, there is an increasing appreciation for the impor-
tance of design in shaping behavior. Solution-based, global,
and other complex strategies require more coordination
and collaboration than typical strategies in the old normal.
Paradoxically, rapid response to opportunities and chal-
lenges require the opposite capability: to operate quickly
in self-contained pods that may pull from but operate
independently of the organization’s core logic. Design ac-
tivities are focused on flexibly managing a loosely con-
nected and dynamic portfolio of recurring and emergent
collaborations among stakeholders. It is also concerned
with the development of capabilities that will differentiate
the organization in the marketplace.
� Third, tailoring is about creating targeted, specific, high
impact interventions that ‘‘perturb’’ the system and set
the conditions for self-organizing. Broad, overly pro-
grammed implementation processes that may have been
successful in the old normal do not work. Even well
designed and defined TQM (total quality management)
and six sigma processes cannot be ‘‘cut and pasted’’ into
the organization without tailoring. Far from seeking uni-
formity, effective change in a rapidly evolving environ-
ment configures the organization’s unique, valuable, and
difficult-to-replicate resources to allow the organization
to learn from and build on diversity.
� Finally, monitoring involves inquiring into the impact of
organization change and development on desired out-
comes, understanding the organization’s progress in
achieving its strategy, and making rapid adjustments
based on what is learned. This process is central to the
organization’s capacity to detect error and learn from
success in today’s environment, where changes have to be
made quickly, where there are many changes going on

and Learn Model.

218 C.G. Worley, S.A. Mohrman

simultaneously in diverse parts of the organization, and
where tight control is not possible or desirable.

There are no ‘‘arrows’’ in the model. There is no par-
ticular prescribed sequence or starting point; the model
can be entered anywhere. All of these routines are hap-
pening at once, in various parts of the organization and in
loosely coupled ways. Change can begin with monitoring or
tailoring just as easily as with awareness or design. Simul-
taneous, asynchronous, and multi-faceted change is being
carried out in different parts of the organization. Change of
the magnitude, speed, and diversity required today cannot
be carried out without considerable emergent change and
self-regulation through the organization. Because of the
complexity and the interdependencies in the system, an
important change challenge is to catalyze sufficient infor-
mation exchanges across the system. This allows interde-
pendent change activities to adjust to and influence one
another.

The center of the model describes two continuous indi-
vidual modes of operating, or motivations that link people
throughout the organization to the various change routines
and enable them to help make change happen: engagement
and learning. Any change agent’s first motivation — and we do
not assume that a change agent comes from any specialized
group or represents a formal hierarchical leader — is engage-
ment. Change agents engage in awareness of the issues facing
the organization. They are plugged into the relevant issues
happening in the organization’s environment, the business,
and its people, in order to orient their activities to be
relevant to stakeholders. They must also understand how
organization design elements govern and drive behavior in
the organization and be able to conceive of alternative
designs to elicit and reinforce new behaviors.

Change agents need to engage in activities that tailor
selected change interventions and designs to operate effec-
tively within the culture and identity of the organization, its
strategy, and its resources. In today’s complex and diverse
global organizations, sensitivity to different sub-cultures and
market contexts is required to avoid trying to fit round pegs
into square holes. Tailoring recognizes that each organiza-
tion’s situation is unique and must be accounted for when
implementing change. Finally, change is likely to be fast and
iterative, in keeping with the ‘‘engage and learn’’ concep-
tualization.

Monitoring activities involve the rapid collection and
interpretation of appropriate data to understand whether
innovations and interventions are having the intended impact
and provide change agents with opportunities to continue to
hone the capabilities of the organization.

Awareness of the broad and specific contexts of an orga-
nization, the ability to diagnose the sources of behavior from
a design perspective and to tailor high impact interventions,
and the skills to monitor a change’s impact motivate an
important and probably nonlinear cycle of activity. Such a
perspective on change recognizes its ongoing nature, and
that change agents must be better at each activity over time.

The second motivation is learning; it is the outcome
of intentional engagement. Through participation in
repeated cycles of awareness, design, tailoring, and mon-
itoring, change agents learn. As test and learn routines are
carried out continuously and simultaneously throughout

the organization to address many different challenges
and purposes, transparency and cross-organizational learn-
ing form a foundation for the development of a system-
wide change capability. This capability depends not only
on knowledgeable individuals, but also on collective pro-
cesses that are core routines of how the organization
operates.

Learning allows each subsequent cycle of engagement
activities to be more efficient and effective as people
throughout the organization become proficient at changing.
This requires systems and processes that support learning,
such as after action reviews, reflection and discussion, doc-
umentation, and transparent sharing of information. Next,
we describe the Cambia Health Solutions case to illustrate
the model.

CAMBIA HEALTH SOLUTIONS

Few environments have undergone as much upheaval and
public scrutiny over the past 30 years as the health care
industry. Over that time, health care costs ballooned,
increasing from 8.9 percent of GDP (gross domestic product)
in 1980 to 17.4 percent 30 years later, and yet our health care
outcomes rank among the worst in the OECD (Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development) countries.

Cambia Health Solutions’ core business is Regence, a 90-
year-old Blue Cross-Blue Shield insurance affiliate in the
Pacific Northwest. As a member of a highly regulated indus-
try, it had developed a conservative culture embedded in a
hierarchical, command-and-control organization structure.
In the early 2000s, and in light of the severe pressures on the
industry, it began thinking about its mission and purpose.

In 2004, Regence’s board and senior leaders, led by CEO
Mark Ganz, anticipated many of the environmental changes
that were to come as they established a new corporate vision.
An emotional and tight ‘‘are we part of the problem or part of
the solution?’’ dialogue among a few executives produced a
new purpose. It was dubbed ‘‘The Cause: To serve as a
catalyst in transforming health care, creating a person-
focused and economically sustainable system.’’ Over the
next few years, the organization talked about the implica-
tions of The Cause and how the organization should go about
pursuing it.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) of
2010 (aka ‘‘Obamacare’’) was a costly, divisive, and disrup-
tive change to the industry that brought a whole new set of
regulatory changes. Organizations in the healthcare eco-
system began to explore and introduce new approaches, thus
starting the process of fundamentally re-crafting the industry
and the relations among the involved parties.

In that context, Cambia was ready. Its leadership team
conceived a significant reorganization and put a stake in the
ground about how The Cause was going to be implemented. A
parent holding company would house Regence, the tradi-
tional insurance business, and Direct Health Solutions (DHS).
DHS was a newly created incubator business unit charged
with developing or investing in innovative products and
services, such as other lines of insurance, alternative forms
of health care access, and freestanding health and wellness
solutions. Both the insurance and the DHS organizations
focused on serving The Cause.

Is change management obsolete? 219

Cambia, a sponsor company of the Center for Effective
Organizations at USC, was aware of our research into orga-
nizational agility. In late 2010, they asked for some help with
culture change to ensure that their investments would make
them more fit for the future.

An agility assessment, consisting of a broadly adminis-
tered survey coupled with structured management inter-
views, was conducted in the spring of 2011. There was a
strong sense of shared purpose, captured by The Cause, and a
belief that the new structure reflected that purpose. There
was also consensus that Cambia was a values-driven company
and that its non-profit status helped their traditional insur-
ance business emphasize a strong ‘‘member focus.’’

The change in strategy and restructuring also led to
tensions in the organization. The Cause, by itself, was an
insufficient statement of strategy. DHS’ investments, which
were expected to achieve a higher rate of return than the
insurance business, suggested to some that economic per-
formance had become Cambia’s driving focus, to the detri-
ment of member satisfaction. Moreover, the management
attention given to DHS left some people in Regence Health
feeling like the emphasis had suddenly shifted away from
the company they had built. Many people feared that The
Cause was too grand a mission for employees to embrace
and too bold for an organization with Cambia’s limited
capabilities.

Innovation and change capabilities, essential to The
Cause, were also a problem. Diagnostic interviews revealed
a deep frustration that it was ‘‘hard to get things done’’ at
Cambia. Goal setting, information flows, and decision-mak-
ing reflecting the hierarchical silos of the core business did
not support a strategy that required risk-taking in the
service of new product and program development. Man-
agers did not understand how their individual goals con-
nected to the strategy, were not held accountable for
outcomes, and did not experience either positive or nega-
tive consequences for their performance. A lack of empow-
erment and accountability meant that decisions were
pushed up for resolution.

Cambia’s CEO understood that these issues threatened its
ability to execute the strategy. He commissioned the VP of HR
to set up a design team, review the findings of the assess-
ment, and develop a change strategy to address them.

The design team came to recognize that if change was to
become a way of life at Cambia, the change process could not
be a new ‘‘program’’ or ‘‘project.’’ Their approach was to
effect change by looking systemically at the organization and
focusing on the system or systems most likely to change the
‘‘rules of engagement.’’ They would act as ‘‘orchestrators,’’
understanding the pros and cons of a chosen system, making
deliberate and powerful changes to it in alignment with The
Cause and the uncertain environment they were facing, and
then continuously steering alignment and reform as neces-
sary. Instead of announcing a new innovation process, they
would work within an existing ‘‘Innovation Force’’ unit to
adapt insurance or DHS systems to unleash the organization’s
creativity. Change would be significant and complex; evolu-
tionary where it could be and discontinuous where it needed
to be.

Ultimately, the design team commissioned four task
forces, each composed of design team members and line
leaders, to:

� Improve the process for setting and communicating orga-
nizational objectives.
� Revise the human capital and performance management
processes.
� Design and implement an enterprise-wide change man-
agement process.
� Explore in greater detail the reasons why it ‘‘was hard to
get stuff done’’ at Cambia and propose solutions.

The objective setting and communication task force and
the human capital and performance management task
force are good examples of the approach. Cambia’s tradi-
tional annual strategy, goal setting, appraisal, and salary
change events did not fit the requirements of success in
either the DHS or insurance business. To build more respon-
sive management practices in alignment with The Cause
and the values, the task forces instituted a shift to quar-
terly objective setting and performance reviews that sup-
ported the pace of envisioned change. Here they learned
from a system being used by a small number of Cambia
leaders who found this shorter-cycle process effective for
both business results and personal development. The
‘‘quarterly conversations’’ included both what the objec-
tives were and whether or not they were achieved, and how
achievement of the objectives reflected the desired orga-
nizational values. A key component of these conversations
was validating that the objectives currently being worked
on were still the right ones and retaining the option to stop
working on them, start new ones, or continue on the
course.

Because of the broad involvement of line leaders, because
they were essentially re-purposing currently used and tested
systems to better support The Cause and agility, and because
the proposed process was known by many, implementation
proceeded quickly with only minimal communication and
management support. The task force presented the proposed
changes at Cambia’s annual senior leadership summit, and
leaders were asked to make the initial changes within the
existing cycle. Implementation coaches, including the CEO as
a coach for his direct reports, were asked to oversee the
implementation of the process, remove roadblocks, and hold
leaders accountable to put the new process in place. In the
first cycle, 90 percent of leaders had submitted their quar-
terly objectives.

The other task forces also made progress.

� The change management task force developed a shared
model and process, not unlike traditional models, that was
piloted in several groups and approved by the Cambia
Leadership Team. There was a strong belief that this was
an important contribution to the organization’s overall
change capability since its ‘‘change muscle’’ was so weak
to begin with, and because the leaders envisioned a future
characterized by many simultaneous changes, large and
small. Moreover, a common model and language would lay
the foundation for the coordination that was expected
between DHS and the insurance business. Task force
members and others trained in the process served as
sponsors who worked with business managers to teach
them the model and apply it to ongoing changes in their
units. An embedded and shared way of thinking about
change was taking place.

220 C.G. Worley, S.A. Mohrman

� The ‘‘hard to get stuff done’’ task force surfaced impor-
tant challenges for the design team. Their analysis sug-
gested that effective execution was associated with
people in leadership positions who could ‘‘make it hap-
pen,’’ find ‘‘work-arounds,’’ and ‘‘bust through the bu-
reaucracy.’’ This old normal view of leadership
effectiveness was reinforced when the CEO made changes
to several key positions. The new leaders visibly em-
braced the proposed changes in strategy and operating
philosophy, possessed the transformational skills the or-
ganization needed, and displayed leadership styles that
were aligned to The Cause and the values. Moreover,
those leaders began to hire people like themselves, thus
multiplying the number of leaders with these needed
skills. The tentative conclusion — and implication for
action — was that change was a function of getting the
right person into key roles. This conclusion was later
challenged and modified.

At the same time as the task forces were working, a host of
emergent changes in structures and management processes
were encouraged by the design team. For example, the IT
(information technology), HR, and other units went through
redesigns that were shaped by The Cause and the organiza-
tion’s values, and that offered many opportunities to inten-
tionally build change capability into the organization. In
addition, the CEO restructured the senior leadership team
that was generally seen as too large, too unfocused in its
purpose, and misaligned in terms of its decision rights. The
CEO replaced the group with four management forums, each
with clear membership, decision rights, and alignment to The
Cause, thereby greatly increasing the speed with which
decisions were made. This was especially important for
the DHS organization. It now had its own management struc-
ture and was able to craft strategies and systems that
supported its purposes separately from the insurance busi-
ness. Finally, the CFO (chief financial officer) replaced the
annual budgeting cycle with a set of quarterly investment
reviews that aligned to the quarterly objectives and perfor-
mance conversations.

The confluence of these emergent design changes and
the ‘‘hard to get stuff done’’ task force findings created a
key learning for the design team: that good leadership
alone could not sustain success. Good leadership and
good organization design (or the lack of either one) made
work and achieving results easy or hard. The design team
recognized that they needed to focus on designing and
implementing a whole system in which it was easy to get
things done. It was an important learning — one that has
diffused through the organization — and led to a greater
orientation to continually review the organization to make
sure it stays aligned with Cambia’s direction in its fast
paced environment.

Cambia assessed its progress at both the one-year and
two-and-a-half year mark. In year one, interviews with key
stakeholders, design team members, and senior executives
supported the change strategy and suggested several
enhancements. After two-and-a-half years, a resurvey of
the organization’s leadership found significant improvements
in all dimensions of design and agility, including leaders’
ratings of the extent to which the culture was more
‘‘change-friendly.’’ In addition, respondents reported

increased frequencies of behaviors that were considered
key to The Cause and the organization’s values and the
DHS organization had started or partnered with others to
create more than 15 organizations.

ANALYSIS OF THE CAMBIA CHANGE EFFORT

The Cambia case reflects and confirms the activities and
dynamics of the ‘‘engage and learn’’ model. The company
established many of the change routines that would be a
foundation for its change capability through time: processes
for continually engaging people throughout the organization
in developing new approaches and learning from them. Work-
ing far from the traditional, linear models, it reflects a non-
linear flow of the core activities that constitute organiza-
tional change capabilities: gaining awareness, designing,
tailoring, and monitoring.

Prior to the declaration of The Cause, Cambia’s leader-
ship team was in the center of the conversation regarding
healthcare reform and developed an increasingly deep
awareness of the various storms that were brewing in the
industry. Insurance premiums were rising and they were
under specific pressures to show value/benefit commensu-
rate with the increases. The Cause was an important if
incomplete tailoring of Cambia’s strategy, and the process
of generating it greatly increased awareness of the changing
environment and understanding of the adaptation challenge
facing the company and the industry. At the top of most
design frameworks, strategy sets the tone for all other
design choices. Ganz, his board, and a few executives
actively engaged in a foresighted design activity that gave
Cambia the luxury of time. They could think about its
implications well ahead of the pressures brought on by
the PPACA.

The deep awareness and anticipation of inevitably dis-
ruptive change provided the impetus for a fundamental
strategic and organizational change at Cambia. Its reorga-
nization into the core health insurance business and the
exploratory direct health solutions business was, and
still is, an important strategic bet. It set the stage to
build ambidexterity by engaging in two parallel but diverse
directions: (1) aggressively changing the capabilities of
the core business; and (2) building a second business
so that Cambia could help shape and derive value from
the disruptive technologies and innovations that were
beginning to reshape healthcare, albeit in emergent direc-
tions.

Cambia, as many other organizations, found itself swim-
ming in a sea of change and uncertainty, and having to
continually transform itself. This is the essence of the
new normal, and the reason why transformation can no
longer be conceived of as an episode with a beginning and
an end.

With the many simultaneous tentacles of organization
change interacting with the many changes and opportunities
being sensed in the environment, the system needed a way
to guide and catalyze change, and to seek needed alignment
and diversity of initiatives and approaches. Cambia’s design
team was a structured way to teach and diffuse knowledge of
design and change to the organization, to approach change
incrementally, build on small successes to gain momentum,

Is change management obsolete? 221

involve a large number of people in planning and
implementing the change, and decentralize much of the
implementation. The design team monitored progress
against The Cause, reviewed the progress of initiatives,
and determined whether they were adding sufficient value
to continue or if new initiatives should be started because
something important was missing. In many ways, calling the
group a ‘‘design’’ team was a misnomer. They were and are
much more like a steering team or, in their terms, an
‘‘orchestrator.’’

Cambia accelerated change by focusing on the design of
the organization in order to build in change capability–—not
just by betting the success of a transformation on the new
structure or depending on leaders to make big splashes that
could not be sustained. No one change was made in isolation;
every change was made with a cross-functional team and a
member of the design team so that the changes were made in
parallel and as a system, and every change was made in
alignment with The Cause and the values the organization
was trying to instill.

Cambia used an agility assessment to ascertain whether it
was fit for the dynamic future it faced, and to monitor
whether the changes it was making were working and pro-
gress was being made. This future orientation is inherent in
the engage and learn model. Yet Cambia also worked to make
the capacity to design and implement very specific organiza-
tional systems and structures a routine capability, knowing
that design and redesign would be a big part of their future
success. By building this capability through the organization,
it ensured the engagement needed to tailor approaches to
the specific contexts faced by different parts of the organi-
zation and the diversity required to be successfully
embedded in an evolving healthcare ecosystem.

The two-and-a-half year assessment monitored progress,
and showed important and impressive improvements. While
there is always a temptation to declare victory, almost every
Cambia leader emphasized, ‘‘we have come a long way, and
there’s still a long way to go.’’ Cambia exemplifies the new
engage and learn approach to organization change. Based on
their belief that change is a long-term, never-ending journey
with uncertain but most certainly temporary destinations,
Cambia has made significant changes in the way it operates
and has laid the foundation for becoming an innovator in the
health care industry. This foundation will support the on-
going journey.

CONCLUSION

Understanding and ‘‘managing’’ change is the topic for our
time. The traditional models of change management that
served organizations well during the old normal are no longer
sufficient to guide them through the types of changes they
are facing today. The new normal calls for different theories
of change and changing. The engage and learn model
addresses three important and different demands of the
new normal.

First, change in the old normal was a project to be
managed or a transformation event to be endured. In the
new normal, change is an interacting flow of routines and
cycles. When change is a project or event, it is natural to ask
‘‘when will it be over?’’ In the new normal, fundamental

change never ends, and it is better viewed as something to be
catalyzed and steered. The trappings of certainty that come
from viewing change as an event should give way to testing
and learning and continually adapting. The engage and learn
model views change as a function of complexity, uncertainty,
and learning, not of executing a detailed plan. It argues that
change does not happen in transformational bursts but
through routines that keep the organization focused on
results and change at the same time. Change routines
become core elements of how an organization operates.

Second, change in the old normal was implemented
through the hierarchy and depended on top management
support. In the new normal, change will be implemented
through networks because the people with the knowledge of
what needs to change are often far removed from the C-
suite. The organization must acknowledge the pervasiveness
of change by insisting that both formal and informal leaders
become competent change agents and by creating networks
that support learning across the organization.

Organization members and units will be asked to utilize
new technology to develop and try out new approaches, learn
what works, implement it, and share those learnings with
others. It is their activities that make this engage-and-learn
process a routine throughout the organization. Only by mak-
ing change leadership part of everyone’s job can the orga-
nization change and learn quickly enough to adapt.
Specialized change management roles will shift the planning
and managing of change to helping organization leaders build
change capabilities, providing deep knowledge and guidance
about the elements of the engage and learn activities, and
creating connections for sharing and learning.

Third, change in the old normal typically leveraged
sequential activities designed to improve particular subsys-
tems in service of a stable competitive advantage. In the new
normal, change is viewed as the source of effectiveness and
embedded in agile designs. The engage and learn model vests
the change process in the flow of organizing and in the roles
and competencies of employees throughout the organiza-
tion. Change is happening all the time, at different speeds,
and in different parts of the organization.

These changes must be viewed in a coordinated fashion to
allow the organization to act as a system rather than as
distinct parts. An organization change capability is not some-
thing to be rented, and change is not something that a
specialized group does to an organization. Rather, people
throughout the organization are asked to figure out, in a
coordinated way, how to make their units and their interfaces
work better, not as a special improvement activity, but as an
embedded aspect of the work system. They will be asked to
create the kind of organizations that support current and
emerging strategies and that fit the demands of a changing
environment.

This new view of change does not eliminate the value of
traditional change perspectives. Traditional change manage-
ment models are just one arrow in a rich and diverse quiver of
approaches that will characterize the new normal. Adjusting
to the stream of pressures and opportunities faced by orga-
nizations will consist of a variety of change activities, some of
which are best conceptualized and dealt with through a
sequential process of unfreezing, moving, and refreezing
on new practices and work systems. But even these tradi-
tional theories of change and changing must adapt and give

222 C.G. Worley, S.A. Mohrman

way to new models of change based on complexity, engage-
ment, and learning. They will have to be accelerated and
flexible, and they will have to be supplemented by a broad
orientation to rapid learning and adjustment. This orienta-
tion, in essence, is the antidote to change resistance.

Derived from the years of CEO research in organization
design, organizational agility, organization development and
change, and human resource management, the ‘‘engage and
learn’’ model is offered as our best chance of bringing the

organization’s capacity for change into alignment with the
new realities of our time.

Is change management obsolete? 223

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

The theories of change arguments are drawn from W. Bennis,
Changing Organizations (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966) and J.
Porras and P. Robertson, Organization development theory: a
typology and evaluation, in Research in Organizational
Change and Development, vol. 1, R. Woodman and W. Pas-
more (eds.) (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1987), 1—57.

The punctuated equilibrium model has been studied fairly
extensively and some good references on the subject include:
L. E. Greiner, Evolution and revolution as organizations grow,
Harvard Business Review, 1972, 50, 37—46; M. Tushman and P.
Anderson, Technological discontinuities and organization
environments, Administrative Science Quarterly, 1986,
31(3) 439—465; E. Romanelli and M. L. Tushman, Organiza-
tional Transformation as Punctuated Equilibrium: An Empiri-
cal Test, Academy of Management Journal, 1994, 37(5),
1141—1166.

The most common source of Lewin’s theories is K. Lewin,
Field Theory in Social Science (New York: Harper & Row, 1951)
and R. Lippitt, J. Watson, and B. Westley, The Dynamics of
Planned Change (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1958).
Other change models mentioned include J. Kotter, Leading
Change (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1996); J. Hiatt,
ADKAR: A Model for Change in Business, Government and the
Community (Loveland, CO: Learning Centre Publications,
2006); a description of GE’s Change Acceleration Process
can be found in D. Garvin, Learning in action: a guide to
putting the learning organization to work, (Boston: Harvard
Business School Press, 2000); K. McArdle and P. Reason, Action
research and organization development, in T. Cummings (ed.),
Handbook of Organization Development (Los Angeles, Sage
Publications, 2008) 123—136.

The positive model of change is described in K. Cameron,
J. Dutton, and R. Quinn (eds.), Positive organizational scho-
larship: foundations of a new discipline (New York: Berrett-
Kohler, 2003) and D. Cooperrider, Positive image, positive
action: the affirmative basis for organizing, in Appreciative
Management and Leadership, S. Srivastva, D. Cooperrider,
and Associates (eds.) (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1990). For
those interested in a primer on social constructionism, see P.
Berger and T. Luckman, The social construction of reality
(New York: Anchor Books, 1967); K. Gergen, The social con-
structionist movement in modern psychology, American Psy-
chologist, 1985, 40, 266—275.

The strategy literature has been exploring changing defi-
nitions of competitive advantage, and two articles that
we’ve found enlightening are: C. I. Stubbart and M. B. Knight,
The case of the disappearing firms: empirical evidence and
implications, Journal of Organizational Behavior, 2006,
27(1), 79—100; and R. D’Aveni, G. Dagnino, and K. Smith,
The age of temporary advantage, Strategic Management
Journal, 2010, 31(3), 1371—1385.

The concept of being ‘‘pre-adapted’’ for change comes
from the study by R. Garud, J. Gehman, and A. Kumaras-
wamy, Complexity arrangements for sustained innovation:
lessons from 3 M corporation, Organization Studies, 2011, 32,
737—767. 3 M spent considerable time documenting their
failures. The failures were often not an issue of bad technol-
ogy but bad timing. By documenting the failures well, when
the environment changed and the time was right, the orga-
nization was able to respond quickly because of the ability to
dip into an existing knowledge base. 3M’s failures really
became options on the shelf.

The results of the i4cp study mentioned in the article can
be found at http://www.i4cp.com/trendwatchers/2014/04/
16/from-march-madness-to-market-madness-building-agile-
workforce-planning-and-analytics-capability.

CEO research — books and articles — that have contrib-
uted to our thinking about the ‘‘engage and learn’’ model
include: E. E. Lawler and C. G. Worley, Built to Change (San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006); C. G. Worley, T. D. Williams,
and E. E. Lawler III, The Agility Factor: Building Adaptable
Organizations for Superior Performance (San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass, 2014); S. A. Mohrman, G. E. Ledford, and A.
M. Jr. Mohrman, Changing the organization through time:
what we have learned about large-scale organizational
change, in A. M. Jr. Mohrman, S. A. Mohrman, G. E. Jr.
Ledford, T. G. Cummings, E. E. III Lawler, and Associates
(eds.), Managing Large Scale Organizational Change, (San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1989), 292—302; S. A. Mohrman and
A. M. Mohrman, Jr., Fundamental organizational change as
organizational learning: creating team-based organizations,
in W. A. Pasmore and R. W. Woodman (eds.), Research in
Organizational Change and Development, Vol. 10 (Green-
wich: JAI Press, Inc., 1997) 197—228; and S. A. Mohrman,
Leading change: do it with conversation, Leadership Excel-
lence, 2008, 25(10), 5.

Christopher G. Worley is a senior research scientist at the Center for Effective Organizations at the Marshall
School of Business at the University of Southern California. He is a recognized leader in the field of organization
development and design. Prior to coming to CEO, he was director of the Master of Science in Organization (MSOD)
program at Pepperdine University and remains a primary faculty member in that program. His most recent
books include The Agility Factor, Organizing for Sustainability: Leading through Networks & Partnerships,
Organization Development and Change (10th edition), Management Reset, and Built to Change. Email:
cworley@marshall.usc.edu.

http://www.i4cp.com/trendwatchers/2014/04/16/from-march-madness-to-market-madness-building-agile-workforce-planning-and-analytics-capability

http://www.i4cp.com/trendwatchers/2014/04/16/from-march-madness-to-market-madness-building-agile-workforce-planning-and-analytics-capability

http://www.i4cp.com/trendwatchers/2014/04/16/from-march-madness-to-market-madness-building-agile-workforce-planning-and-analytics-capability

mailto:cworley@marshall.usc.edu

224 C.G. Worley, S.A. Mohrman

Susan A. Mohrman is a senior research scientist at the Center for Effective Organizations in the Marshall School of
Business at the University of Southern California. She researches and publishes in professional journals and books
on the topics of: (1) organization design for the global knowledge economy; (2) organization development,
learning, and change; (3) high technology organizations; (4) the design of teams and other lateral approaches to
organizing; (5) design for growth; and (6) the design of sustainable business systems. Mohrman has been involved as
a consultant or researcher to a wide variety of organizations instituting innovative management systems and
organizational designs. She is faculty director of the Certificate Program in Organization Design at the Center for
Effective Organizations. Email: smohrman@marshall.usc.edu.

mailto:smohrman@marshall.usc.edu

Is change management obsolete?

The ‘‘Old Normal’’

Theories of change in the old normal

Implementation theories in the old normal

Conclusion

The emergence of a ‘‘New Normal’’

A new theory of changing

Cambia Health Solutions

Analysis of the Cambia change effort

Conclusion

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Assignment Resources/Leading Changes – Why Transformation Explanations Fail

Article

Leading changes: Why
transformation explanations
fail

Mark Hughes
Brighton Business School, University of Brighton, UK

Abstract

Professor John Kotter (1995) claimed in Leading change: Why transformation efforts fail to have

identified eight leadership errors which resulted in transformation failures. He followed this up in

1996 with his best-selling book Leading Change, prescribing an eight-step model for leading trans-

formations encouraging change leaders to create a sense of urgency, build powerful guiding

coalitions and develop visions. Kotter openly acknowledged that he neither drew examples nor

major ideas from any published source, except his own writing. In the 2012 edition of his book,

which included a new preface, Kotter claimed that his book was now more relevant than when it

was first published. As leaders knowingly or unknowingly still use Kotter’s steps and academics

still cite this book, this paper critically assesses Kotter’s claim about the relevance of Leading

Change. Three conclusions are drawn; Leading Change remains an enduring landmark leadership

study, but Leading Change is stuck in the past and paradoxically today discourages change.

Keywords

John Kotter, leading change, transformation, organizational change

Introduction

Leading Change (Kotter, 1996) has framed (Deetz et al., 2000; Fairhurst, 2005) practitioner
and academic debate about leading change ever since it was published. Glowing senior
executive endorsements and its inclusion in TIME’s (2014) 25 most influential business
management books highlight its continuing practitioner appeal. Practitioners are Kotter’s
target constituency, in the preface he acknowledges that ‘I have neither drawn examples or
major ideas from any published source except my own writing nor tried to cite evidence from
other sources to bolster my conclusions’ (Kotter, 1996: X). As Kotter regards his book as

Corresponding author:

Mark Hughes, Brighton Business School, University of Brighton, Mithras House, Lewes Road, Brighton BN2 4AT, UK.

Email: m.a.hughes@brighton.ac.uk

Leadership

2016, Vol. 12(4) 449–469

! The Author(s) 2015

Reprints and permissions:

sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav

DOI: 10.1177/1742715015571393

lea.sagepub.com

http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1177%2F1742715015571393&domain=pdf&date_stamp=2015-02-09

practical, it is perverse that it has also framed academic debate with over 5500 academic
citations (see Table 1).

In Table 1, Kotter’s (1995, 1996) publications are the first and second most cited.
Transformational leadership has been described as the single most studied and debated
idea within the field of leadership studies over the past 30 years (Diaz-Saenz, 2011). Yet,
the most cited transformational leadership publication (Bass and Riggio, 2005) by compari-
son received fewer citations than either of Kotter’s publications.

Academic reliance upon Kotter’s findings as if they were empirically or theoretically
tested and supported has been described as an enigma (Appelbaum et al., 2012). Why do
university libraries stock and academics cite such an unashamedly a-theoretical book?
Possibly it is the halo effect of Kotter’s employment at Harvard Business School or his
earlier writings on leadership, or perhaps consultants more effectively convey their messages
than academics (Salaman and Asch, 2003). The precursor to Leading Change was Kotter’s
(1995) article Leading change: Why transformation efforts fail published in Harvard Business
Review, informed by Kotter ‘watching’ 100 companies. Both the article and the book would
have gained legitimacy if they had been informed by research, but this was not the case.
These publications were based upon knowledgeable reflections of an experienced business
consultant unencumbered/untroubled by either empirical evidence or ideas from ‘other
sources’. As Grint (2005a: 101) more generally notes ‘the claim that leadership is critical
to all organizational success (and failure) is almost as commonplace as the claim to have
discovered the secret of its success’. Associating leading with successful change may be
another explanation for why Leading Change appealed to leaders/managers in 1996 and
why it still appeals.

In 2012, a revised edition of Leading Change appeared, substantially the same book, but
with refreshed penguin imagery and a new preface. Kotter (2012: ix) reflected upon the first

Table 1. The most cited leading change/transformational leadership publications published between

1978 and 2012.a

No Citations Transform/Change Output Title Author/Year

1. 5543 Change Book Leading change (Kotter, 1996)

2. 3795 Change Paper Leading change: Why transform-

ation efforts fail

(Kotter, 1995)

3. 3213 Transformation Book Transformational leadership (Bass and Riggio, 2005)

4. 2654 Transformation Book Improving organizational

effectiveness through

transformational leadership

(Bass and Avolio, 1993)

5. 2592 Transformation Paper Transformational leader

behaviors and their effects on

followers’ trust in leader,

satisfaction, and organizational

citizenship behaviors

(Podsakoff et al., 1990)

aAnalysis undertaken on 6 January 2014, using Publish or Perish software (Harzing, 2007) enabled a citation count of books

and journal papers published between 1 January 1978 and 31 December 2012 which referred to: change leader/s, change

leadership, leadership of change and leading change and transformational leader/s, transformational leadership, leadership

of transformation and leading transformation within their titles.

450 Leadership 12(4)

edition as follows ‘I saw it simply as the next instalment in a series of research projects I was
conducting at Harvard’. Again a Harvard research project would have considerable aca-
demic credibility, but there were was no discussion about research methods, methodology or
empirical findings. Kotter’s anecdotes and observations could generously be described as
participant observation, although he did not make this claim (see Bryman, 2011 for further
discussion about what leadership studies participant observation would involve).

A repeated mantra within Kotter’s writing relates to constant change, for example ‘the
problem for us today is that stability is no longer the norm. And most experts agree that over
the next few decades the business environment will become only more volatile’ (Kotter, 1996:
15) (see Eccles and Nohria, 1992; Sorge and Van Witteloostuijn, 2004 for a critique of this
position). It is consequently ironic that Kotter (2012: vii) in his new preface to Leading
Change writes ‘the material in this book is not only still relevant now, sixteen years after
it was published, but I believe it is more relevant, and for one reason the speed of change
continues to increase’. Whilst, stability is espoused as no longer the norm, Kotter’s text
remains exceptionally stable and it is this assertion which this paper critically reviews.
We could have remembered Kotter’s contribution as a milestone on our on-going quest to
better understand leadership and organizational change, but when Kotter claims that
Leading Change is more relevant today than it was in 1996, he raises a critical academic
question, is it?

In answering this question, the paper will take account of the longer chronology of
Kotter’s work with specific reference to publications informing the development of his
eight steps. In evaluating the relevance today of Leading Change failings in Kotter’s original
explanation of transformations will be highlighted. This critique is counterbalanced with an
appreciation of theoretical advances since 1996 relating to resistance, ethics, power and
politics, process thinking, learning, agency and discourse, context and evaluation, inevitably
underplayed in Kotter’s a-theoretical book. The paper will draw conclusions that Leading
Change remains an enduring landmark leadership study, but that Leading Change is stuck in
the past and paradoxically today discourages change.

Understanding Kotter’s contribution chronologically

Evaluation today of Leading Change must acknowledge and reflect upon Kotter’s work
chronologically. Kotter now an emeritus Harvard Professor can reflect back upon a sub-
stantial body of influential writing, consequently the focus is upon publications particularly
relevant to evaluating Leading Change. Kotter became a full professor at Harvard Business
School in 1980 at the age of 33. The General Managers (1982), Power and Influence (1985)
and The Leadership Factor (1988) were part of a series of books themed around leadership in
business. These books were written in a very different style to Leading Change. They were
underpinned by Kotter’s empirical work and built upon his work in the 1970s including
named case studies, locating companies within their own unique contexts and presenting a
historical analysis of the featured companies. They remain key works within leadership
studies and milestones of the development of the field. In a prescient manner, Kotter
(1990: 142) worked with a quadrant of strong/weak leadership and strong/weak manage-
ment warning against the consequences of strong leadership and weak management within a
complex organization (see Table 2).

In Table 2, we see a leadership explanation for the collapse of Enron, Lehman Brothers
and many other American corporations long before these events occurred. In these earlier

Hughes 451

books, Kotter was in academic mode, whilst his focus was very much upon leadership, a
differentiation between management producing predictability and leadership producing
change begins to surface. Kotter had signalled an interest in organizational change through
a co-authored paper Choosing strategies for change (Kotter and Schlesinger, 1979). This
paper in not citing empirical evidence anticipated the later anecdotal writing style of
Leading Change. Managerialist strategies for overcoming resistance to change were offered
ranging from educating employees through to explicit coercion of employees. Kotter and
Heskett (1992) claimed to go beyond previous empirical work in establishing a link between
culture and performance, although Rosenzweig (2007) was sceptical that such an association
could be made.

In 1995, Harvard Business Review published Leading change: Why transformation efforts
fail (Kotter, 1995). This was a time of high expectations within organizations and amongst
academics that with the right recipes organizational change could be effectively managed. So
against this backdrop, Kotter highlighting transformation efforts failing was a radical chal-
lenge to the orthodoxy. The paper informed by Kotter’s experiences as a consultant, rather
than original empirical work, allowed him to suggest eight leadership errors, although
he never explained how he had evaluated particular transformation efforts as failures
(see Table 3).

The subsequent book Leading Change (Kotter, 1996) employed a simple yet clever idea.
Rather than the negative focus of errors and failure, Kotter positively and proactively
focused upon eight best practice leading change steps, he believed resulted in successful
transformation, each step being the reverse of an error (see Table 3). Subsequently,
Kotter was invited to follow up Leading Change by Deloitte Consulting with a project
which involved the Deloitte team headed up by Dan Cohen interviewing over 200 people
in more than 90 U.S., European, Australian and South African organizations in order to
collect stories which would help people to more deeply understand the eight-step formula.
There is very real practical value in deeply understanding the eight-step formula, but this is
different from empirically testing the effectiveness of each step, the ordering of each step, the
evaluation of the outcomes or the sustainability of the perceived outcomes (see Appelbaum
et al., 2012 for retrospective literature-based testing). In Kotter’s preface to The Heart of
Change, he finally clarified what he meant by transformation: ‘By transform I mean the
adoption of new technologies, major strategic shifts, process reengineering, mergers and
acquisitions, restructuring into different sorts of business units, attempts to significantly
improve innovation, and cultural change’ (Kotter and Cohen, 2002: ix). In this preface,

Table 2. Consequences of strong leadership/weak management (Kotter, 1990).

Strong long-term vision without short-term planning and budgeting, plus

An almost cult-like culture without much specialization, structures and rules, plus

Inspired people who tend not to use control systems and problem solving discipline

A situation that eventually gets out of control – critical deadlines, budgets, and promises are not met –

threatening the very existence of the organization.

452 Leadership 12(4)

Kotter (2002: i) also suggested that he had examined ‘. . .close to 100 cases. . .’ for Leading
Change and highlighted that The Heart of Change referred to real people ‘and these people
are named – real names except in a few disguised cases’ (Kotter, 2002: x). In 2005, Cohen
wrote The Heart of Change Field Guide: Tools and Tactics for Leading Change in Your
Organization with a foreword by Kotter. Subsequently, Our Iceberg is Melting (Kotter
and Rathgeber, 2006) was published based upon Leading Change (Kotter, 1996) explaining
the eight steps now as a fable of a penguin colony in Antarctica. The intention was that this
fable would be more accessible than Leading Change, ironic given the simplicity of the
original book. A Sense of Urgency (Kotter, 2008) explored the first step in more detail,
again written in Leading Change’s accessible style. Recently, Harvard Business School pro-
moted Kotter’s accelerate dual operating system, through an article (Kotter, 2012) and a
subsequent book (Kotter, 2014). The original eight steps were expanded and rebranded now
as accelerators. There was an acknowledgement that the eight accelerators could operate
concurrently, pull in as many people as possible and that they required flexible and agile
networks.

Why Kotter’s transformation explanations fail

Kotter’s (2012) Leading Change claims that his book was more relevant today than when
first written, implies that no shortcomings had been identified and no revisions were
required. Critically assessing this claim necessitates highlighting the failings within
Kotter’s analysis of leadership errors (Kotter, 1995) and his prescribed leadership steps
for successful transformation (Kotter, 1996). Kotter (1995) believed that leadership lessons
could be learnt when transformation efforts fail and now with the passage of time we can
potentially learn lessons when transformation explanations fail. The seven identified

Table 3. Why transformations efforts fail (Kotter, 1995) and eight steps to transform your organization

(Kotter, 1996).

Eight errors which cause transformation failures

(Kotter, 1995)

Eight steps to transform your organization

(Kotter, 1996)

Error 1: Not establishing a great enough sense of

urgency

1. Establishing a sense of urgency

Error 2: Not creating a powerful enough guiding

coalition

2. Forming a powerful guiding coalition

Error 3: Lacking a vision 3. Creating a vision

Error 4: Under communicating the vision by a

factor of 10

4. Communicating the vision

Error 5: Not removing obstacles to the new

vision

5. Empowering others to act on the vision

Error 6: Not systematically planning for, and

creating short-term wins

6. Planning for and creating short term wins

Error 7: Declaring victory too soon 7. Consolidating improvements and producing

still more change

Error 8: Not anchoring changes in the corpor-

ation’s culture

8. Institutionalizing new approaches

Hughes 453

transformation explanation failures are employees depicted as resistors, ethics, power and
politics underplayed, overemphasis upon a sequence of linear steps, disparaging history
limits learning, and appreciation of incremental change, leader and leader communications
overemphasized, under emphasis of unique cultural contexts, rhetorical treatment of organ-
izational success/failure.

Employees depicted as resistors

Kotter and Schlesinger (1979) identified four causes of resistance to change diagnosing
strategies in order to respond to such resistance. In Leading Change, the language is different,
but the message remains the same: ‘the key lies in understanding why organizations resist
needed change. . .’ (16), ‘Colin was typical of the foot draggers’ (104), ‘these blockers stop
needed action’ (114), ‘an unwillingness to confront managers like Frank is common in
change efforts’ (114), ‘. . .quick performance improvements undermine the efforts of cynics
and major league resisters’ (123). Academics have criticized simplistic/individual-based
explanations (see depiction of Colin and Frank) instead favouring greater emphasis upon
the constructed reality in which individuals operate (Ford et al., 2002). Crudely categorizing
people as for/against a leader’s particular change neglects the multidimensional attitudes of
employees towards change (Piderit, 2000). The semantics of resistance to change (Collins,
1998) suggest dysfunctional personality characteristics, again illustrated through Kotter’s
chosen pejorative terminology and stereotyping: ‘blockers’, ‘cynics’ and ‘major league
resisters’.

Ethics, power and politics underplayed

Kotter (1996: 61) laments ‘trust is often absent in many organizations’ and that ‘one of the
main reasons people are not committed to overall excellence is that they don’t really trust
other departments, divisions or even fellow executives’ (1996: 65). In this way Kotter empha-
sizes trust and honesty, yet elsewhere appears to prescribe dishonest actions which would
potentially breach trust, for example:

Visible crises can be enormously helpful in catching people’s attention and pushing up urgency
levels. Conducting business as usual is very difficult if the building seems to be on fire. But in an

increasingly fast-moving world, waiting for a fire to break out is a dubious strategy. And in add-
ition to catching people’s attention a sudden fire can cause a lot of damage. (Kotter, 1996: 45)

The dishonest action (claiming the building is on fire) Kotter encourages appears to contra-
dict Kotter’s espousal of trust. The idea of trusting followers to guide leaders is the antithesis
of Kotter’s pyrotechnic vision, but does offer an informative counterpoint.

What might be better would be an atmosphere of much greater trust (probably built around the
removal of any assessment early on) when poor leadership is seen to fail and poor leaders are

helped to understand why they fail and how they might succeed by those most affected by
leadership failure – the followers. (Grint, 2005a: 135)

This quotation casts new light upon Kotter’s ‘planning and creating short-term wins’, (the
opposite of what Grint is encouraging), short-term wins enhance the power and authority of
leaders and reaffirm their centrality/authority to lead change. If Kotter’s trust in the
capabilities of empowered follower’s was more than warm words, he would encourage

454 Leadership 12(4)

short-term defeats in order to ensure that everyone collectively took responsibility for
achieving the transformation effort. Kotter felt no compulsion to explicitly engage with
ethics in his new 2012 edition of Leading Change. This is disappointing given the lack of
ethical perspective in recent high profile leadership failures, particularly within the large
American corporations which fascinated Kotter and disappointing given Harvard
Business School’s engagement with the MBA Oath (see mbaoath.org).

Overemphasis upon a sequence of linear steps

The dustcover of Leading Change posed the question: ‘What will it take to bring your
organization successfully into the twenty-first century?’ This dustcover answered its own
question: ‘The book identifies an eight-step process that every company must go through
to achieve its goal. . .’ Kotter (1996: 23) warned that ‘although one normally operates in
multiple phases at once, skipping even a single step or getting too far ahead without a solid
base almost always creates problems’. Kotter (2012, 2014) tempered this sequentialism
within his new accelerate dual operating system, but in terms of our focus upon Leading
Change, was Kotter really offering a new process to bring organizations into the 21st
century?

Back in the 20th century, Lewin (1947) identified three steps required for planned change
(see Table 4). In his reappraisal of Lewin’s contribution, Burnes (2004) acknowledged that
the three-step model was not originally developed with regards to organizational issues. It
was one of four concepts, part of a broader integrated approach towards understanding and
bringing about change at group, organizational and societal levels. Notions of unfreezing,
moving and refreezing have become recurrent themes within organizational change theories
ever since (see Cummings, 2002; Hendry, 1996 for further discussion) although the academic
convention is to acknowledge the original source, rather than presenting it as your own ‘new
process’.

Under-socialized models of change referred to as n-step guides exhibit three features: a
rational analysis of organizational change, a sequential approach to the planning and man-
agement of change and a generally up-beat and prescriptive tone (Collins, 1998). N-step
approaches appeal to managers/leaders in ways that academic/empirical accounts depicting
change as ambiguous, uncertain and irrational do not. Academic accounts are more likely to
draw attention to improvisation and design, highlighting designs as recipes, attention and
bricolage (Weick, 2000). Instead of eight ‘off the shelf’ steps, there would be real merit in a
leader assembling their own n-step approach.

Table 4. Lewin’s three steps and Kotter’s eight steps.

Changing as three steps Kotter explains his steps

A successful change includes three aspects:

unfreezing (if necessary) the present level L1,

moving to the new level L2 and freezing group

life on the new level (Lewin, 1947: 35)

The first four steps in the transformation process

help defrost a hardened status quo. If change

were easy, you wouldn’t need all that effort.

Phase’s five to seven then introduce many new

practices. The last stage grounds the changes

in the corporate culture and helps them stick

(Kotter, 1996: 22)

Hughes 455

Disparaging history limits learning and appreciation of incremental change

In A Force for Change, Kotter (1990: 40) carefully located the Travel Related Services arm of
American Express within its own unique historical context, helping him to differentiate the
company from National Cash Registers. However, in Leading Change, Kotter (1996: 142)
became irritated by corporate history ‘cleaning up historical artefacts does create an even
longer change agenda, which an exhausted organization will not like. But purging of
unnecessary interconnections can ultimately make transformation much easier’. Kotter
was writing about ‘purging’ in the context of the 1990s, a time when Hammer and
Champy (1993) became infamous for their violent rhetoric – Don’t automate, obliterate!
As Kotter (1996: 186) concludes on the final page of his book ‘as an observer of life, I think I
can say with some authority that people who are making an effort to embrace the future are
a happier lot than those who are clinging to the past’. However, the large-scale corporate
transformations which interested Kotter required a far more culturally sensitive approach
than Kotter prescribed (see Stadler and Hinterhuber, 2005 for culturally sensitive and his-
torically grounded longitudinal analyses of how transformations were led within Shell,
Siemens and Daimler Chrysler).

In terms of competing approaches to strategy (Whittington, 2001), Kotter favoured clas-
sical and systemic approaches, inevitably at the expense of evolutionary and processual
approaches. Mintzberg et al. (2009: 318) suggested that ‘there is a time for coherence and
a time for change’, in this way strategic change becomes an oxymoron as strategic change
addresses both transformations and continuities. Whilst practitioner rhetoric about trans-
forming everything is echoed within prescriptive literature, organizational change processes
are far subtler. Kotter’s scepticism (see Kotter, 1996: 173) about incremental change failed to
address the paradox senior managers often encounter, with regards to the interplay between
evolutionary and revolutionary change (De Wit and Meyer, 2004). Despite management
rhetoric and the media depicting revolutions and transformations, senior managers are
largely involved in evolutionary change (Burke, 2008; Dunphy and Stace, 1988; Johnson
et al., 2010).

Leader and leader communications overemphasized

Critical leadership literature (Grint, 2005a; Tourish, 2013) challenges popular societal beliefs
in heroic leaders. In mitigation Kotter did not explicitly focus upon an individual heroic
leader, instead encouraging a notion of a ‘powerful guiding coalition’ as the optimum way to
lead change. However, Kotter’s central thesis remains that companies have too much change
management and not enough change leadership. Kotter (1996: 26) wrote that ‘a close look at
exhibits 2 and 3 shows that successful transformation is 70 per cent to 90 per cent leadership
and only 10 to 30 per cent management’. Exhibit 2 is Kotter’s eight steps (see Table 3) and
Exhibit 3 comprises text-based boxes taken from A Force for Change (Kotter, 1990). Whilst
A Force for Change was grounded in Kotter’s empirical work, his published research did not
support his ‘transformation is 70 per cent to 90 per cent leadership’ quantification. A reader
going back to A Force for Change at this stage would learn salutary lessons with Kotter
actually warning against strong leadership and weak management (see Table 2). Even within
Leading Change, Kotter warned against leadership alone, ‘transformation is not a process
involving leadership alone; good management is also essential’ (Kotter, 1996: 129). More
generally, doubts about the utility of Kotter’s (1990) differentiation between management
and leadership surface (Bolden et al., 2011; Knights and Willmott, 2014; Spector, 2014).

456 Leadership 12(4)

Under emphasis of unique cultural contexts

Leading Change is written from a contingent perspective with the rationale for leading trans-
formations always depicted as a consequence of rapidly changing environments, rather than
the whim of a powerful leader. O’Toole (1995: 7) noted an unquestioning academic com-
mitment to contingency theory at this time, informing a popular belief ‘. . .that to implement
change, effective leaders do whatever the circumstances require’. O’Toole did not favour this
position, but noted its attractiveness as appearing to be non-prescriptive, non-judgemental
and non-deterministic. Kotter invoking a threat of a vague and rapidly changing environ-
ment gives leaders their rationale to lead change through decisive action (in essence strong
leadership). Whilst this line of reasoning may appeal to leaders, academic flaws in Kotter’s
reasoning are apparent. In Leading Change, Kotter offered no context, no company names
and no named leaders, making it impossible to gauge how real this perceived environmental
threat really was. The repeated rhetorical assertion that we are always living through a time
of rapidly changing environments has been questioned (see Eccles and Nohria, 1992; Sorge
and Van Witteloostuijn, 2004). Kotter’s contingent context may even have been socially
constructed to justify the actions of a change leader. Grint (2005b) warns against a belief
that there is an essentialist context out there, instead drawing attention to the context or
situation being actively constructed by the leader (or in this case the leadership writer).
Kotter (1995/1996) constructed an oblique yet troubling environmental context requiring
increased numbers of corporate transformations, yet with his own caveat that these trans-
formations invariably failed, giving leaders a moral blank cheque to do ‘. . .whatever the
circumstances require’ (O’Toole, 1995: 7).

Rhetorical treatment of organizational success/failure

Quantifying results/outcomes of leadership are extraordinarily difficult (Grint, 2005a). In
Kotter’s (1995: 59) paper, Leading Change: Why transformation efforts fail, he wrote that ‘a
few of these corporate change efforts have been very successful. A few have been utter failures.
Most fall somewhere in between, with a distinct tilt toward the lower end of the scale’. It was
the title of his paper that framed (Deetz et al., 2000; Fairhurst, 2005) a notion that trans-
formation efforts fail. Kotter never claimed all transformation efforts fail; a few were very
successful and most were somewhere in between success and failure. Kotter’s eight leadership
errors explained transformation failure (see Table 3) exclusively through internal factors,
rather than external environments, perverse given that Kotter was preoccupied with a rapidly
changing external environment. Plausible explanations of failure such as technological or
legislative change, local/global competition or products being at the maturity stage of the
product life cycle were absent. As it was transformation efforts in the corporations that
Kotter was ‘watching’ which kept failing, as a consultant did he ever feel complicit?

In Leading Change, the narrative becomes much more appealing switching from
errors and failure to successful transformation. If you follow Kotter’s eight steps in the
order that he prescribes your transformation will be successful, again he neither explains
how to evaluate success, nor more troublingly even encourages such an evaluation, instead
choosing to emphasize ‘consolidating gains and producing more change’ (Kotter, 1996: 131).
The goal of pausing and reflecting would lead to incremental change which Kotter was
sceptical about. As Kotter (1996: 126) concedes ‘without competent management, inad-
equate thought is usually given to the whole question of measurement’ and certainly inad-
equate thought was given to the question of measurement within Leading Change.

Hughes 457

Rethinking leadership and organizational change

Failings within Kotter’s explanation of transformation typify an academically problematic
intersection between leadership and organizational change. Parry (2011: 57) took critical
stock of such interrelationships in his contribution to The SAGE Handbook of Leadership.

Leadership and organizational change are inextricably intertwined. However, ‘organizational

change’ has become an interest for organizational consultants more so than for empirical
researchers. There are many more books and articles on practitioner or conceptual scholarship
than on theoretical or empirical scholarship. Much of the practitioner work is case study-based,

and anecdotal and not rigorous in its conduct.

This sad indictment of the state of theorizing interrelationships between leadership and
organizational change highlights an urgent need to academically rethink leadership and
organizational change. At the very least we need to debate the current pitiful state of under-
standing leadership and organizational change, as identified by Parry (2011), rather than
continuing to cite Kotter’s flawed analysis (see Table 1). This rethinking must be informed
by theoretical and empirical work, which may subsequently inform practice, rather than the
reverse, this is essential if the sub-field of leadership and organizational change is going to
gain academic credibility. In this spirit, this section offers a positive counterbalance to the
critique of the previous section acknowledging and celebrating research, theory and
research-informed practice advances (see Table 5).

Table 5. Leading changes: Why transformation explanations fail.

Why transformation

efforts fail (Kotter,

1995)

Leading change

(Kotter, 1996)

Why transformation

explanations fail

Rethinking leadership

and organizational

change

1: Not establishing a

great enough sense

of urgency

2: Not creating a

powerful enough

guiding coalition

3: Lacking a vision

4: Under communicating

the vision by a factor

of 10

5: Not removing

obstacles to the

new vision

6: Not systematically planning

for, and creating short-term

wins

7: Declaring victory

too soon

8: Not anchoring

changes in the

corporation’s culture

1. Establishing a sense

of urgency

2. Forming a powerful

guiding coalition

3. Creating a vision

4. Communicating the

vision

5. Empowering others

to act on the vision

6. Planning for and

creating short-term

wins

7. Consolidating

improvements and

producing still

more change

8. Institutionalizing

new approaches

Employees depicted

as change resistors

Ethics, power and

politics underplayed

Overemphasis upon

a sequence of linear

steps

Disparaging history

limits learning and

an appreciation of

incremental change

Leader and leader

communications

overemphasized

Under emphasis of

unique cultural contexts

Rhetorical treatment

of organizational

success/failure

Resistance

Ethics, power and

politics

Process thinking

Learning

Agency and discourse

Context

Evaluation

458 Leadership 12(4)

The first column of Table 5 summarizes the leadership errors which Kotter identified
resulting in transformation failures. The second column features his subsequent eight steps
prescribed for leading change. The third column summarizes Kotter’s transformation
explanation failures (see previous section). The fourth column directly responds to each
of these failures (column 3) and more proactively highlights advances since 1996. The seven
empirical/theoretical advances (fourth column) relate to Resistance, Ethics, Power and
politics, process thinking, Learning, Agency and discourse, Context and Evaluation are
gathered together using a mnemonic REPLACE. This mnemonic is shorthand for both a
need to replace deficiencies within Leading Change and anecdotal/practitioner orientated
work as highlighted by Parry (2011) and more proactively the REPLACE mnemonic priv-
ileges theoretical/empirical accounts of leadership and organizational change over practi-
tioner accounts. As a single explanation is unlikely to suffice given the complexities and
ambiguities of both leadership and organizational change, REPLACE encourages thinking
in terms of seven interconnected advances. This discussion is inevitably selective in number
given word count constraints of a journal paper, deliberately concentrates upon publica-
tions since 2000 and privileges references within respected refereed journals and critical
monographs.

Resistance to change

Leading Change worked with an assumption that resistance to change was the problem and
strong leadership was the solution. Critical scholars have increasingly questioned the utility
of overcoming resistance to change and crudely categorizing people as either for or against a
leader’s particular change (Piderit, 2000). Oreg’s (2003) empirically grounded paper asked
questions about individuals who resist even changes consonant with their interests, generat-
ing a four-facet structure for measuring individual differences in resistance to change dis-
positions: routine seeking, emotional reaction to imposed change, short-term focus and
cognitive rigidity. In their polemical, Academy of Management Review paper, Ford et al.
(2008) took critical stock of what was now known about resistance to change, updating
developments since Ford et al. (2002) they warned that the presence and activities of change
agents may even be part of the problem, rather than the solution. Engaging with resistance in
a more sophisticated manner as subtle and diverse responses to ongoing organizational
change processes involves employees within change processes, rather than marginalizing
them as resistant bystanders.

Ethics, power, politics and organizational change

Leading Change at best minimizes ethical concerns, whereas by contrast critical scholars
foreground ethical approaches towards leading change (see for example Wall, 2007).
Narratives and ethics as related to downsizing within a multinational information technol-
ogy company were explored by Rhodes et al. (2010). Their research highlighted that ‘. . .the
presence of strong collective narratives in organizations can limit the scope of ethical delib-
eration and action, organizations seeking to engage in organizational change ethically
should encourage debate, critique and contestation over the meaning of those events’
(Rhodes et al., 2010: 547). By and Burnes (2011: 296) reminded us that those promoting
particular approaches to leadership and change must explicitly acknowledge the ethics of the
approaches they champion, yet simultaneously criteria for judging leaders are far less clear
than for managers (see also By and Burnes, 2013).

Hughes 459

Leading Change socially constructing leaders as the powerful ones in times of change
may explain its enduring popularity. There is a logic and inevitability in using management
power in the context of organizational change, recognized by academics as far back as the
early 1970s (see Bradshaw and Boonstra, 2004; Hardy and Clegg, 2004 for discussion).
However, Hardy and Clegg (2004) warned that much of the organizational change litera-
ture assists change management failure due to a lack of pragmatism with regards to power.
Buchanan and Badham (2008) encouraged greater engagement with power and politics,
although they conceded that academics tend to neglect political behaviour with regards to
organizational change. Thomas and Hardy (2011) went further arguing that power and
resistance constitute organizational change. Engaging with ethics, power and politics intro-
duces important dynamics and choices often absent within typical explanations of leading
change.

Process thinking and organizational change

Similarity between Kotter’s eight steps and Lewin’s (1947) unfreeze, change and refreeze (see
Table 4) is indicative of sequential temporality common within organizational change
explanations (Burnes, 2004; Cummings, 2002; Hendry, 1996). More recently, Dawson
(2014) acknowledged the prevalence of such temporality, but equally the need to engage
with alternative explanations of organizational change. In a far-reaching reflection upon
temporality and organizational change, Dawson (2014) revisited Tsoukas and Chia’s
(2002) notion that organizations consist of processes of becoming with verbs such as orga-
nizing and strategizing capturing fluid processes of changing organizations. He highlighted
the considerable traction that now exists between theories explaining change either as a series
of marked episodes (steps) or as an ongoing ceaseless process. Engaging with process think-
ing explanations of leading change disrupts the sequentialism and linearity which Kotter’s
eight steps encourage.

Learning and organizational change

The danger within leadership preoccupations with looking forwards is the neglect of look-
ing backwards and recognizing the temporal dimensions of organizational change (Ybema,
2010). Forward looking leadership potentially underplays the contribution learning theory
can make with regards to organizational change processes (Starkey et al., 2004). Easterby
Smith et al.’s (2000) overview of organizational learning debates, past, present and future
identified interest in organizational learning as growing up almost ‘underground’, until an
explosion of interest in the late 1980s. Lakomski (2001: 68) highlighted the centrality of
learning ‘the prime mover of change is the leader, who transforms the current stagnating
culture into a productive one. . .Ongoing learning is believed to be the best preparation for
the future, and it is the leader’s responsibility to see that happens’. Lakomski’s (2001)
paper a provocative think piece shared similar beliefs to Sugarman (2001) who focused
upon five businesses which successfully changed through becoming more like learning
organizations. The publication of a revised and updated edition of The Fifth Discipline
(Senge, 2006) featuring Senge’s (1990) conceptualization of the learning organization high-
lighted its enduring popularity. Mintzberg et al. (2009) have acknowledged that Senge
(1990) gave impetus to burgeoning interest in the ‘learning organization’. However, learn-
ing discourse with its underlying ideology of depicting learning as always a good thing has

460 Leadership 12(4)

been critiqued (Contu et al., 2003) with Clegg et al. (2005) favouring rethinking and
reframing organizational learning as organizational becoming, in order to make connec-
tions between organization, learning and becoming (see also Friedman et al., 2005;
Jackson, 2001; Ortenblad, 2007 for critiques of learning organization). Engaging with
organizational learning acknowledges the past, as well as, the future and the often evolu-
tionary/incremental nature of strategic change and potentially involves employees within
organizational change processes.

Agency, discourse and organizational change

Leading Change depicts leaders/powerful guiding coalitions as agents of change and
Caldwell (2003) acknowledged the 1980s as the era change leaders gained prominence.
However, Caldwell was sceptical about claims being made for change leaders including an
over-emphasis upon leaders transforming organizations, failure to clarify differences
between leaders and managers within change processes, underestimation of leadership at
all levels in changing organizations and a conflation between leadership and change.
Informed by literature reviewing, Caldwell (2003) developed a fourfold classification of
change agency covering leadership, management, consultancy and team models. In synthe-
sizing and reconceptualizing the nature of change agency, he emphasized that there was nei-
ther a universal model of change agency, nor a single type of change agent with a fixed set of
competencies (see also Caldwell, 2005, 2007). Ongoing debates with regards to change
agency have highlighted both problems of dispersed change agency (Doyle, 2001), as well
as, how distributed change agency was used successfully (with caveats) to implement a
complex organizational change (Buchanan et al., 2007) (see also Battilana and Casciaro,
2012).

Depictions of the leader/powerful guiding coalition as change agent privilege one way
communication at the expense of listening to or engaging with followers, the quantity and
volume of the change communications takes precedence over message construction and
message reception. The danger is that ‘. . .communication is frequently treated as either a
tool for promoting change or an unproblematic component of organizing’ (McCellan,
2011: 467). A sensible precaution of not speaking up against an organizational change has
been labelled ‘organizational silence’ (Morrison and Milliken, 2000). However, the leader/
powerful guiding coalition may assume that the absence of negative feedback conveys
acceptance of their change. Dutton et al. (2001) analysed 82 accounts of ‘issue selling’
and identified how managers were successfully shaping change through issue selling
moves including packaging, involvement and timing. Heracleous and Barrett (2001)
explored the role of discourse in shaping organizational change processes informed by
their longitudinal field study of electronic trading in the London Insurance Market. They
developed a typology of four approaches to discourse: functional, interpretive, critical
and structurational approaches based upon Van de Ven and Poole (1995). Similarly,
Tsoukas (2005) encouraged more sophisticated engagement with discourse in the context
of organizational change differentiating between behaviourist, cognitivist and discourse
analytical approaches (see Phillips and Oswick, 2011 for a comprehensive overview of
organizational discourse developments). Academic accounts of agency challenge belief in
the exclusive agency of a change leader or leaders, highlighting choices with regards to
where change agency is located, dispersal of power and construction of change
discourses.

Hughes 461

Contextualizing organizational change

The academic norm is to locate strategic change case studies within their own unique con-
text. In this sense, Hope Hailey and Balogun’s (2002) context-sensitive account of change
within Glaxo Wellcome is an exemplar, as well as, offering a critical counterpoint to Leading
Change’s a-contextual transformation cases. Hope Hailey and Balogun warn against descrip-
tive contingency models which offer ‘recipes’ for making complex business simpler and more
manageable, they cite Kotter and Schlesinger (1979) as illustrative of such a formulaic recipe.
Instead they favour their own diagnostic tool referred to as the change kaleidoscope which
encourages: ‘(1) A rigorous analysis of context; (2) consideration of a range of implemen-
tation options; (3) an awareness of one’s own preferences about change and how this limits
the options considered; and (4) development of change judgement’ (Hope Hailey and
Balogun, 2002: 154). This position is compatible with notions of leaders socially constructing
the context for a change (discussed earlier). As Pettigrew (2012: 1308) acknowledges ‘stra-
tegic change is ultimately a product of a legitimization process shaped by gross changes in
the outer context of the firm and by political and cultural considerations inside the firm,
though often expressed in rational/analytical terms’. Engaging with unique contexts and
cultures encourages movement away from formulaic recipes, refocusing upon diverse choices
made by reflexive leaders.

Evaluating organizational change

Leading change is caricatured as either failing with improved leadership the solution (Kotter,
1995) or leading change will be successful if leaders follow eight successful transformation
steps (Kotter, 1996). Pettigrew et al. (2001: 701) in their frequently cited overview of the
study of organizational change acknowledged that ‘. . . in very few empirical studies do
researchers seek to link change capacity and action to organizational performance’. They
(2001: 701) suggest that whilst this is a difficult area, this should not deter scholars from the
challenge, although with the caveats ‘. . .evaluating the success of change initiatives is replete
with practical difficulties. What is success in the management of change? Definitions of
success can include notions of the quantity, quality, and pace of change’. Vaara (2002)
focussed upon discursive constructions of post-merger integration, drawing upon extensive
interview data with reference to eight Finnish–Swedish mergers and acquisitions. Four types
of discourse were identified: rationalistic, cultural, role-bound and individualistic. This nar-
rative perspective revealed multiple interpretations for evaluating organizational change
‘. . .success stories are likely to lead to overly optimistic, and failure narratives to overly
pessimistic views on the management’s ability to control these change processes’ (Vaara,
2002: 237). In their empirically informed study of organizational change, Amis et al. (2004)
questioned common assumptions, evident within the literature, around the pace, sequence
and linearity of organizational change. Their research focussed upon 36 Canadian national
sports organizations (NSOs) challenged the belief that rapid change throughout organiza-
tions was sufficient to bring about radical change even suggesting that rapid change may be
detrimental.

‘Why do some changes to organization structures, working practices and culture appear
to be irreversible, while others decay more or less rapidly?’ (Buchanan et al., 2005: 189).
Buchanan et al. (2005) illustrate an emerging academic interest in the sustainability of
organizational change initiatives. They subsequently identified 11 factors affecting sustain-
ability: substantial, individual, managerial, financial, leadership, organizational, cultural,

462 Leadership 12(4)

political, processual, contextual and temporal. Sustainability is likely to be influenced by
interplay between these factors (see Hughes, 2011, for further discussion about evaluating
organizational change). Academic engagement with organizational change evaluation offers
an antidote to simplistic generalizations that transformations fail or succeed exclusively as a
consequence of leadership.

The REPLACE mnemonic has been introduced here as a framework for encouraging
debate around seven related advances grounded in empirical and theoretical work believed
to be particularly pertinent to informing understanding about leadership and organizational
change interrelationships. Whilst academic advances have been discussed separately in order
to aid exposition, inevitably they overlap and they are interconnected. They are likely to be
closer to Chia’s (1999) rhizome analogy of organizational change than traditional concep-
tualizations of a tree of knowledge.

Conclusions

Kotter’s belief that unprecedented change was occurring, yet that Leading Change was now
more relevant than when first published in 1996, fuelled the writing of this paper. It was as if
the 2008 global financial recession never really happened. As if a leadership thought leader
was announcing in 2012 – It’s business as usual! Taking critical stock of Kotter’s claims
necessitated engagement with his larger body of influential work, as well as, Kotter’s lead-
ership explanations of why transformations failed and how successful transformation would
occur through appropriate leadership. This review enables three conclusions to now be
drawn, addressing Kotter’s considerable contribution to the sub-field of leadership and
organizational change, development of this sub-field since 1996 and movement towards
more moral and ethical leadership.

Leading Change an enduring leadership studies landmark

Kotter’s (1996) account of leading change is remembered and still utilized as a respected
practice orientated model. In an academic sense, the first four of the eight steps (see Table 2)
offer an alternative explanation for Kotter’s significant influence upon the field of leadership
studies and sub-field of leadership and organizational change. Kotter was deeply concerned
with American corporate transformation failures at a time when managing, rather than
leading change was the norm. Despite its deficiencies, Kotter’s (1995) paper created the
sense of urgency both within the practitioner and academic communities of that time with
regards achieving and explaining transformations. The crisis was the failure of transform-
ations and although with hindsight he may have caricatured this crisis, it needed to be of this
magnitude to disrupt change management thinking at that time. In terms of step two,
creating the guiding coalition, Kotter (1996: 57) suggested four essential ingredients: position
power, expertise, credibility and leadership. Kotter as a professor at Harvard Business
School possessed such position power. He had the expertise both in terms of his influential
and respected earlier contributions to leadership studies, but also his willingness to engage
with practitioners at a senior level in American corporations through his consultancy
work. His credibility was underpinned by his position power and his expertise and he
undoubtedly showed leadership in his influence of an academic field, as well as, practice.
In terms of step three, Kotter (1996: 72) suggests that effective visions are imaginable,
desirable, feasible, focused, flexible and communicable. In this paper, Leading Change has

Hughes 463

been critiqued however as a vision of how change is to be lead, it meets these criteria. In
terms of the fourth step, communicating the change vision Kotter (1996: 90) emphasizes
‘simplicity: all jargon and technobabble must be eliminated’. And once again he practices
what he preaches. This modelling of the first four steps in Kotter’s leadership of the theory
and practice of leading change may explain its enduring success (one of TIMEs most
influential management books of all time and by far the most cited book about leadership
and organizational change).

Leading Change is stuck in the past

Kotter’s steps as well as offering an explanation for the enduring success of Leading Change
also explain the major limitation of this book today. Kotter and Cohen (2002: 177) refer to
the eighth step, anchoring new approaches in the culture slightly differently, as ‘make change
stick’, writing in the final chapter of their book ‘be sure the changes are embedded in the very
culture of the enterprise so that the new way of operating will stick’. Whilst Kotter was a
tireless advocate for creating more change, the eight steps became the new way of operating,
the new way of thinking and in this sense they did stick, for practitioners and academics.
This potentially explains why the eight steps in 2012 remained completely unchanged. As
Kotter (1996: 157) himself warned ‘sometimes the only way to change a culture is to change
key people’, it was always going to be difficult for Kotter to create the sense of urgency to
change his own vision of leading change.

Kotter’s contribution will be remembered long after this paper has been forgotten.
However, the play on words within the title of this paper acknowledges that accounts of
leading inevitably change, informed by the people writing about change changing, informed
by thinking changing and informed by contexts in which leadership takes place changing.
This paper has showcased the latest thinking believed to be pertinent to advancing theories
and practices of leadership and organizational change with seven empirical/theoretical
advances relating to resistance, ethics, power and politics, process thinking, learning,
agency and discourse, context and evaluation gathered together using the mnemonic
REPLACE (see Table 5). Development of the REPLACE mnemonic has been driven by
three forces: perceived shortcomings now within Kotter’s 1996 vision of leading change, the
lived experience of the 2008 global financial recession and its aftermath and Parry’s (2011)
critical verdict of the current state of what we know about leadership and organizational
change.

Leading Change today paradoxically discourages change

At the same time as Kotter’s (1996) Leading Change, O’Toole’s (1995) Leading Change:
Overcoming the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom was also being published. In
the latter book, O’Toole (1995) made the case for values-based leadership. O’Toole (1995: 7)
was annoyed with unquestioning academic contingency theory at this time ‘. . . the belief that
to implement change effective leaders do whatever the circumstances require’. He (O’Toole,
1995: 10/11) subsequently challenged this belief ‘clearly, the leadership of change, does not
depend on circumstances it depends on the attitudes, values and actions of leaders’.

O’Toole’s (1995) concerns have been magnified with the passage of time and the recent
experience of failed leadership with regards to the global financial recession. Kotter (1990)
himself originally warned against the consequences of companies with too strong leadership

464 Leadership 12(4)

and too weak management developing ‘cult like cultures’ and not using control systems
which would threaten the very existence of these organizations and Kotter’s prophecy
came true. The 2008 global financial crisis encouraged critical reappraisal of the leadership
of our largest companies and the academic responsibility to collectively challenge the darker
side of transformational leadership (Tourish, 2013). Kotter writing about his sixth step
about generating short term wins wrote ‘to some degree, all management is manipulation
– and that includes the production of short-term performance improvements’ (1996: 128),
tempered with some caveats. However, set against the context of recent corporate history,
for example, Enron’s accounting practices, Arthur Anderson’s auditing or the manipulation
of the LIBOR rate by UK bankers; Kotter’s 2012 prescriptions now paradoxically discour-
age change. In his thought leadership of the field of leading change, it is disappointing that
with the benefit of 16 years hindsight he chose to maintain that such views were still relevant
today, ignoring local developments at Harvard Business School, such as the public commit-
ment to the MBA Oath (mbaoath.org). We have a limited window of opportunity to learn
from the leadership errors of the past decade, if we are to avoid repeating these leadership
errors and the considerable damage they do to societies and economies. As Kotter (1996:
186) himself concluded ‘. . .people who are making an effort to embrace the future are a
happier lot than those who are clinging to the past’. The enduring status quo of leadership
studies and leadership practice requires challenging, which Leading Change now impedes.
Leading Change remains an enduring landmark of leadership studies, but today it is stuck in
the past and paradoxically discourages changes which leadership studies and leadership
practices urgently require.

Acknowledgements

I thank participants and my discussant in the Organizational Change stream at the 30th EGOS col-

loquium for helpful feedback on an earlier version of this paper. I thank Professor Tourish for his

thoughtful editorial guidance on this submission. I found the anonymous review process extremely

helpful, in constructively challenging some of my thinking, but equally encouraging in the critical

development of this intentionally provocative paper. I remain exclusively responsible for the critical

analysis presented here.

A very early and highly abbreviated version (2500 words) of this paper was submitted to the 2014

Chartered Management Institute Article of the Year Initiative, which seeks to build a bridge between

academia and practice.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or

publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this

article.

References

Amis J, Slack T and Hinings CR (2004) The pace, sequence, and linearity of radical change. Academy
of Management Journal 47: 15–39.

Hughes 465

Appelbaum SH, Habashy S, Malo J, et al. (2012) Back to the future: Revisiting Kotter’s 1996 change

model. Journal of Management Development 31: 764–782.
Bass BM and Avolio BJ (eds) (1993) Improving Organizational Effectiveness Through Transformational

Leadership. Los Angeles: Sage Publications Inc.

Bass BM and Riggio RE (2005) Transformational Leadership. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates Inc/Psychology Press.

Battilana J and Casciaro T (2012) Change agents, networks, and institutions: A contingency theory of
organizational change. Academy of Management Journal 55: 381–398.

Bolden R, Hawkins B, Gosling G, et al. (2011) Exploring Leadership: Individual, Organizational and
Societal Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bradshaw P and Boonstra J (2004) Power dynamics in organizational change: A multi-perspective

approach. In: Boonstra JJ (ed.) Dynamics of Organizational Change and Learning. Chichester: John
Wiley & Sons.

Bryman A (2011) Research methods in the study of leadership. In: Bryman A, Collinson D, Grint K,

et al. (eds) The SAGE Handbook of Leadership. London: Sage Publications Ltd.
Buchanan D and Badham R (2008) Power, Politics and Organizational Change: Winning the Turf

Game, 2nd ed. London: Sage Publications Ltd.

Buchanan D, Fitzgerald L, Ketley D, et al. (2005) No going back: A review of the literature on
sustaining organizational change. International Journal of Management Reviews 7: 189–205.

Buchanan DA, Addicot R, Fitzgerald L, et al. (2007) Nobody in charge: Distributed change agency in
healthcare. Human Relations 60: 1065–1090.

Burke WW (2008) Organization Change: Theory and Practice, 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage
Publications Ltd.

Burnes B (2004) Kurt Lewin and the planned approach to change: A re-appraisal. Journal of

Management Studies 41: 977–1002.
By RT and Burnes B (2011) Leadership and change: Whatever happened to ethics? In: Boje DM,

Burnes B and Hassard J (eds) The Routledge Companion to Organizational Change. London:

Routledge.
By RT and Burnes B (eds) (2013) Organizational Change, Leadership and Ethics: Leading Organizations

Towards Sustainability. London: Routledge.

Caldwell R (2003) Models of change agency: A fourfold classification. British Journal of Management
14: 131–142.

Caldwell R (2005) Things fall apart? Discourses on agency and change in organizations. Human
Relations 58: 83–114.

Caldwell R (2007) Agency and change: Re-evaluating Foucault’s legacy. Organization 14: 769–791.
Chia R (1999) A ‘rhizomic’ model of organizational change and transformation: Perspective from a

metaphysics of change. British Journal of Management 10: 209–227.

Clegg SR, Kornberger M and Rhodes C (2005) Learning/becoming/organizing. Organization 12:
147–167.

Cohen DS (2005) The Heart of Change Field Guide: Tools and Tactics for Leading Change in Your

Organization. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
Collins D (1998) Organizational Change: Sociological Perspectives. London: Routledge.
Contu A, Grey C and Ortenblad A (2003) Against learning. Human Relations 56: 931–952.
Cummings S (2002) ReCreating Strategy. London: Sage Publications.

Dawson P (2014) Reflections: On time, temporality and change in organizations. Journal of Change
Management 14: 285–308.

Deetz SA, Tracy SJ and Simpson JL (2000) Leading Organizations Through Transition: Communication

and Cultural Change. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications Inc.
De Wit B and Meyer R (2004) Strategy: Process, Content and Context. London: Thomson Learning.
Diaz-Saenz HR (2011) Transformational leadership. In: Bryman A, Collinson D, Grint K, et al. (eds)

The SAGE Handbook of Leadership. London: Sage Publications Ltd.

466 Leadership 12(4)

Doyle M (2001) Dispersing change agency in high velocity change organisations: Issues and implica-

tions. Leadership and Organization Development Journal 22: 321–329.
Dunphy D and Stace D (1988) Transformational and coercive strategies for planned organizational

change: Beyond the O.D. model. Organization Studies 9: 317–334.

Dutton JE, Ashford SJ, O’Neil RM, et al. (2001) Moves that matter: Issue selling and organizational
change. Academy of Management Journal 44: 716–736.

Easterby Smith M, Crossan M and Nicolini D (2000) Organizational learning: Debates past, present
and future. Journal of Management Studies 37: 783–796.

Eccles RG and Nohria N (1992) Beyond the Hype: Rediscovering the Essence of Management. Boston:
Harvard Business School Press.

Fairhurst G (2005) Reframing the art of framing: Problems and prospects for leadership. Leadership 1:

165–185.
Ford JD, Ford LW and D’Amelio A (2008) Resistance to change: The rest of the story. Academy of

Management Review 33: 362–377.

Ford JD, Ford LW and McNamara RT (2002) Resistance and the background conversations of
change. Journal of Organizational Change Management 15: 105–121.

Friedman V, Lipshitz R and Popper M (2005) The mystification of organizational learning. Journal of

Management Inquiry 14: 19–30.
Grint K (2005a) Leadership: Limits and Possibilities. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
Grint K (2005b) Problems, problems, problems: The social construction of ‘leadership’. Human

Relations 58: 1467–1494.

Hammer M and Champy J (1993) Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution.
London: Nicholas Brealy.

Hardy C and Clegg S (2004) Power and change: A critical reflection. In: Boonstra JJ (ed.) Dynamics of

Organizational Change and Learning. Chichester: John Wiley and Sons.
Harzing AW (2007) Publish or Perish. Available at: http://www.harzing.com/pop.htm (accessed 30th

January 2015).

Hendry C (1996) Understanding and creating whole organizational change through learning theory.
Human Relations 48: 621–641.

Heracleous L and Barrett M (2001) Organizational change as discourse: Communicative actions and

deep structures in the context of information technology implementation. Academy of Management
Journal 44: 755–778.

Hope Hailey V and Balogun J (2002) Devising context sensitive approaches to change: The example of
Glaxo Wellcome. Long Range Planning 35: 153–178.

Hughes M (2011) Do 70 per cent of all organizational change initiatives really fail? Journal of Change
Management 11: 451–464.

Jackson B (2001) Management Gurus and Management Fashions. London: Routledge.

Johnson G, Whittington R and Scholes K (2010) Exploring Strategy: Texts and Cases, 9th ed. Harlow:
Financial Times/Prentice Hall.

Kotter JP (1982) The General Managers. New York: The Free Press.

Kotter JP (1985) Power and Influence: Beyond Final Authority. New York: The Free Press.
Kotter JP (1988) The Leadership Factor. New York: The Free Press.
Kotter JP (1990) A Force for Change: How Leadership Differs from Management. New York: Free Press.
Kotter JP (1995) Leading change: Why transformation efforts fail. Harvard Business Review 73:

259–267.
Kotter JP (1996 and 2012) Leading Change. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
Kotter JP (2002) Preface. In: Kotter JP and Cohen DS (eds) The Heart of Change: Real-life Stories of

How People Change Their Organizations. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, ix–xi.
Kotter JP (2008) A Sense of Urgency. Harvard: Harvard Business School Press.
Kotter JP (2012) Accelerate!: How the most innovative companies capitalize on today’s rapid fire

strategic challenges. Harvard Business Review 90: 43–58.

Hughes 467

http://www.harzing.com/pop.htm

Kotter JP (2014) Accelerate. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press.

Kotter JP and Cohen DS (2002) The Heart of Change: Real-life Stories of How People Change Their
Organizations. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

Kotter JP and Heskett JL (1992) Corporate Culture and Performance. New York: The Free Press.

Kotter J and Rathgeber H (2006) Our Iceberg Is Melting. London: Pan Macmillan.
Kotter JP and Schlesinger LA (1979) Choosing strategies for change. Harvard Business Review 57:

106–114.
Knights D and Willmott H (2014) Management and leadership. In: Knights D and Willmott H

(eds) (2014) Introducing Organizational Behaviour and Management. London: Cengage Learning
EMEA.

Lakomski G (2001) Organizational change, leadership and learning: Culture as cognitive process. The

International Journal of Educational Management 15: 68–77.
Lewin K (1947) Frontiers in group dynamics: Concept, method and reality in social science; social

equilibria and social change. Human Relations 1: 5–41.

McCellan JG (2011) Reconsidering communication and the discursive politics of organizational
change. Journal of Change Management 11: 465–480.

Mintzberg H, Ahlstrand B and Lampel J (2009) Strategy Safari: The Complete Guide Through the

Wilds of Strategic Management, 2nd ed. London: FT Prentice Hall.
Morrison EF and Milliken FJ (2000) Organizational silence: A barrier to change and development in a

pluralistic world. Academy of Management Review 25: 706–725.
Oreg S (2003) Resistance to change: Developing an individual differences measure. Journal of Applied

Psychology 88: 680–693.
Ortenblad A (2007) Senge’s many faces: Problem or opportunity? The Learning Organization 14:

108–122.

O’Toole J (1995) Leading Change: Overcoming the Ideology of Comfort and the Tyranny of Custom. San
Francisco: Jossey Bass Inc.

Parry KW (2011) Leadership and organization theory. In: Bryman A, Collinson D, Grint K, et al.

(eds) The SAGE Handbook of Leadership. London: Sage Publications Ltd.
Pettigrew AM (2012) Context and action in the transformation of the firm: A reprise. Journal of

Management Studies 49: 1304–1328.

Pettigrew AM, Woodman RW and Cameron KS (2001) Studying organizational change and devel-
opment: Challenges for future research. Academy of Management Journal 44: 697–713.

Phillips N and Oswick C (2011) Organizational discourse: Domains, debates, and directions. The
Academy of Management Annals 6: 435–481.

Piderit SK (2000) Rethinking resistance and recognizing ambivalence: A multidimensional
view of attitudes toward an organizational change. Academy of Management Review 25:
783–794.

Podsakoff PM, MacKenzie SB and Moorman RH (1990) Transformational leader behaviors and their
effects on followers’ trust in leader, satisfaction, and organizational citizenship behaviors. The
Leadership Quarterly 1: 107–142.

Rhodes C, Pullen A and Clegg SR (2010) ‘If I should fall from grace. . .’: Stories of change and
organizational ethics. Journal of Business Ethics 91: 535–551.

Rosenzweig P (2007) The Halo Effect: How Managers Let Themselves Be Deceived. London: Pocket
Books.

Salaman G and Asch D (2003) Strategy and Capability: Sustaining Organizational Change. Oxford:
Blackwell Publishing.

Senge P (1990 and 2006) The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organisation.

London: Random House Business Books.
Sorge A and Van Witteloostuijn A (2004) The (non) sense of organizational change: An essai about

universal management hypes, sick consultancy metaphors and healthy organization theories.

Organization Studies 25: 1205–1231.

468 Leadership 12(4)

Spector B (2014) Flawed from the ‘‘Get-Go’’: Lee Iacocca and the origins transformational leadership.

Leadership 10: 361–379.
Stadler C and Hinterhuber HH (2005) Shell, Siemens and Daimler Chrysler: Leading change in

companies with strong values. Long Range Planning 38: 467–484.

Starkey K, Tempest S and Mckinlay A (2004) Introduction. In: Starkey K, Tempest S and Mckinlay A
(eds) (2004) How Organizations Learn: Managing the Search for Knowledge. London: Thomson
Learning.

Sugarman B (2001) A learning-based approach to organizational change: Some results and guidelines.

Organizational Dynamics 30: 62–76.
Thomas R and Hardy C (2011) Reframing resistance to organizational change. Scandinavian Journal of

Management 27: 322–331.

TIME (2014) The 25 most influential business management books. Available at: http://content.time.
com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,2086680,00.html (accessed 13 October 14).

Tourish D (2013) The Dark Side of Transformational Leadership. Hove: Routledge.

Tsoukas H (2005) Afterword: Why language matters in the analysis of organizational change. Journal
of Organizational Change Management 18: 96–104.

Tsoukas H and Chia R (2002) On organizational becoming: Rethinking organizational change.

Organization Science 13: 567–582.
Vaara E (2002) On the discursive construction of success/failure in narratives of post-merger integra-

tion. Organization Studies 23: 211–248.
Van De Ven AH and Poole MS (1995) Explaining development and change in organizations. Academy

of Management Review 20: 510–540.
Wall S (2007) Organizational ethics, change and stakeholder involvement: A survey of physicians.

HEC Forum 19: 227–243.

Weick KE (2000) Emergent change as a universal in organizations. In: Beer M and Nohria N (eds)
Breaking the Code of Change. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

Whittington R (2001) What Is Strategy and Does it Matter? London: Routledge.

Ybema S (2010) Talk of change: Temporal contrasts and collective identities. Organization Studies 31:
481–503.

Author biography

Mark Hughes is Reader in Organizational Change at Brighton Business School and a
member of the Centre for Research on Management and Employment. His doctorate was
focussed upon communicating change in banking. He teaches on postgraduate and profes-
sional programmes and facilitates change related management development within organ-
izations. He is author of Managing Change: A Critical Perspective published by CIPD
Publishing and The Leadership of Organizational Change is due for publication by
Routledge in 2015.

Hughes 469

http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,2086680,00.html

http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,2086680,00.html

Assignment Resources/The Change Agent – The Managers Role in Change

LEADERSHIP

The change agent: the
manager’s role in change
David Stonehouse

ABSTRACT
Within this article the author will examine the manager’s role in the change process. Change
within the NHS is an ever-present reality, whether proposed from within your own department
and identified by your own staff, or forced upon you from outside. However, participating within
the change process can distract managers away from the vital job of managing their service or
department. Therefore, as a manager it is vital to recognise the focus of your role and to then
support a strong leader and expert who will act as ‘change agent’ to see the change through
to a successful conclusion.

Key Words: Change • change agent • leader • manager • management

Accepted for publication: 21 August 2013

As a manager you know that your time is
precious and often not your own. You hit the
ground running every time you walk through
the door, if not already on the job while still
at home and away from the office. Just keeping
your service functioning on a day to day basis
is a 24-hour, seven-days-a-week commitment
and undertaking. When changes and service
developments are proposed—or even forced
upon you—your workload and stress level
increases. As Kanter (2009:181) states,
‘the effort it takes to manage things under
routine circumstances needs to be multiplied
when things are changing.’ This can therefore
cause a shift in focus and divert you away from
your important day-to-day job of managing your
service. As Smith and Langston (1999) state,
managers are the ones who have to cope Mdth
the results and complexities of change. This
is added on to your managerial responsibilities
and actions that you need to do for your
department and team, your staff and service
users within your day.

Role of oversight
As the manager you may be expected to take on
the role of managing and leading the change
within your area. This is a natural expectation
as you are the boss and the one in charge. If
this is the case do you have the necessary skills
and experience in leading the change process?
Has your previous experiences of change been
a positive or negative one? Depending on your
answers to these two sets of questions will
hopefully help you to decide if you are the right
person for the role. Lientz (2013), however,
argues that the manager’s role should be one of
oversight only. Being available to receive updates
on how the change is progressing, to approve
additional work that needs to be done and to
make decisions that only the manager with the
necessary authorify can make (Lientz, 2013).

The change agent
Ideally, the person leading the change should be
an expert in change management. Someone who
is skilled and has experience in the use of change

David Stonehouse
Senior Lecturer
Faculty of Health
and Social Care,
Edge Hill University

Email: stonehod@
edgehill.ac.uk

British Journal of Healthcare Management 2013 Vol 19 No 9 443

LEADERSHIP

their manager you will be their
first port ofeall, and you uyill need

to work through these eoncems and
luorries ivith your stciff

tools and who is confident with the processes
required. This person is often known as the
‘change agent’ (Marquis and Huston, 2009:167).
Your role as manager then is to allow and assist
this person to do the role they are trained to
do. It is this person who does not have day-to-
day managerial responsibilities for your service
as you do, and can therefore focus upon the
change at hand. The change agent will have the
commitment, drive and time to bring the change
to its successful completion (Stonehouse, 2011).

Support a strong leader
Not only do you need to allow the change agent
to do their job, but you must also give them your
open support, so that all the staft can see that
the change agent is acting on your behalf and
with your blessing. Number five of the
‘Ten Commandments for Executing Change’
(Kanter et al, 1992: 383) states that we must
‘Support a strong leader role’. The change agent
needs to be seen to have both your support
and that of more senior management v\dthin
your organisation, preferably from the very
top. This may well include support from senior
clinical colleagues who have a direct impact and
involvement with your department.

Support your staff
As manager you will need to be sensitive to
the needs of your staff who are being affected
by, and having to take part in the change.
Just as your work load is likely to increase when
change is occurring, so does theirs. It is therefore
important to allow staff time to take on new roles
and responsibilities and for them to adapt to new
ways of working. Staff may need extra training
and support to fully embrace the change and get
up to speed with new developments. At the same
time you need to make sure that existing staft
roles are not being negatively aftected through
the change process.

The change may also directly aftect your staff
in areas such as their working hours, a change
in their working environment, a change in the
team of people that they immediately work with,
or the application of new techniques and ways
of working. Staft may find that their hours of
work are changing, or their distance of travel to
work and within their working day is increasing.
As their manager you will be their first port of
call and you will need to work through these
concerns and worries v«th your staft. You may
need to consult with your human resources
department as well as staft representatives
and unions. However, as stated by Aubrey
(2011:140) ‘the more staft are actively involved
in reaching towards an agreed solution, the more
constructive is their response likely to be.’

Resistance to change
Some of your staft may be resistant to the
change taking place and this should be seen as
a natural reaction (Mullins, 2010). As stated by
Marquis and Huston (2009:176) ‘because change
disrupts the homeostasis or balance of the group,
resistance should always be expected.’ As the
manager you need to be aware of this and be
supportive, acting in a positive manner towards
any resistance. As stated by Newton (2009: 257),
‘resistance is not simply a force to overcome; it
indicates a difterent viewpoint that should be
listened to and explored.’ By involving all of your
staft in the process and communicating fully
with them in an honest and transparent way
will foster trust, develop ownership and gain
staft support for the change (Stonehouse, 2012).
It will also strengthen the proposed change,
highlighting any difficulties and flaws early on
which can then be addressed.

To conclude, this article has highlighted the
important role of oversight that a manager of
a department should have when changes are
being made to their area of responsibility.
If the manager becomes too involved in the
change process it may divert them away from
their vital role of managing. This could lead the g
service, staft and service users to receive a less |
than quality service. A change agent, someone I
who is an expert in leading change, should be |
identified and then supported to carry out the 3

444 British Journal of Healthcare Management 2013 Vol 19 No 9

LEADERSHIP

change to a successful conclusion. This
does not remove the manager from the
process and responsibilify, but allows them
to focus on their own role while supporting the
change, their staft and service users throughout
the process.

References
Aubrey C (2011) Leading And Managing In The Early

Years. 2nd edn. Sage, London

Ranter RM (2009) Managing the human side of change.
In: Price D, ed. The Principles And Practice Of Change.
Palgrave MacMillan, Hampshire: 175-83

Kanter RM, Stein BA, JickTD (1992) The Challenge of
Organizational Change: How Companies Experience It
And Leaders Guide It. Free Press, New York, NY

Lientz BP (2013) Project Management: A Problem-based
Approach. Palgrave Macmillan, Hampshire

Marquis BL, Huston CJ (2009) Leadership Roles and
Management Functions in Nursing. 6th edn. Lippincott
Williams & Wilkins, Philadelphia, PA

Mullins LJ (2010) Management And Organisational
Behaviour. 9th edn. Financial Times, Prentice Hall,

KEY POINTS
• During the change process the manager must not lose focus

on the vital role of managing.

• The role of the manager—unless the actual change agent—is

one of oversight, rather than direct involvement.

• Support a strong leader who will act as change agent.

• Resistance to change is natural and should be acted towards

in a positive manner.

• Support your staff who are going through the proposed change.

London

Newton R (2009) The Practice And Theory Of Project
Management: Creating Value Through Change.
Palgrave Macmillan, Hampshire

Smith A, Langston A (1999) Managing Staff in Early
Years Settings. Routledge, London

Stonehouse D (2011) Management and leadership for
support workers. British Journal of Healthcare
Assistants 5(10): 507-10

Stonehouse D (2012) Resistance to change: The human
dimension. British Journal of Healthcare Assistants
6(9): 456-7

internurse.com

British Journal of Healthcare Management 2013 Vol 19 No 9 445

Copyright of British Journal of Healthcare Management is the property of Mark Allen
Publishing Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a
listserv without the copyright holder’s express written permission. However, users may print,
download, or email articles for individual use.