STRATEGIC LEADERSHIP AND

LEADING CHANGE
CHAPTER AIMS
 Introduce and critically discuss the link between leadership and strategy, hence
strategic leadership

 Explore the differing views of what strategic leadership represents in organisations

 Critically discuss the link between leadership and change

 Introduce a debate around the enactment of strategic leadership for change in

organisations

Watch the following videos at https://study.sagepub.com/studyleadership3e to reinforce

your understanding of the aims of this chapter:

▸ What is Strategic Leadership?

▸ How Can Leaders Manage the Discourse and Bring their Followers on Board as they
Attempt to Implement Change Strategies?

▸ Leaders Leading Change; Leading Change and Continuity

In this chapter, we combine two prominent issues within the leadership

literature. One is how to lead strategically in organisations, or the
development of the theme of strategic leadership, and the second is the
seemingly inherent link leadership has with change and the issue of leading
change in organisations. As we have already explored in Chapter 1, there
appears to be a strong link between concepts of leadership and concepts of
change. In this chapter, we delve a little further into these connections and
also introduce the idea of strategic leadership. We start the chapter by
looking at the issue around the term ‘strategic leadership’, and owing to the
nature of what we discover about strategic leadership, this tends to focus
our attention on issues of change in organisations.

Reflective Question 8.1

What experiences of strategic leadership have you had? (These can be societal, organisational
or individual.) Based on these experiences, what does strategic leadership mean and how
important is it within organisations?

STRATEGIC LEADERSHIP
The scholarly literature on strategic leadership, a term very often heard in organisations,
appears to be split into three differing views of what it is:
  leading the strategy of an organisation (Bolden et al., 2011; DuBrin, 2010; Hambrick,
1989; Leavy and McKiernan, 2009; Rowe, 2001);

 developing and initiating leadership strategically in organisations (Rowe, 2001; Yukl,

2010);

 or shorthand for describing the leadership at the top of an organisation (Cannella and
Monroe, 1997; Denis et al., 2011; Hambrick, 1989; Yukl, 2010).

Further to these views, Denis et al. (2011) highlight Hambrick’s (1989) ideas around
distinguishing strategic leadership from other forms of leadership lower down the
organisation (as we shall see later on, this is a common way of interpreting strategic
leadership). Hambrick (1989: 5–15) suggests four factors:

 Strategic leadership involves a focus on internal and external factors in organisations

and is concerned with positioning the organisation within its context.

 Strategic leadership involves greater degrees of complexity and ambiguity than

leadership at other levels.

 Strategic leadership is multifunctional and integrative in comparison to other, more

specialised roles in organisations.

 Strategic leadership means leading through others.

This view appears typical of the idea that strategic leadership is at the top of the organisation
and that it is significantly different from other forms of leadership elsewhere in the
organisation. Yukl (2010), for example, explicitly relates strategic leadership to executives in
one of his chapters in the textbook Leadership in Organizations. He goes on to highlight the
controversial issue of whether executives in organisations are important for organisational
performance, highlighting the two sides of the debate – those that believe executives have a
high impact on organisational performance (Finkelstein and Hambrick, 1996; Hambrick,
2007; Katz and Kahn, 1978) and those that suggest they have little influence (Hannan and
Freeman, 1984; Meindl et al., 1985; Pfeffer, 1977). Under this label of strategic leadership,
Yukl goes on to describe and discuss executive teams, the constraints on executives, issues of
political power, CEO research and CEO succession. While he does recognise the idea of
strategic leadership as strategically developing leadership across the organisation, there is a
tendency towards using strategic leadership as shorthand for researching and thinking about
leadership at the top of an organisation.

Critical Thinking Box 8.1

These ideas expressed by Hambrick (1989) could be challenged in the modern contemporary
organisation, which can be defined in a more networked and technology-driven way. For
example, in the modern organisation landscape one might challenge the idea that strategic
leadership (being used as shorthand for leadership at the top of an organisation) is involved in
more ambiguity and complexity (or ‘wicked problems’, as discussed in Chapter 1) or that they
are more externally focused than other members of an organisation. This suggests a need to
develop ideas on strategic leadership that are more dispersed (see Chapter 9) or systemic
(discussed later in this chapter).

A similar framework to that of Hambrick picks up on this idea of leadership at differing levels
of an organisation and tries to differentiate strategic leadership again from other forms of
leadership in organisations. Rowe’s (2001) distinction of strategic leadership, visionary
leadership and managerial leadership suggests that:

 strategic leadership is the ability to influence others to voluntarily make decisions that
enhance the long-term viability of the organisation, while at the same time maintaining
its short-term financial viability;

 visionary leadership is future-oriented, concerned with risk-taking; control is

maintained through socialisation and shared norms, values and beliefs;

 managerial leadership involves stability and order, focuses on day-to-day activities

and is short-term oriented.

Reflective Question 8.2

In relation to Rowe’s categories, what instances of strategic, visionary and managerial
leadership have you seen? These may be experiences you’ve had while working for an
organisation, as a customer, in everyday interactions with organisations, or simply observed in
the media.

There appears to be some empirical evidence for Rowe’s model from research conducted
using the theory of transformational and transactional leadership, by Edwards and Gill (2012).
They investigated the perceived effectiveness of transformational and transactional leadership
across hierarchical levels in 38 UK manufacturing organisations. They found that while
transformational leadership was effective at all levels in these organisations, transactional
leadership was shown to be effective only at senior, middle and lower levels. They suggested
a diamond shape to describe the variance in the three effectiveness criteria (leadership
perceived effectiveness, perceived satisfaction with the leadership, and the level to which a
person would put in extra effort in response to a manager’s leadership behaviour). The model
of effectiveness of these behaviours can be seen in Figure 8.1.

As can be seen from Figure 8.1, there are distinct differences at various levels in the
organisation. For example, at senior, middle and lower levels, there is the need for a mix of
transformational and transactional leadership, which may reflect Rowe’s ‘managerial
leadership’, whereas at the top and director levels of the organisation there is the need only for
transformational leadership, which of course has visionary elements and hence may be linked
to Rowe’s ‘visionary leadership’. In addition, it appears that Rowe’s ‘strategic leadership’ is
best described somewhere between the senior and director levels in organisations. This would
suggest that the idea of strategic leadership being at the very top of an organisation is
questionable, and rather reflects the fact that interaction and tensions between senior and
director levels in organisations are the nature of strategic leadership. This model, however,
also leans too much towards a hierarchical explanation of strategic leadership, and in reality it
is probably more dispersed across an organisation and may be similar to ideas around
systemic leadership.
Figure 8.1 Leadership across hierarchical levels

Source: Edwards and Gill (2012). Reproduced by permission of Emerald

Publishing Limited.

In addition, Bolden et al. (2011) seem to take a ‘setting the direction’ perspective on strategic
leadership. Similarly to Rowe (2001), they draw on the work of Achua and Lussier (2010)
and suggest that the purpose of strategic leadership is to turn the vision of an organisation
from the idealistic to the specific via a process of strategy formulation, implementation and
evaluation. Leavy and McKiernan (2009) take a similar view and highlight the following
aspects as being important in strategic leadership:

 context – defining the opportunity;

 conviction – fuelling the performance;

 credibility – keeping the stakeholders on board;

 enhancing differentiation – the difference is culture;

 strengthening corporate identity – competing for a share of hearts and minds;

 generating a trust premium – promoting inclusive capitalism.

Lastly, and most recently, Denis et al. (2011) map out the strategic leadership literature
through two frames of reference, each broken down into two further sub-themes:

1. Who strategic leaders are:

a. strategic leadership as collective cognition (Hambrick, 2007; Hambrick and
Mason, 1984);
 b. strategic leadership as individual inspiration (Zaleznik and Kets de Vries,
1975).
2. What strategic leaders do:
a. strategic leadership as political action (Eisenhardt and Bourgeois, 1988;
Pfeffer, 1992a, 1992b);
b. strategic leadership as social practice (Alvesson and Sveningsson, 2003b;
Knights and Willmott, 1992).

This dichotomy is useful in mapping the terrain within the subject of strategic leaders. A
further look at strategic leadership takes a competency and developmental view (Norzailan et
al., 2016). Norzailan and colleagues suggest that strategic leadership is built on competencies
such as need for achievement, strategic thinking, willingness to lead, change management,
need for cognition, influence and persuasion, business acumen and talent development. They
go further, however, and suggest that these competencies should be developed through the
following mechanisms – deliberate practice, experience density and mentoring (further
reflections on these techniques for leadership development are covered in Chapter 11).

Reflective Question 8.3

Reflect on your own organisational experiences (either working within or observing): what
model(s) of behaviour across organisational levels have you seen? Reflect on examples from
your experience of the workplace.

CRITICISM OF STRATEGIC LEADERSHIP

APPROACHES
As one might conclude from this chapter so far, the strategic leadership approach can be
criticised for being ‘shorthand’ for researching and thinking about leadership at the top of
organisations. A slightly different view is provided by those who investigate ideas such as
systemic leadership (addressed later in this chapter). There are also other criticisms that have
been cited in the literature. For example, Bolden et al. (2011) mention the focus on the
individual at the expense of more distributed or process ideas of leadership (see Chapter 9).
They suggest that strategic leadership is not just the product of the leader but also requires a
process of cooperation and a sense of shared values. Bolden and colleagues (2011) also refer
to the work of Levy et al. (2003) who suggest a political, power and identity-laden process of
strategic management in organisations, which is not represented in the leadership literature.
There is further work, therefore, to be done to define strategic leadership as a topic in and of
itself, as opposed to what seems to be a labelling process of leaders at the top of organisations.
To do this, some investigation, along the lines of Levy et al. (2003), into the identity and
political issues incumbent in the strategic leadership process, would seem merited.

Systemic or ‘Systems’ Leadership

Some scholars offer a differing and more dispersed perspective (see Chapter 9 for further
information regarding distributed and dispersed notions of leadership) on what we might call
strategic leadership, that of systemic (see Beerel, 2009; Collier and Esteban, 2000; Painter-
Morland, 2008) or systems (see Bolden et al., 2019) leadership. Here, the leader role is to
keep organisations relevant in contemporary climates by being alert to ‘new reality’ signals
from external sources (Beerel, 2009). Leadership in these terms is also seen as more ethical
than the top-down leadership approaches highlighted above (Collier and Esteban, 2000;
Painter-Morland, 2008). Indeed, accounts of unethical behaviour at the top of organisations is
relatively prevalent (see Edwards et al., 2019) (further discussions regarding ethical
leadership are captured in Chapter 13). Beerel (2009) goes on to describe systemic leaders as
those who ensure that organisations are always an open system by remaining attentive to
networks, relationships and patterns in the organisational system. These forms of leaders are
also attentive to levels of distress in the system and work with organisational members to
diffuse this distress. This view seems to show a more networked version of what we might
call strategic leadership and fits with views around leadership as a network (Balkundi and
Kilduff, 2006). Although the idea of systemic leadership is intuitively appealing, it does not
seem to acknowledge organisational issues of power and politics (discussed in Chapter 7).
From here, the chapter now looks at issues of change in organisations in more detail.

Reflective Question 8.4

Reflect on a societal, organisational or individual change experience and apply this experience
to the following models and discussion on leading change: what observations can you make
along the way?

Vignette 8.1Extract from Case Study 4 highlighting strategic

leadership and values
For Lucy, values form the bedrock of both leadership and strategy: ‘In Winterbourne View,
adults with learning disabilities were locked up in large groups and despite charging high fees,
the company took the money and failed to deliver personalised support. As the recession
began to bite, we had a discussion with our Board in relation to our values given the financial
squeeze from government and commissioners. We upheld the fact that we are wholly against
the institutional large-scale warehousing of vulnerable people, no matter how financially
attractive this may be. We are clear that this is against our values. But there is a tension
between the amount of money available and the quality of care we want to provide. Despite
this our solution cannot be to pile ‘em high! Instead we have gone down the line of focusing
on developing a service journey that provides highly creative models of individual support,
adopting assistive technology where possible and taking ongoing action to increase
efficiencies and reduce overheads. Our strategy is quite broad based but it has clear principles.
We also know that the bottom line for our survival depends on growth and increasing our
market share.’

Holding onto core values in a tough market requires taking a firm stand, and on the right
occasions it also means balancing this with the tension of the reality of the marketplace. In
these difficult times, being a successful chief executive can be tough; in standing up for the
people you serve and your employees who directly support them, there is always a dialogue
going on with stakeholders. And the arguments and the answers are no longer easy. Whether
it be paymasters or politicians, or indeed families and the people with learning disabilities
themselves, everyone is seeking quality services but the financial purse strings are always
very tight. As Steve put it: ‘Values are at the heart of what we do. We are values driven, but
we are also a product of the market itself. We won’t be standing to present these values if we
are inconsistent with the market.’

1. Use this extract to critically reflect on the strategic leadership literature discussed
above. To what extent do values underpin the theory of strategic leadership? You may
also want to reflect on the theory highlighted in Chapter 13.
2. To what degree do you think other directors at the Brandon Trust share Lucy’s values?
Would other employees share her values too? Explain why or why not.
Using Models of Change to Lead
Further to drawing on leader competence of behaviour, there are those scholars who look to
more generic models of change to research and conceptualise leadership and change in
organisations. For example, Lewin (1951) proposed the, now famous, model of change in
organisations, that of unfreezing, changing and refreezing (Figure 8.2). This is a simple model
but useful to managers and leaders in organisations in: (1) tracking where change efforts are
in the process; and (2) reminding managers and leaders that there are inherent cultural issues
in unfreezing and refreezing processes (an issue discussed in more detail in Chapter 10).

Figure 8.2 The change process

Source: Adapted from Lewin (1951).

In addition to Lewin’s model, there is the ‘coping cycle’ (Kübler-Ross, 1969), which helps
managers and leaders track the potential emotional impact of change on the people involved.
Originally developed to describe the process of bereavement, the model tracks a typical
emotional journey for those coping with loss. This model is now being used quite extensively
in management and leadership development to explain the morale of a person as they shift
through a change process. These emotions include denial, anger, bargaining, depression and
acceptance (see Figure 8.3).

Figure 8.3 The coping cycle

Source: Adapted from Kübler-Ross (1969).

Reflective Question 8.5

In the models described above, what is the role of the leader or leadership? What other
theories of change might be useful in developing ideas of leading change?

LEADING CHANGE
Change and leadership have been closely linked by leadership scholars for some time. As we
saw in Chapter 1, John Kotter (1990) has described the difference between management and
leadership as follows:

 management produces orderly results which keep things working efficiently;

 leadership creates useful change.

Kotter goes on to suggest that both are needed in organisations, avoiding the issue of
denigrating management, also highlighted in Chapter 1. Previous to this work, Kotter and
Schlesinger (1979) suggested the following techniques for change management, which can
also be linked to leadership:

 education and commitment – educating people about the change and hence gaining
commitment to the change;

 participation and involvement – involving people in the change;

 facilitation and support – enabling people through change;

 negotiation and agreement – negotiating with resistors to change;

 manipulation and co-optation – using power and politics to control those involved in
the change process;

 implicit and explicit coercion – using threats and punishments to control change
processes.

Kotter and Schlesinger (1979) do not advocate all these techniques; instead, they are
observations of processes that occur within organisations. From his later work, Kotter (2002)
recommends eight steps to successful change in organisations:

1. Create a sense of urgency and get people ready to move.

2. Develop a guiding team that has trust and emotional commitment.
3. Get the guiding team to create uplifting visions and sets of strategies.
4. Ensure communication of those visions and strategies.
5. Empower people to remove obstacles to those engaging with the vision – give power.
6. Create short-term wins.
7. Keep momentum.
8. Make change stick by nurturing a new culture.

Further to this early work, and as Higgs and Rowland (2011) point out, there are a number of
scholars (e.g. Conner, 1995, 1999; Higgs, 2003; Higgs and Rowland, 2001; Kotter, 1997,
2007) who cite growing evidence of the importance of leaders’ change processes in
organisations. Higgs and Rowland, in their earlier work in 2001, also provide evidence that
change leadership can be developed for impact in business organisational and individual
terms. Higgs and Rowland (2000, 2005, 2011), themselves, also go on to suggest a framework
for leading change. They suggest the following five broad areas of leadership competency for
successful change implementation:

1. Creating a case for change: effectively engaging others in recognising the business
case for change.
 2. Creating structural change: ensuring that the change is based on a depth of
understanding of the issues and supported with a consistent set of tools and processes.
3. Engaging others in the whole change process and building commitment.
4. Implementing and sustaining changes: developing effective plans and ensuring good
monitoring and review practices are developed.
5. Facilitating and developing capability: ensuring that people are challenged to find their
own answers and that they are supported in doing so.

Higgs and Rowland (2005, 2011) also highlight three broad sets of leadership behaviours
linked to change in organisations:

1. Shaping behaviour: the communication and actions of leaders linked to the change,
e.g. ‘making others accountable’, ‘thinking about change’ and ‘using individual
focus’.
2. Framing change: establishing starting points for change, e.g. ‘designing and managing
the journey’ and ‘communicating guiding principles in the organisation’.
3. Creating capacity: creating individual and organisational capabilities and
communication, and making connections.

From their research, Higgs and Rowland (2005, 2011) suggest that shaping types of
behaviours tend to be detrimental to change initiatives, owing to the reliance on ‘heroic’ and
‘individualised’ notions of leadership. They suggest that successful change initiatives are
better served by ‘framing’ and ‘creating capacity’ types of behaviours. Whilst the
competencies, behaviours and frameworks highlighted above are helpful in tracking change,
there are elements that are too simplistic, such as empowering and nurturing a new culture. As
is highlighted in Chapter 1, culture is more complex an issue than it is given credit for by
some of the scholars above, and is reviewed in more detail in Chapter 10. Further to the
competency approach there, some writers encourage a more distributed notion of change
leadership (e.g. Kempster et al., 2014), look at the leadership of planned and emergent change
in organisations (e.g. Van der Voet et al., 2014) and reimagine change leadership as an ethical
process (Burnes and By, 2012; Burnes et al., 2018). On this last point, there has been research
that suggests narcissistic leaders impact adversely on change implementation (Higgs, 2009),
and this manifests itself in leaders not having self-awareness as their own ego leads them into
‘traps’ that seriously damage the success of change initiatives (Higgs and Rowland, 2010).
Higgs and Rowland go on to suggest that these traps are where the leader is conceptualised by
the organisation as a revolutionary, a protector, a hero or a magician, roles that cannot be
fulfilled by the leader and call for shaping-type behaviour that they have highlighted is
detrimental to change initiatives. Narcissism and leadership, ethics and toxic leadership will
be further discussed in Chapter 13.

Change Agents
The idea of change agents came out of the work of Kanter (1984). Kanter developed an idea,
similar to systemic leadership (noted above), that managers and leaders of change in an
organisation do not require formal positions in that organisation, and moreover will exhibit
certain behaviours or attitudes to change. She suggested the following:

 an ability to work independently, without management power, sanction and support;

 being an effective collaborator, able to compete in ways that enhance cooperation;

 the ability to develop high-trust relationships based on high ethical standards;

  self-confidence tempered with humility;

 respect for the process of change as well as the content;

 an ability to work across business functions and units, being ‘multi-faceted and
ambidextrous’;

 a willingness to stake any reward on results and gain satisfaction from success.

Resistance to Change and Failure to Change

An opposite approach to looking at leading change is investigating why people resist change
efforts and why change efforts fail. For example, Conner (1995) describes the main reasons
for resistance to change as:

 lack of trust;

 belief that change is unnecessary;

 belief that change is not feasible;

 economic threats;

 relatively high costs;

 fear of personal failure;

 loss of status and power;

 threat to values and ideals;

 resentment of interference.

This list enables managers to identify certain behavioural and emotional factors in why people
resist change, enabling them to respond in an appropriate manner. The model falls short,
however, in providing information on how managers and leaders can react to this resistance.
Further discussion regarding resistance and framing as a leadership process itself is found in
the next section. In addition to this work on the resistance to change, Kotter (2007) highlights
the main reasons for a failure in change efforts:

 not establishing a great enough sense of urgency;

 not creating a powerful enough guiding coalition;

 lacking a vision;

 under-communicating the vision by a factor of 10;

 not removing obstacles to the new vision;

 not systematically planning for, and creating, short-term wins;

 declaring victory too soon;

 not anchoring changes in the corporation’s culture.

Again, this is helpful to managers and leaders in organisations as it enables them to focus on
what to avoid and what to concentrate on in the leading-change process. However, it is
difficult to see from this work what is meant by ‘failure’ – what does it mean to ‘fail’? This
would need further exploration through case study work.

Critical Thinking Box 8.2

Many of the change models represented in the leading change literature are too linear. This is
to enable some form of sense-making in regard to issues of change in organisations. However,
this linearity also covers over the inherent complexity in change processes in organisations,
and hence more non-linear models of change should be reflected upon in leadership terms.

Leadership as Resistance to Change

A recent development in concepts of leadership and change appears to be emerging that
challenges the mainstream view of just connecting leadership with the drive for change.
Levay (2010) and Zoller and Fairhurst (2007) both developed ideas around investigating the
‘flip side’ and looked at leadership in the resistance to change. Levay (2010), for example,
investigates, through two case studies, the role of charismatic leadership in resisting change.
She concludes that the idea of the ‘charismatic leader’ is as much evident in the resistance to
change in organisations as it is in the drive for change (which is the prevailing discourse in
leadership studies). Zoller and Fairhurst (2007) take a more critical perspective and again
challenge leadership being the driving force of change, but also challenge the notion of
‘agency’ and individualism that is inherently linked to the idea of leading change in
organisations. They do not discuss ‘leading change’ or the ‘leadership of resistance’; instead,
they describe resistance as leadership and suggest an approach whereby resistance leadership
emerges from the dynamic and evolving relationships between resisters, as well as between
resistors and their targets. This all happens, they suggest, in particular social and historical
contexts. The authors then go on to suggest relationships or tensions (the concepts are
mutually dependent and flow into each other) between:

 resistance and reproduction;

 covert and overt resistance;

 individual and collective;

 leader and follower;

 reason and emotion;

 worker and manager;

 discourse and Discourse;

 fixed and fluid meaning.

Ultimately, in taking this view, Zoller and Fairhurst (2007) describe the mobilisation of
collectives and how this is achieved in organisations, which is reminiscent of the distributed
leadership approach discussed in Chapter 9.

Vignette 8.2Extract from Case Study 1 highlighting the use of

change models
Adding to this, in March 2012, Space Engineering Services went through an organisation-
wide restructure, leading to a 20% reduction in overheads. At the same time, the company had
a large (150 engineers) Transfer of Undertaking Protection of Employees (TUPE) out of the
company. The engineering industry is renowned for continuously winning/losing contracts.
With this comes TUPE, where employees who work on that contract are transferred across
with the contract to the new supplier. For leaders, this means fresh talent, and it can also mean
a diverse mix of capabilities, cultures and work standards. There have been instances where
companies have used TUPE to transfer across employees who are not as capable, to ensure
they keep a good talent pool in their organisation. With all this change and movement,
employees were now working in different job roles and for different managers. The
completion of performance reviews was stagnant, and mid-year reviews were put on hold.

There was an underlying rumour from employees that morale was extremely low. Despite the
amount of change, this didn’t seem to be the cause of this change in mood. Instead, the reason
for the unrest was the lack of communication from management and senior leaders.
Employees were on consultation for redundancy, and yet were not being consulted. They were
not receiving updates on time frames, or on changes in the organisation such as new job
positions. When looking into this problem further, it seems that department leaders were not
being told by senior managers about the changes, and so could not update the process or send
out communications.

1. Use the change models described in this chapter to analyse and explain the situation
here.

Managerial and Organic Views of Leading Change:

The Issue of Organisational Becoming
In the leading-change literature, there are two forms of understanding that appear to be
dominant. The first is a ‘managerialist’ view, which suggests that we can control an
organisation in a top-down manner. This is reminiscent of the work of Kotter (1990, 2007). A
second viewpoint is what we might call a distributed or organic view of leading change in
organisations, which appears to be advocated by writers and researchers such as Kanter
(1984) and Zoller and Fairhurst (2007), and signifies a bottom-up or a collective approach.
Neither is necessarily advocated, but both viewpoints should be noted. The issue in either
case, however, is how people might cope with the constant evolution of organisations, as
Tsoukas and Chia highlight: ‘change is inherent in human action, and organizations are sites
of continuously evolving human action’ (2002: 567).

The authors go on to suggest that we should treat change as a normal condition of

organisational life. This is reminiscent of the old adage – ‘change is the only constant’.
Nonetheless, however, this adage is to extraordinarise change, whereas Tsoukas and Chia
wish to make it part of our ordinary management, leadership and organisational lives. As they
suggest, change is inherent in human action and organisations are sites of continuously
evolving human action. Change is part of our everyday lives and organisations are ‘in a state
of perpetual becoming’ (Tsoukas and Chia, 2002: 576). The issue of ‘becoming’ we will pick
up again in Chapter 11, when we discuss the idea of ‘leader becoming’ (Kempster and
Stewart, 2010).

Reflective Question 8.6

Reflect back on the societal, organisational or individual change experience we asked you to
think about at the beginning of this section. Relate the resistance (Zoller and Fairhurst, 2007)
and organisational becoming (Tsoukas and Chia, 2002) views to your own experiences. Does
this notion help make sense of change? If so, why? If not, why not?

Vignette 8.3Extract from Case Study 4 looking at change and

leadership
In the leadership team, they have a phrase in common usage: ‘Change is the norm and a key
component of our thinking and our expectations.’ We see change as a norm, because none of
us live in a static world, we live with ambiguity. ‘As leaders we expect to be continuously
moving forward. It can be exhausting, but it’s game on – part of being in the real world. It’s
much more than just changing the corporate colours, mere appearance. It’s about behaviours.
We are introducing coaching for all our managers. We believe that everyone is a leader and an
innovator, so what does this mean for how we behave? It’s how you do your job that is key.’

1. Read this short paragraph and provide a critical perspective on the messages regarding
change and leadership.

Vignette 8.4Extract from Case Study 1 highlighting the

importance of an understanding of strategic leadership and
change
When starting the knowledge transfer partnership project, I asked to see the business plan to
ensure the HR and project objectives were aligned with the overall strategic direction.
However, this was more difficult than originally thought, for the following reasons:

 Long-term strategic direction is challenging to determine – as the nature of the

industry is extremely reactive, long-term planning can be difficult. The strategic
direction can change in terms of priorities at any given time.

 Directors are rarely ‘seen’ by the wider workforce – although the directors are visible
in head office, they are not seen in the regional offices or out in the field. There have
been comments about asking if the directors care, and even asking what their names
are. There is a gap and a disconnection between senior management and front-line
employees.

1. Based on the chapter you have just read, what recommendations would you make to
top management concerning the issues highlighted above?
2. How might change be affecting workers in this instance and how might leadership
help?

SUMMARY
This chapter has investigated the linked notions of strategic leadership and leading change in
organisations. First, it highlighted the lack of empirical and theoretical consideration
regarding the notion of strategic leadership, and suggested three ways in which it appears to
be shown in the literature. This is either as leading strategy in an organisation, strategically
initiating and modelling leadership in organisations, or as a shorthand way of describing
research into top management in organisations. The chapter goes on to define leadership in
relation to ideas about managerial and visionary leadership, courtesy of Rowe (2001). The
chapter also brought attention to some empirical evidence to support this definition and
distinction. However, it also developed a more critical discussion regarding notions of
strategic leadership, in which it criticises these for not considering the impact of power and
politics in the leadership process within organisations (see Chapter 7). The chapter offered a
discussion of an alternative way of viewing strategic leadership through the notion of
systemic leadership, which appears to be a more distributed notion (see also Chapter 9).
Finally, it looked at leading change through the work of John Kotter, alongside some generic
models of change in organisations. The chapter concludes with some critical interpretations
around leading change through perspectives of leadership and resistance to change, and the
ideas of organisational and leadership becoming.

Additional Reflection Questions

1. What do you envisage when you hear strategic leadership?
2. What do you envisage when you hear strategic leader?
3. How does change manifest itself in organisations?
4. How might we lead or manage change in organisations?
5. What are resistance and resistance leadership?
6. How might we conceptualise ‘organisational becoming’?

CASE STUDY QUESTIONS

1. Read carefully through Case Studies 1 and 5 where there are discussions on an
engineering company and a self-development organisation. To what extent is strategic
leadership evident? How is it similar or different between these case examples? Which
is more effective and why?
2. Read carefully through Case Study 3 where there is a discussion around management
practice. What advice would you give the company on its approach to leading change?
What recommendations would you make based on the information within this chapter?
3. Using the change models discussed in this chapter, reflect on Case Studies 4 and 6 and
identify critical instances and incidents that impact on how change is being led in
these organisations. How might ideas on leading resistance and organisation becoming
be represented in these case examples?
4. From Case Study 7, highlight what level of strategic leadership is evident. To what
extent is this in relation to leading change and what models would be useful in this
scenario and why?

Visit the companion website at https://study.sagepub.com/studyleadership3e for multiple-

choice questions that test your understanding of the concepts and theories introduced in this
chapter, and for links to online videos and interactive questions that engage you in further
reflection on the subject.

FURTHER READING
Sage Articles Accessible through the Online
Resources
Alvesson, M. and Sveningsson, S. (2003b) Managers doing leadership: The extra-ordinization
of the mundane. Human Relations, 56(12): 1435–59.

Burnes, B., Hughes, M. and By, R.T. (2018) Reimagining organisational change
leadership. Leadership, 14(2): 141–58.
Higgs, M. and Rowland, D. (2011) What does it take to implement change successfully? A
study of the behaviors of successful change leaders. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science,
47: 309–35.

Zoller, H.M. and Fairhurst, G.T. (2007) Resistance leadership: The overlooked potential in
critical organization and leadership studies. Human Relations, 60(9): 1331–60.

Other Key Reading on Strategic Leadership and

Change
Beerel, A. (2009) Leadership and Change Management. London: Sage.

Bolden, R., Gulati, A. and Edwards, G. (2019) Mobilizing change in public services: Insights
from a systems leadership development intervention. International Journal of Public
Administration, 43(1): 26–36.

Denis, J., Kisfalvi, V., Langley, A. and Rouleau, L. (2011) Perspectives on strategic
leadership. In A. Bryman, D. Collinson, K. Grint, B. Jackson and M. Uhl-Bien (eds) The
SAGE Handbook of Leadership. London: Sage, pp. 71–85.

Kempster, S., Higgs, M. and Wuerz, T. (2014) Pilots for change: Exploring organisational
change through distributed leadership. Leadership & Organization Development Journal,
35(2): 152–67.

Levay, C. (2010) Charismatic leadership in resistance to change. Leadership Quarterly, 21:

127–43.

Norzailan, Z., Othman, R.B. and Ishizaki, H. (2016) Strategic leadership competencies: What
it is and how to develop it. Industrial and Commercial Training, 48(8): 394–9.