Jennifer L. Sparr

The Critical Role of Moderators in Leader Sensegiving: A Literature Review

Abstract Change initiatives entail a high risk of failure if leaders cannot convey the underlying sense to employees. However, the effectiveness of leader sensegiving depends on external as well as internal factors. Moderators of the leader sensegiving process represent a critical but underexplored factor of sensegiving during organizational change. We derive a theoretical model of contextual factors by reviewing existing sensegiving literature. Drawing on information-processing theory, we highlight the influence of crucial moderators at the organizational and individual levels during two phases of the sensegiving process: in the first phase, moderators affect how leaders set up sensegiving; in the second phase, moderators affect how employees engage in sensemaking. The moderators in the first phase are (a) schema consistency at the organizational level and (b) legitimate power at the individual level. During the second phase, the moderating effect of (c) schema consistency at the organizational level and (d) employee emotions at the individual level is explored. We contribute to literature by demonstrating how moderators affect sensegiving during organizational change at two phases of the process and providing a multi-level perspective by distinguishing between moderators at the organizational and individual levels.

Leader behaviors and innovation: Employees’ job satisfaction, boundary spanning, and leader justice

Leadership has been recognized as a critical success factor for innovation. However, earlier research did not sufficiently account for the complexity, the unpredictability and the over time changing requirements during innovation processes, leading to heterogeneous findings. Based on the recently introduced ambidexterity theory of leadership for innovation, we examined the differential effects of opening and closing leader behavior on three employee-related factors – job satisfaction, boundary spanning behavior, and perceptions of leader justice. Furthermore, we investigated the influence of these success factors on employees’ idea generation and idea implementation, incorporating a temporal perspective. The results of our intraindividual weekly diary study in a sample of 46 participants over 5 weeks show that opening leader behavior is positively related to employees’ job satisfaction and leader justice perceptions while closing leader behavior relates positively to employees’ boundary spanning behavior ...