Rune Lines

The Structure and Function of Attitudes toward Organizational Change.

In this article, an attitudinal perspective on organizational members’ reactions to change is proposed and developed. By viewing change as an attitude object in this sense, a richer conceptualization of perceptions of change and reactions to change in terms of emotions, cognitions, and behaviors is achieved. The perspective also frames organizational changes in terms of aspects that are relevant for change recipients because of their relationships with important values that are held by organizational members. To identify classes of beliefs underlying the formation of attitudes toward change, constructs are integrated from theories of job characteristics and organizational justice with the overarching attitude perspective. Research implications of the framework as well as implications for managing change are discussed.

The Production of Trust During Organizational Change

Abstract This paper investigates the relationships between organizational change and trust in management. It is argued that organizational change represents a critical episode for the production and destruction of trust in management. Although trust in management is seen as a semi stable psychological state, changes in organizations make trust issues salient and organizational members attend to and process trust relevant information resulting in a reassessment of their trust in management. The direction and magnitude of change in trust is dependent on a set of change dimensions that reflect trust relevant experiences and information. We distinguish between dimensions related to trust relevant consequences of the change and trust relevant aspects of how the change process is performed. Empirical results indicate that increases in post change emotional stress and the use of referential accounts for justifying change are both negatively related to post change trust in management. The use of ideological accounts and participation were found to be positively related to post change trust in management, so was perceived decision quality. Findings also indicate that the effects of change on trust are negatively moderated by tenure.

Using Power to Install Strategy: The Relationships between Expert Power, Position Power, Influence Tactics and Implementation Success

Abstract This paper explores the relationship between two change agent power bases (amounts of expert power and position power) and success at implementing strategic change. Drawing on research on social power and influence, hypotheses are developed that relate power to influence tactics and implementation success. Based on a review of the strategic management literature, two influence tactics, participation and sensemaking/sensegiving, emerged as relevant for this setting. Implementation success is operationalized as change goal achievement, level of resistance to change and change in organizational commitment. The hypotheses are tested using data drawn from the transformation of a large, divisionalized telecommunications company facing deregulation and global competition. Change agent power was found to predict the use of influence tactics and some direct relationships were found between power and implementation success. Findings also indicate that the relationship between power and implementation success is partly mediated by differential use of influence tactics.

First mover advantages in the discount grocery industry

Purpose – This paper aims to address whether the order of entry yields competitive advantage in the discount grocery industry. More specifically, the paper aims to investigate whether such advantages are based on the effects of entry on consumer perceptions rather than factors such as technological leadership or cost efficiency.Design/methodology/approach – The paper combines perceptual measures of overall preferences and attribute‐level beliefs with objective measures of attribute levels in order to explore whether entry‐based advantages in this industry are due to the relationships between entry and consumer perceptions.Findings – The findings show that early entrants are perceived to be significantly superior to later entrants. This finding also hold true for store attributes documented to be similar across chains.Originality/value – A number of papers have shown relationships between order of entry and indicators of competitive advantage. This is the first study that rules out “economic performance” b...

Authentic Leadership Perception, Trust in the Leader, and Followers’ Emotions in Organizational Change Processes

Despite the increasing interest in emotions at work, there is still a need for more research that focus on the antecedents of emotions in organizational change contexts. Moreover, literature on the subject considers leadership and trust to be fundamental when dealing with change processes. Taking into account both ideas, it is proposed here that authentic leadership (AL) perception can influence followers’ trust and emotions during change. To test these hypotheses, we gathered and analyzed the experience of 102 Spanish human resource managers using structural equation modeling based on partial least squares. Findings show that AL is directly and positively related to followers’ trust in the leader and the experience of positive emotions. Furthermore, we found that trust mediates the relation between AL perception and the experience of negative emotions. Based on these findings, some practical implications are proposed, such as the implementation of training initiatives in order to provide human resource managers with a better understanding of the AL concept and facilitate different actions that could be carried out by them so as to contribute to trust building.

How social accounts and participation during change affect organizational learning

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine how the way change implemented effects organizational learning. More specifically, we study the relationships between the use of social accounts, participation and organizational learning in the context of strategic change. The use of social accounts and participation are often promoted during change, but up to this point, their influences on organizational learning have not been studied.Design/methodology/approach – A multi‐change and multi‐organization study, using a critical incident technique (i.e. informants provide information from a specific change experience), provides the data for testing a set of theory driven hypotheses that link aspects of the change process to learning outcomes.Findings – Findings show that social accounting and participation are positively associated with organizational learning, but that the influence of social accounting is negatively moderated by participation. Social accounts framed as threats to system survival were unre...

The triple role of values in culturally adapted leadership styles

Prior research has established that culturally adapted leadership is associated with positive outcomes for organizations as well as for leaders and followers. However, the adaptation of leadership styles to national culture is under pressure mainly due to the professionalization of leadership grounded in a formal knowledge base that is predominantly derived from research in Anglo-American cultural settings and performed by Anglo-American leadership researchers. In this paper, we argue that the forces leading to a drift away from cultural adaptation are partly counteracted by three mechanisms tying leaders to the cultural context in which they operate. This theoretical perspective allows us to understand better observed leadership in a national setting as equilibrium between cultural forces and institutional forces grounded in culturally biased formal research and leadership education based on this research. To illustrate the added value of this perspective, we develop some specific propositions concerning the three mechanisms and their relative strengths under a variety of cultural conditions.

Information processing in choice‐based conjoint experiments

Purpose – This paper investigates how respondents to conjoint experiments process information and choose among product profiles, and how this varies with their knowledge about the product. Models for estimating conjoint attribute weights are almost exclusively based on principles of compensatory decision making. The paper aims to explore to what extent and in what way these basic principles of conjoint modelling are violated.Design/methodology/approach – Data were obtained from a verbal protocol study where 18 undergraduate students each performed a total of 28 stated choice tasks while “thinking aloud”.Findings – Results show that cognitive operations consistent with compensatory decision rules constitute a majority of the total number of operations performed across tasks and respondents. However, few respondents exhibited a consistent use of compensatory‐type processes throughout their choice sets. Results suggest that individual preferences interact with characteristics of the choice sets to instigate ...

Paternalism as A Predictor of Leadership Behaviors: A Bi-Level Analysis

This study investigated whether cultural values of paternalism measured at the leaders’ individual and societal level relate to leadership behaviors of managers. The findings indicated that paternalistic values are important determinants of leadership behaviors; however, the influence of paternalism on leaders’ behavioral choices was not common across the two levels of analysis. Societal level paternalism was related with structural leadership, while self-referenced ratings of paternalistic values showed a significant linkage with human resource and symbolic leadership.

Organizational Learning As a By-product of Justifications for Change

In this article, we develop and test a model that relates change managements justifications for organizational change to organizational learning. The main argument is as follows: by justifying change in specific ways, change managers instigate thought processes that generate new insights for change recipients (cognitive learning). Also, provision of justifications affects motivation, which in turn is hypothesized to foster learning. The hypotheses are tested using a multi-organization, multichange dataset from a sample of Norwegian work organizations. Empirically, a distinction is made between three types of learning outcomes: generative learning, distributive learning and process learning, i.e. the generation and dissemination of change relevant knowledge. Findings show that four types of justifications are positively related to learning. Some support was found for the hypothesis that the effect of justification is mediated by attitudes towards change and the change process (motivational path).