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Regina Eisenbach, Kathleen Watson and Rajnandini Pillai: College of Business Administration, California State University, San Marcos, USA
"What it takes to be a leader in the 1990s and beyond is really handling change (Roberto Goizueta, late Chairman and CEO of the Coca-Cola Company)."
Change oriented models of leadership have sustained the interest of managers and scholars alike because of their promise of extraordinary individual and organizational outcomes. As we move closer to the new millennium, models of outstanding leadership such as transformational, charismatic, and visionary leadership, which focus on organizational transformation, are likely to become even more important to organizations because of the breathtaking changes foreseen in the business and political environment. These include workforces with a greater degree of demographic diversity, technological change, and increased international competition which will place new demands on the leaders of tomorrow (House, 1995). The importance of leadership to the change management process is underscored by the fact that change, by definition, requires creating a new system and then institutionalizing the new approaches (Kotter, 1995).
While change management depends on leadership to be enacted, to date there has been little integration of these two bodies of literature. The key role leaders play in the change process has been noted by change theorists, yet there is no conclusive research that focuses on this relationship between leadership and change (Almaraz, 1994). Recent theoretical research has attempted to integrate change as a contextual variable influencing transformational leadership (Pawar and Eastman, 1997). Such research focuses on determining when organizations will be more receptive to transformational leadership and the match between receptivity level and the actual transformational leadership process. However, Pawar and Eastman (1997) do not address the issue of the capabilities of transformational leaders required to carry out the pertinent change process.
Thus, the purpose of this article is to draw parallels between the change literature and the leadership literature; specifically, the transformational leadership literature that is primarily concerned with the capabilities required to enact change successfully. First, we will describe the latest literature relating to change management. Next, we will review theories of change oriented leadership. Finally, we will integrate these literatures and link them to the articles that comprise this special issue.
Types of change: incremental, radical, continuous
Tushman and Romanelli's...