Although the construct of leader humility has received increased attention in organizational scholarship, there are large gaps in the empirical studies of leader humility and employee creativity. In this study, we find that leader humility substantially contributes to organizational effectiveness in both normal and crisis situations. Building on social information processing theory and the process model of emotion regulation, we test a model linking leader humility to employee creativity based on 451 member–leader dyads of 129 emergency medical task forces involved in the Wenchuan earthquake. We find that leader humility is positively related to employees’ perspective taking and creativity. We also find that employees’ cognitive reappraisal moderates the relationship between leader humility and employees’ perspective taking, and employees’ perspective taking mediates the interactive effect of leader humility and employees’ cognitive reappraisal on creativity. We also discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our findings.
This study examined the impact of two types of psychological contract breach (organizational policies and social atmosphere breach) on resistance to change and engagement in the anticipatory phase of change and assessed whether supervisory informational justice mitigated the negative effects of breach. Employees from three departments of a Dutch financial institution (n = 141) who were in the first phase of a change initiative participated in the study. Results showed that social atmosphere breach was positively related to affective resistance to change and negatively related to engagement, while organizational policies breach was positively related to cognitive resistance to change. These findings point to the importance of distinguishing between different types of psychological contract breach. In addition, it was found that supervisory informational justice mitigated the adverse effect of social atmosphere breach on cognitive resistance to change, pointing to the important role of managers in the first phase of change.
This research examines whether relationships between change resistance and its consequences and antecedents strengthen or weaken over time during an extended duration of organizational change. In 40 health care clinics undergoing a 3-year period of significant organizational changes, we found that resistance to change had increasingly negative relationships over time with two important consequences: employees’ commitment to the organization and perceptions of organizational effectiveness. That these relationships became stronger (rather than weaker) over time suggests festering effects of resistance to change. We also found that over time supportive leadership was increasingly impactful in reducing change resistance. A major implication of this research for practice is that it is important for change agents to address employee resistance because, left unchecked, it can fester and increasingly inflict harm. Also, engaging in supportive leader behaviors can be particularly useful in ameliorating resistance to change at later stages of a change initiative.
Organizational demands on productivity, innovations, and safety may seem paradoxical. How can the organization support employees to cope with such paradox? Based on organizational climate measures of safety, occupational health, innovativeness, and production effectiveness, we explored if a second-order organizational climate could be identified, that was associated with staff safety, health, innovations and team effectiveness, and if such a climate could be represented by an organizational climate of perceived organizational support (POS). Questionnaire data were collected from 137 workgroups in four Swedish companies in construction and mining. Analyses (structural equation modeling) were done at the workgroup level and a split sample technique used to investigate relations between climates and outcomes. A general second-order organizational climate was identified. Also, an organizational climate constructed by items selected to represent POS, was associated with team effectiveness, innovations, and safety. A POS-climate may facilitate employees’ coping with paradoxes, and provide a heuristic for managers in decision making.
Problems referred to as wicked, messy, complex, and meta-level, by their very nature, require involving multiple and diverse organizations. Issues such as climate change, poverty, sustainable agriculture, and health care involve many hundreds of organizations at a national level; at a global level this easily increases to many thousands. Emerging their collective power into an effective force represents an enormous organizing challenge. Drawing from complexity and global networking knowledge, and building on the concept of "innovation system," this article develops the concept of "societal change system" as a framework to support addressing the organizing challenge. This arose through analysis of global change initiatives aiming to integrate sustainability concerns into the production of electricity, which included a meeting of leaders of such change initiatives. The activities produced recommendations for greatly enhancing change efforts with pragmatic steps to develop the societal change system in which they are embedded.
Personality assessment has a long history of application in the workplace. While the field of organization development has historically focused on developmental aspects of personality tools, other disciplines such as industrial-organizational psychology have emphasized its psychometric properties. The importance of data-driven insights for talent management (e.g., the identification of high potentials, succession planning, coaching), however, is placing increasing pressure on all types of applied behavioral scientists to better understand the stability of personality tools for decision-making purposes. The current study presents research conducted with 207 senior leaders in a global consumer products organization on the use of personality assessment data over time and across two different conditions: development only and development to decision making. Results using three different tools (based on the Hogan Assessment Suite) indicate that core personality and personality derailers are generally not affected by the purpose of the assessment, though derailers do tend to moderate over time. The manifestation of values, motives, and preferences were found to change across administrations. Implications for organizational development and talent management applications are discussed.
The study examined the mediating role of individual’s self-regulatory processes of deep cognitive strategies (meaningful learning rather than a reproduction of knowledge) and negative affect in the relationship between dispositional and team goal orientations and team member’s performance of complex tasks. Thirty-three research and development teams and their managers participated. Results demonstrated that dispositional performance orientation (focus on success) increased negative affect, which, in turn, lowered employee job performance. Whereas team learning orientation (focus on learning and improvement) decreased negative affect, which, in turn, was associated with higher employee job performance. Additionally, both dispositional and team learning orientations were positively and significantly associated with individuals’ use of deep cognitive strategies. However, deep cognitive strategies were not associated with employee performance. Findings suggest that managers of teams performing complex tasks may want to consider ways to create and sustain a high learning orientation in order to reduce negative affect and increase use of deep cognitive strategies within their teams.
While the pace and complexity of change is increasing, the rate of failed change attempts continues to be unacceptably high. Leaders at every level play a central role in change, yet few receive formal training on how to lead change and to date, a validated assessment to provide feedback on their performance has been lacking. The current study is intended to help close this gap. This article describes an effort to develop and validate an instrument to measure change leadership behaviors, the Change Leader Behavior Inventory.
This research examines the link between intrinsic motivation and creativity using inductive theory building to explore the intrinsic motivation of creative people. Data were gathered at six case study sites in France using semidirective interviews to explore how creative people experience their creativity and motivation in various contexts. Data analysis suggested a 2 x 2 model of the types of intrinsic motivation for creativity composed of two creativity dimensions based on the relationship to the setting (independent vs. dependent) and the focus of the creative behavior (egocentric vs. other-centered). The model suggests promising avenues for further research, and the development of theory about the complex relationships between intrinsic motivation and creativity. Furthermore, the model suggests possible insights into ways to encourage and support intrinsic motivation, and hence creativity, in organizations.
The importance of diagnostic assessments during the design, implementation, and evaluation of change management processes is increasingly emphasized in the change management literature, and in practice. However, evidence-based change management is challenged by the rather fragmented state of research on employees’ reactions to change. Hence, this study proposes a theory-based framework for the design of change surveys that includes and links concrete classes of change management variables with specific employee reactions to change. The framework is applied and tested in the context of organizational changes following an international merger project (N = 240). Structural equation modeling revealed a good fit of the framework to empirical data and demonstrated the usefulness for the systematic and comprehensive identification of relationships between change management variables and employees’ specific reactions to the change process. The results underscore the potential of the framework to guide researchers and practitioners alike in analyzing and optimizing organizational change processes.
The present study explores how aspects of Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory can be applied to coaching, focusing on corporate dysfunction. Conceptually, the article starts from Lacan’s distinction between the registers of the Imaginary and the Symbolic, as outlined in his L-schema, and the concept of transference. It is argued that by focusing on symbolic transference, and by exploring signifiers that insistently return in a patient’s speech, Lacanian-oriented coaching can bring clients to the point of recognizing the unconscious determinants of their daily interactions and behavior, and make a step toward dealing differently with their desire, such that it no longer has a disrupting effect on their performance. Principles for individual coaching are outlined and two case studies are presented. The case discussions reveal that desire and conflict can be clarified by mapping and addressing core signifiers of the client’s speech.
We examine why and when proactive personality is beneficial for innovative behavior at work. Based on a survey among 166 employees working in 35 departments of a large municipality in the Netherlands we show that an increase in task conflicts explains the positive relation between a proactive personality and innovative employee behavior. This process is moderated by job autonomy in such a way that the relationship between proactive personality and task conflict is particularly strong under low compared with high autonomy. The present research contributes to the discussion on the potential benefits of task conflict for change processes and highlights the importance of examining the interplay between personality and work context for understanding innovation practices.
This study is based on intentional change theory and supports cognitive-emotion and social complexity perspectives regarding positive and negative affect. We examine how a coaching experience guided by a specific theoretical approach within a leadership development program at a European business school influences cognitive-emotional processing of MBA students with regard to their levels of personal vision comprehensiveness and strength, goal-directed energy, and resilience. A within-subjects pre–post Non-Equivalent Dependent Variables design with a total of 76 students was conducted using survey methods. A rigorous analysis sheds light on how intentional change theory–based coaching enhances individual self-development processes. Participants stated higher levels of personal vision, goal-directed energy, and resilience postcoaching. A series of moderator effects were identified regarding the quality of the coaching connection (i.e., overall emotional saliency) and the general self-efficacy of participants. Implications concerning how coaching processes may be enriched through the establishment of high-quality coaching connections are discussed.
This study uses regulatory focus theory to take a holistic perspective on employee coaching. The contrasting effects of facilitative versus pressure-based coaching on changes in team effectiveness were examined over a 54-month period of time. Results of growth curve analysis on a sample of 714 managers and their teams indicated that facilitative and pressure-based coaching had opposing direct and indirect effects on long-term changes in team performance, with team commitment playing a critical role in this process. Specifically, facilitative coaching positively influenced team commitment and, in turn, team effectiveness. In contrast, pressure-based coaching hindered team functioning by negatively influencing team commitment through heightened levels of tension within the team. Limitations and areas for future research are discussed.
The author explores effects of functional diversity on group creativity under varying group longevity. When group members have worked together for a long time in functionally diverse groups, they are expected to show stronger information processing and weaker categorization processing. Knowledge sharing and group cohesion are examined as mediating mechanisms through which functional diversity enhances group creativity as group longevity increases. Analysis of a sample of 155 workgroups demonstrates that group longevity positively moderates the relationship between functional diversity and group creativity through moderating the effects of functional diversity on two mechanisms of knowledge sharing and group cohesion.
Organizational theatre interventions have become established as a pervasive and influential arts-based method of dialogic organizational development, yet their effects are controversial and contested. While they have been praised for their potential as a tool of empowerment, they have also been criticized for their possible use as a more or less insidious form of control. This article explores and evaluates such claims and counterclaims, supported by an in-depth longitudinal quasi-experimental field study of customer service staff in a regional Australian bank. The results of the field study not only indicate that organizational theatre interventions may increase both empowerment and control but also suggest that the outcomes may be more lightweight than supporters have hoped and critics have feared. The article outlines the implications of these findings for future research and practice.
This article applies the concept of identity ambiguity to the individual level of analysis, suggesting that identity ambiguity will likely follow certain scenarios of change in which an essential target of one’s identification is abruptly lost. This temporary absence of identification has thus far been understudied, and it is proposed that individuals perceive it as a negative experience, in which opportunities for reidentification are uncertain and unclear. It is further proposed that they will be driven to overcome this identity ambiguity through one of four distinct strategies. The choice of which strategy to adopt is moreover said to be influenced by the interaction between opposing factors: the strength of one’s organizational identification prior to the change and the degree to which the new setting is perceived as prestigious, distinct, and with values that are congruent to one’s personal values. Finally, a discussion of theoretical and managerial implications is provided.
Why do so many social innovations fail to have a broad impact? Successful social entrepreneurs and nonprofit organizations often "scale out" innovative solutions to local problems in order to affect more communities or numbers of individuals. When faced with institutional barriers, they are motivated to "scale up" their efforts to challenge the broader institutional rules that created the problem. In doing so, they must reorient their own and their organizations’ strategies, becoming institutional entrepreneurs in the process. This article proposes a contextual model of pathways for system change consisting of five different configurations of key variables and informed by qualitative interview data from selected nonprofit organizations. The authors argue that the journey from social to institutional entrepreneurship takes different configurations depending on the initial conditions of the innovative initiatives. Despite an expressed desire to engage in system change, efforts are often handicapped by the variables encountered during implementation.
The development and enactment of leadership involves paradoxical tensions. Cultural and organizational forces increasingly reflect an awareness of paradox. Leadership is correspondingly understood as having paradoxical aspects. I address the relationship between leadership and paradox and explore the utility of the competing values framework as a means to develop leadership skill from a paradox perspective. The competing values framework can support the development of a more paradoxical view of leadership that encourages greater leader behavioral and cognitive complexity as well as increased leader flexibility. Furthermore, the capacities of awareness, exploration, and interpretation are identified as possible resources to advance paradoxical conceptualizations of leadership.
Organizations are rife with tensions—flexibility versus control, exploration versus exploitation, autocracy versus democracy, social versus financial, global versus local. Researchers have long responded using contingency theory, asking "Under what conditions should managers emphasize either A or B?" Yet increasingly studies apply a paradox perspective, shifting the question to "How can we engage both A and B simultaneously?" Despite accumulating exemplars, commonalities across paradox studies remain unclear, and ties unifying this research community weak. To energize further uses of a paradox perspective, we build from past reviews to explicate its role as a metatheory. Contrasting this lens to contingency theory, we illustrate its metatheoretical nature. We then dive deeper to sharpen the focus and widen the scope of a paradox perspective. Identifying core elements viewed from a paradox perspective—underlying assumptions, central concepts, nature of interrelationships and boundary conditions—offers a guide, informing the practice of paradox research. Next, we illustrate diverse uses of this lens. We conclude by exploring implications and next steps, stressing the rising need for paradox research, as complexity, change, and ambiguity intensify demands for both/and approaches in theory and practice.
This study is the first formal, quantitative investigation of the effectiveness of Immunity-to-Change coaching for leadership development. Forty-five supervisors who engaged in Immunity-to-Change coaching were compared with a comparison group of 25 supervisors from the same company to determine whether coached participants reported more progress on their leadership development goals than did comparisons. Coached participants indicated their likelihood of using Immunity-to-Change tools to pursue further goals and identified the coaching components they found most useful. Extensive analyses revealed that the coached group reported significantly more progress toward their leadership development goals than their comparison group counterparts. Accordingly, a vast majority of coached participants indicated intent to use Immunity-to-Change coaching tools again in the future, especially the four-column map. These findings suggest that Immunity-to-Change coaching may be an effective intervention for corporate employees seeking to make progress on their leadership development goals.
The life and contribution of Charlie Seashore are at the core of the organization development (OD) discipline and practice. Charlie embodied characteristics of the consummate OD scholar-practitioner, and he serves as a role model that many OD practitioners and budding professionals attempt to emulate. This article shares the story of his life, describing family connections to Kurt Lewin, his childhood and formative life experiences, his teaching and mentoring OD professionals, and his intellectual contributions to the field of OD. The article suggests that Charlie Seashore has been a key link in the trajectory of OD from its formative beginnings at NTL (National Training Laboratories) Institute to its present role in our society and throughout the world.
This empirical article focuses on practices by CEOs of global organizations to manage paradox. Earlier research has pointed to how difficult it is to solve paradoxes and has suggested overarching approaches for their resolution. The purpose with this article is to further the understanding of how paradox handling works in practice. The article builds on interviews with CEOs of 20 global organizations selected out of their ability to create both economic and social value. The article aims to contribute to the literature by (a) showing how CEOs relate to paradoxes and (b) strategies for solving the paradoxes. Suggestions are made for how this develops the current literature in the area, and what further research may look into. The article informs industrial practice by showing examples of managerial solutions to paradoxes and by highlighting paradox resolution as a source of competitive advantage.
We explore how Singapore Airlines has become one of the highest performing and respected airlines in the world through its ability to transcend organizational paradoxes. We address four paradoxes: cost-effective service excellence, simultaneous decentralized and centralized innovation, being simultaneously a follower and a leader in service development, and accomplishing standardization as well as personalization in customer interactions. We employ empirical data from multiyear case research on Singapore Airlines to outline how the organization simultaneously balances dual capabilities (seen as poles of the paradoxes) that most other organizations would consider distinct or incompatible. We conclude that the ability to balance opposing poles and in this way transcend paradoxes is what affords Singapore Airlines its sustainable competitive advantage and that this ability is becoming more and more relevant to organizational effectiveness as competition intensifies.
The employee–employer relationship is said to be affected by extensive workplace transitions, and yet little is known about how employees make sense of these changes while deciding on their responses to them. Our study investigated two factors, social comparison and the nature of the exchanges, as moderators of the effects of psychological contract (i.e., employee beliefs regarding the terms of exchange between the employee and the organization) and psychological contract fulfillment (i.e., employee beliefs regarding the extent to which the employer is fulfilling these terms of exchange) on employee performance. Analysis of data before and after organizational change showed that unfavorable social comparison is associated with lower employee performance for transactional, relational, and balanced psychological contracts. Employees’ perception of the social nature of exchange was associated with lower performance in response to relational and balanced psychological contract fulfillments.
In 1956, Akhtar Khan began a project in rural East Pakistan that inspired new approaches to community and organization development. A quarter century later, he replicated the developmental process in impoverished neighborhoods of Karachi. The techniques of shared decision making, building cooperatives, training the master trainers, and encouraging self-sufficiency were pivotal to the approach. The effect transformed the two communities and helped inspire microfinance. Using the lens of intentional change theory in a post hoc analysis, we explain why this approach worked. The article allows us to honor a social innovator while affirming our commitment to practices like participation to create and reinforce a shared vision, creating new resonant relationships, building a multilevel intervention with distributed leadership, inclusiveness in training for empowerment, and continuous attention to cycling through the process iteratively. These are offered as insights in the design of organization and community development efforts.
This article explores a distinctive coaching approach designed to help leaders learn about how they think in action, and then apply that learning to improve their performance and leadership. The particular focus of this approach is on the way that leaders think about, or frame key situations—and specifically how this thinking can powerfully shape their acting and results. I call this double-loop coaching (DLC), drawing on the distinction coined by Chris Argyris between single- and double-loop learning. The essence of DLC is the idea that the way leaders act and the results they create begin with the way they think. With actual coaching cases that apply this approach, this article suggests ways leaders can better connect their thinking and their action to increase their chances of success, especially when important matters are at stake among parties with different perspectives.
A parallel organization improves problem solving and decision making by liberating creative, rigorous inquiry blocked or unavailable in the formal organization. This article reports a study of a parallel organization unusual for its structure, size, and duration. Its outputs significantly affected a wide range of organizational policies in manufacturing, strategic planning, and human resources. Its structure, staffing, and process improved organizational practices, relationships, learning, and communication. The case provides a valuable extension and contrast to other cases and enlightens views of theory and practice.
This collaborative inquiry reports the impact of mindfulness meditation practice in a hospital’s palliative care setting. Designed as action research, the collaborative program invited participants to investigate and deepen the benefits of the practice for themselves with others over the course of 12 weeks. Participants expressed surprise by how liberating it was to learn to notice and drop their self-centered thinking. Theorizing these findings by bringing perspectives from pragmatism and psychological perspectives on Buddhism, an experience-near understanding of the self also emerged. The article includes reflection on how the combination of action research and mindfulness is practical and useful to participants in the context of caregiving as it reports many benefits to participants. The article ends with a definition of self as "encompassing all that which can be responded to," which also contributes a practical and useful direction for reconceptualizing the self as a more collaborative self.
An important element in discussions of organizational ethicality is the diagnosis of organizational culture. Kaptein developed the Corporate Ethical Virtues Model Scale (CEVMS) to facilitate this task. We build on this work by developing a short form of Kaptein’s scale, the CEVMS–Short Form (CEVMS-SF). In a series of studies, using three independent samples, we (a) developed the CEVMS-SF (Study 1, n = 274), (b) tested the psychometric properties of the short form (Study 2, n = 417), and (c) found validity evidence (Study 3, n = 204) for the measure. The primary implication of this research is that the CEVMS-SF can be combined with existing scales allowing diagnosticians to conduct more comprehensive diagnoses by including ethical culture. We also explain how the CEVMS-SF is applicable in the action research process when conducting a diagnosis or evaluating change interventions during the transformation of an unethical organizational culture to an ethical one.
The purpose of this article is to extend the organizational development diagnostics repertoire by advancing an approach that surfaces organizational identity beliefs through the elicitation of complex, multimodal metaphors by organizational members. We illustrate the use of such "Type IV" metaphors in a postmerger context, in which individuals sought to make sense of the implications of the merger process for the identity of their organization. This approach contributes to both constructive and discursive new organizational development approaches; and offers a multimodal way of researching organizational identity that goes beyond the dominant, mainly textual modality.
This article develops theory to address a dilemma experienced as "resistance" to a conflict transformation process among Jewish and Arab nursing students in Israel. This dilemma is analyzed from two theoretical perspectives: (a) the "postcolonial approach," which applies ideas of critical conflict theory and group dynamics to generate change in intergroup relationships, and (b) the "negotiating reality approach," which applies ideas of social constructionism and action science to enable participants to jointly shape a space in which they feel free to express their complex individual and group identities. We propose that the postcolonial approach offers a powerful interpretive framework but would likely engender greater resistance. We present a negotiating reality intervention model designed to offer a way out of the dilemma and increase cooperation in critical reflection, learning, and change. The discussion compares the implications of the two approaches, setting forth propositions for guiding further research and practice.
This study examines the curvilinear CEO tenure–R&D investment relationship and the moderating influence of board capital on this relationship, thus making two major contributions. First, the finding of an inverted-U CEO tenure–R&D investment relationship enriches our understanding of how the CEO life cycle affects corporate investment decisions, particularly R&D. Second, the evidence of positive moderating effects of board human and social capital suggests that boards affect managerial choices through their human and social capital, thereby providing insight into how boards influence CEOs’ decision-making capabilities and, consequently, their R&D investment decisions. One important implication is that to encourage CEOs to invest in R&D, shareholders in the electronics industry and firms competing in innovation through R&D spending may consider appointing more directors with greater human and social capital to the Board because they will provide CEOs with ongoing advice and essential resources for R&D. The implications for strategy consultants are also discussed.
In this article, we use the anthropologist Gregory Bateson’s conceptualization of framing and his theory of interpersonal communication process to explore how relational realities develop in designed conversational processes. In recent years, there has been a blossoming of interest in large group methods as a way of achieving whole-system change. Many of these techniques seek to construct alternative spaces or dialogic "containers" in which the usual routines and authority structures are suspended; as such, they require that practitioners give particular attention to issues of framing. By analyzing examples drawn from two World Café events, we attempt to clarify theoretical principles underlying dialogic approaches to organizational change. We also consider the practical implications inherent in Bateson’s ideas, particularly the possibilities they offer for enhancing the facilitator’s awareness of the context in which he or she is a participating member.
Employee involvement is a popular approach to improve organization performance. It moves decision making downward in the organization so employees can make decisions and solve problems as quickly and close to their source as possible. One of the most developed and referenced approaches to involvement is Edward E. Lawler’s model of "high-involvement work processes" (HIWP). It describes organizational attributes that contribute to employee involvement and explains how they work together to increase organization performance. Although extensive attention has been paid to Lawler’s model in the literature, empirical tests of the model are still in a preliminary stage. Our study describes and tests a mechanism through which HIWP increases organization performance, organizational citizenship behavior. We find that organizational citizenship behavior mediates the relationship between HIWP and organization performance in a sample of 143 consumer-products organization units. Results also confirm that the HIWP attributes work together synergistically to create opportunities for employee involvement.
Establishing change readiness may be one of the key factors in determining whether a given change intervention will ultimately be successful or not. Unfortunately, there is a good deal of conceptual confusion in the literature surrounding the term, illustrated by the sheer number of terms that are used to capture the construct (e.g., openness, receptivity, commitment, attitudes toward change) and the varying theoretical foundations that have been proposed. To arrive at a more conceptually sound notion of change readiness, the current article advocates moving beyond state-based conceptualizations toward a process model of change readiness. This process model has the advantage of serving as a framework against which to synthesize extant theorizing on change readiness, incorporating the influences of context and environment over time on an individual’s cognitive and affective evaluations and subsequent positive and proactive responses to change, and capturing readiness as a recursive and multidimensional process.
Despite the popularity of organizational change management, the question arises whether its prescriptions are based on solid and convergent evidence. To answer this question, a systematic review was conducted of organizational change management research published in scholarly journals during the past 30 years. The databases ABI/INFORM, Business Source Premier, ERIC, and PsycINFO were searched for relevant studies. A total of 563 studies met the review’s criteria. Assessment shows a predominance of one-shot studies with a low internal validity. Replication studies are rare. Findings suggest that scholars and practitioners should be sceptical regarding the body of research results in the field of organizational change management published to date. Prescriptions are offered for researchers, editors, and educators to develop a more solid body of evidence on organizational change management.
Leaders across companies initiate and implement change and thus are crucial for successful organizations. This study takes a competency perspective on leaders and investigates the competencies leaders show to facilitate effective change. The article explores the content of the construct of leaders’ change competency and examines its antecedents and effects. We conducted a case study in a German tourism company undergoing a major change process. The study identified (a) distinct content facets regarding the construct of leaders’ change competency along its two dimensions of leaders’ readiness for change and leaders’ change ability; (b) the construct’s antecedents, specifically contextual factors, leaders’ competency potentials, and attitudes toward change; and (c) beneficial effects of leaders’ change competency. The study ends with implications for research and leadership practice as well as suggestions for future studies on leaders’ change competency.
Peer coaching has become a recognized tool for career learning in response to the demands of the contemporary business environment. Researchers and practitioners alike have defined it as a dyadic relationship with the potential to foster significant learning for one or both parties. However, the potential of peer coaching to facilitate personal and professional development may be undermined if critical risk factors are not understood and addressed. Exploring the risk factors associated with peer coaching is the explicit focus of this conceptual article. We adopt an ecological lens to deepen understanding of the process of peer coaching, and to show how the interdependence among elements at different levels of analysis influences this relational exchange. This multilevel perspective highlights the dynamic nature of influences which differ in visibility, severity, and levels of the social fabric. We also draw on relational theory in careers, research on interpersonal relationships, and dysfunctional mentoring to predict ways in which effective peer coaching can be undermined. Finally, we propose intervention strategies for minimizing risk factors associated with peer coaching, and an agenda for future research.