Category: Organizational Change

Managing, leading and evaluating organizational change.

The Graveyard of Disappointed Hope
Introduction

Yesterday, I finished reading No Silver Bullet: Bursting the Bubble of the Organisational Quick Fix (NSB). I awoke this morning intending to begin writing this post, yesterday, I had no such intention. My unconscious also gifted the slightly depressing Graveyard of Disappointed Hope title for this post. In my sleep, I was processing thoughts and feelings about NSB, not so accessible to my conscious mind. Unconsciously, I was back amongst the workshop whiteboards, flip charts and coffee airports; back with my organizational change publication successes/failures, very personal hopes and despair.

NSB is as much about the invisible often unconscious emotional aspects of organizational life as the more visible and tangible conscious quick fixes. If we put the shortcomings of silver bullets to one side, they are carriers of strong and at times intoxicating emotions.

I worked for over three decades as an academic before volunteering for redundancy in 2019. Over that time, I observed the demise of change management, the rise of change leadership and the ascendancy of the leadership development fetish. Interesting times and as a Reader in Organizational Change, I was not a neutral observer.

I read NSB by way of preparation for a potential future conversation with Steve. We met at a staff seminar, about a decade ago and subsequently, we have had some water cooler conversations facilitating our respective workshops over the years. I virtually attended and enjoyed the NSB book launch and more recently enjoyed reading NSB.

I have a strong suspicion that it will be the last organizational change book that I read. If that is the case, I am grateful to conclude with such a meaningful and thoughtful read. I assure you that there was a lot of meaningless and thoughtless organizational change literature that I encountered.

I am going to major in this post on hope and despair regarding organizational change. However, first I need to balance the slight menace of the title of this post with a reassuring and uplifting Amazon-style book review.

Excellent Book (5/5)

I had high expectations before reading NSB. As I read the book these high expectations were repeatedly exceeded. The crude dichotomy characterizing much of the organizational change literature is as follows. Academic literature speaks to academics but disengages and excludes practitioners. Practitioner literature persuades practitioners but at the expense of academic engagement/respect.

I admire how Steve has been able to write a book with an appeal to two very different audiences with different agendas. The only audience excluded would-be academics and practitioners seeking a superficial read. This is a deep book, in NSB you have a sense of the author reliving his past experiences, but also living through (and surviving) the writing experience.

It took time for this weary old academic to read, largely because the book engaged me both emotionally and philosophically. However, I felt neither patronized nor overwhelmed. NSB is informed by both knowing scholarship as well as a deep and thoughtful engagement with the development and facilitation of organizational change practice.

In subsequent sections, I will illustrate the reflexivity NSB surprisingly encouraged. This reflexivity is enabled through Steve’s frequent very candid disclosures. In most of my academic writing, I had to maintain the artificial objective/subjective distinction. The first-person singular was taboo in academic writing, academic authority informed by excluding the self, that’s interesting. In reading NSB, I felt more like I was in a conversation than a lecture, refreshingly different from other organizational change books.

The Cemetery Gates

‘even disappointed hope wanders around agonizing, a ghost that has lost its way back to the cemetery and clings to refuted images.‘(Bloch, 1995:195)

The title for this post is taken from a quotation in The Principle of Hope, Ernst Bloch’s encyclopaedia of human hoping. I will return to hope and despair, but for now, we stand together at the Blochian cemetery gates. In this instance the gateway into a world of organizational ghosts and personal shadows. Whatever happened in my sleep last night I was taken to the gates of the cemetery of disappointed hope, in C.G. Jung’s terms, I am having to make my unconscious conscious.

In 2009, I was fortunate enough to be at a Critical Management Studies conference where Simon Critchley was one of the keynote speakers. He talked persuasively about passive nihilism. Instead of the terrorism of an anarchist, passive nihilists find the tyranny and manipulation in the world abhorrent, but focus on passive activities such as gardening and bird watching. Post-redundancy, I wear my passive nihilist t-shirt with pride lost in my twin passions of gardening and rambling.

In writing NSB, Steve appears to have sidestepped this passive nihilist cul-de-sac. Alternatively, he has hidden his existential angst very well. NSB and its no quick fixes subtitle does not offer the warm comfort blanket of certainty. Steve offers plenty of practical guidance, particularly in the two concluding chapters. There is also a very useful subtext throughout NSB about the benefits of being more reflexive and thoughtful in the processes of organizing.

In reading NSB and some of my writing and workshop facilitation I embraced the shift from doing to being. That said it is never easy to relinquish agency. The sleazy Just Do It (J.D.I) organizational slogan exists for a reason (even if it is a dodgy reason). In reading NSB I was in the realm of, Just Don’t Do It (J.D.D.I). There are plenty of references in NSB to corporate rebels and contrarians.

I enjoyed these folk tales they felt like my kind of people. I enjoy listening to The Road to Nowhere by Talking Heads and Everyone Knows This is Nowhere by Neil Young. The awkward part isn’t the journey, it is when you reach the existential nowhere.

So, here’s to you DiMaggio and Powell

The existentialist nowhere in the last section went a little too deep, a little too quickly. Perhaps I can lighten the load with the healing balm of institutional theory. I enjoyed facilitating many organizational change workshops with Steve Reeve and we worked well as a double act. He would approach organizational change from perspectives of political science, institutional theory and economics. I would approach organizational change from the perspectives of psychology, sociology and history.

Steve (R) covered the institutional theory of DiMaggio and Powell (1983) in our workshops. It always went down well with workshop participants, regardless of seniority, or sector background. Benign ghosts from these workshops joined me in reading NSB. DiMaggio and Powell helped me to understand why organizations copy each other. Once I had this insight, it informed my attempts to understand organizations.

They referred to institutional isomorphism which could take three forms; coercive, mimetic, and normative. Organizations gain legitimacy by copying each other. The interesting bit for me is that they have to copy other organizations, the agency of choice isn’t as prevalent as many imagine. If everyone else in your sector has an armoury of silver bullets and you have no silver bullets, you may well feel exposed, insecure and illegitimate.

As Steve (H) eloquently explains business schools and large consultancy firms are significant players in manufacturing and delivering silver bullets. I have a suspicion that organizational receptiveness to these munitions is cultivated through the forces of institutional isomorphism. There is a very real desire to be legitimate or at least signal legitimacy. At different points in NSB Steve refers to the tale of the Emperor’s new clothes. Even if it is blindingly obvious that the Emperor is not wearing any clothes, it is challenging to spell this out when everyone else is saying the opposite.

Steve repeatedly acknowledges the role of collusion which is very valid. However, for me, collusion was the precursor to co-optation. I had my moments explicitly questioning business school orthodoxy and Steve cites one of them. My (2011) provocative highlighting and questioning of the spurious nature of 70% change failure tendencies enthusiastically espoused by respected business schools/respected professors.

Yet, a decade later, Hughes (2011) was repeatedly invoked in Human Relations as the author who claimed change tends to fail (Schwarz et al, 2021). My irreverent critique of business school orthodoxy now co-opted into favoured business school orthodoxy – change tends to fail and we can help you succeed.

NSB has rightly been applauded, but the danger is that it is co-opted into the beige orthodoxy of organizational change. One of the paradoxes, witnessed over three decades was how resistant organizational change orthodoxy was to the type of change Steve encourages.

Too many words have been expended on the spurious goal of overcoming resistance to change (see HERE), perhaps it is time to overcome the resistance to change of organizational change orthodoxy.

Who Killed Change Management?

Sorry the last section was meant to be more upbeat, but I went back to another dark place of old battles and frustrated emotions. There are reasons why the unconscious lurks in the shadows. Possibly counterintuitive, but let’s visit another dark place. It’s around 2009, we have just experienced the global financial recession, and businesses and governments are broke. The organizational work we did for the university dried up. Politically we were out of favour and fashion in our institution, dark days indeed.

I stumbled across Who Killed Change? Solving the mystery of leading people through change by Ken Blanchard et al (2009). This frothy little book was written in the style of a Mickey Spillane murder mystery. The murder under review was the apparent tendency for change to fail. Who Killed Change, was the antithesis of NSB and could be paraphrased as – we’ve got silver bullets/quick fixes and we know how to use them. The hopeful news for readers was that Ken Blanchard companies were able to solve their murder mystery for a consultancy fee.

I wrote Who Killed Change Management primarily as therapy with publication in the wonderful Culture and Organization a welcome bonus. In following the detective style, I parodied the Blanchard et al parody. My detective delved into my growing concerns with practitioner depictions of change failing, but also the increasingly vociferous academic critiques of change management and the manageability of change.

Writing the paper was fun, but also helped me to understand the consultancy dependency on failure problems as the precursor to successful solutions. Business school/consultancy quick fixes were contingent on failure depictions, such as change tends to fail, regardless of the validity/reliability of such depictions. Also, at this time I began to explicitly and purposefully engage with the literature on hope and implications for organizing.

Hope – The Fuel of Progress

The politician Tony Benn was quoted by Younge (2002) in The Guardian as referring to hope ‘…as the fuel of progress…’ Hope fuels practical organizational agendas, as well as, the publication ambitions of academics, yet somehow remains implicit in these agendas and ambitions. Hope was a recurring theme for me in reading NSB, though on the pages it is more implicit than explicit. Perhaps in asserting no silver bullets/quick fixes, Steve Hearsum is the hope thief, apparently offering to replace hope with despair and optimism with pessimism.

Hope is integral to NSB and my concluding reflections on organizational change bookending my career. Although, unpublished I did a deep dive into the relationship between hope and organizing at a time when my life felt hopeless (see previous section). The following selective insights about hope feel pertinent to Steve’s NSB thesis.

In NSB the sloppy misrepresentations of Kurt Lewin and other scholars are rightly called out. In my hopeful quest, I wanted to know what Kurt said about hope.

‘…the importance of that psychological factor which is commonly called hope … Hope means that sometime in the future, the real situation will be changed so that it will equal my wishes.’ (Lewin, 1942: 80)

Lewin captures exactly what I am dancing around in this post. Academic critique plays a crucial role in social science. Bursting quick-fix bubbles informs organizational practices, but how does this take us to a future which equals my wishes, or are we on the passive nihilist road to nowhere?

I took reassurance from Halpin (2001: 107) ‘…frequently the state of being hopeful implicitly involves critical reflection about prevailing circumstances.’ This was the subtext I read into NSB which transforms silver bullet bursting from a hopeless activity into a hopeful activity.

In my hope literature review, an epiphany came when I unexpectedly understood the utility of despair. Nesse, (1999) suggests that events indicating our efforts will succeed arouse hope, whereas events indicating that our efforts are futile foster despair. Although not favouring this dualism, he acknowledges that the bias is so powerful, because the words hope and despair contain intrinsic judgements.

This acknowledgement is crucial to understanding the role of success and failure in organizational change, I feel a sermon coming on, but back to Nesse. Nesse (1999) highlights two persuasive illusions about hope and despair. Firstly, the illusion that hope and despair are opposites, they are dependent upon each other. Secondly ‘…that hope is a beneficial virtue and despair is a harmful sin. Both exist only because, in certain situations, they offer benefits’ (Nesse, 1999: 431).

The Who Killed Change Management moment featured in the previous section was my despair for the field of organizational change and my involvement in the field. However, out of the despair of this critical questioning came hope and fortunately subsequent successful publications and workshop facilitation. I perceive this down, through up and out trajectory when I read NSB, but that might just be me.

Leaders Solve Problems or Construct Problems?

I have an urge to address the leadership theme of NSB and as it is winter and my gardening has paused, I will indulge my urge. Heroic leaders fire silver bullets at the problems of organizational life. We mere mortals look on in complete awe, fantasising that one day we might get to wear our underwear over our trousers.

One of the best/most useful papers I ever read about leadership questioned such heroic leader orthodoxy. Problems, problems, problems: The social construction of leadership (Grint, 2005) highlights the involvement of leaders in creating the problem context they heroically solve. The paper unpacks the tame, wicked and critical problems organizations encounter and the applicability of management, leadership and command in addressing these problems (see further elaboration HERE).

I agree that there are no silver bullets, but even the perceived targets leaders point their big weapons at are often largely socially constructed. This position is incompatible with traditional leadership development and consultancy interventions. Over time critical voices are co-opted into the dominant and dominating orthodox narrative – “where are the leaders, what we need is leadership”. Very few business schools would teach students that leadership is about asking questions, whereas command is about offering answers (Grint, 2005). No, it is easier to peddle the pornography of strong leadership using the sleazy glamour models featured on The Apprentice and Dragon’s Den.

The Principle of Hope

A gate at sunrise in the frost

Hope was tangibly delivered when a member of the university library staff informed me that the three volumes of Bloch’s (1995) The Principle of Hope had arrived. My academic solution to a very human emotion of despair. Tragically, Bloch’s encyclopaedic historical account of hope was the most depressing set of books I ever read. Bloch’s historical overview highlighted human hopes repeatedly being manipulated and unfulfilled. He wasn’t against hope, his anger was targeted at those peddling false hopes. His anger was around the knowing manipulation of humans hoping to serve the power and financial interests of the manipulators.

Emotions are invested in particular organizational change initiatives such as hope, excitement, pride, fear, anticipation, confusion etc. Business schools and large consultancy firms have been masterful in their manipulation and monetization of these emotions as they successfully deliver and distribute silver bullets.

Earlier, I rhetorically caricatured Steve as the hope thief, but I never believed this. After reading NSB, I perceive him as the bouncer at the cemetery gates of disappointed hope. Just inside the gates, we see a small group of academics sobbing over the latest academic league table. Opposite them, smartly dressed consultants fondle their top-of-the-range smartphones. Steve in his brown overalls shuffles past a non-descript group of practitioners enthusiastically bounding towards the cemetery gates.

“Nothing for you here madam/sir, just the shells of dodgy old silver bullets and some cases of new silver bullets, move along please, we will be closing the cemetery shortly!”

Ghosts of disappointed hopes haunt too many of my reflections. However, these benign ghosts encourage critical reflection on past experiences. This reflexivity is the best defence against the manipulation of silver bullets and quick fixes.

If you can be patient and reflexive, the proposition that there are no silver bullets is a reason to be cheerful. If you have the courage to resist the isomorphism of adopting the latest silver bullet, your position is stronger not weaker. Questioning the silver bullet prescriptions of business schools and large consultancy firms is a basis for despair informed hope. If you are willing to embrace an ongoing and uncertain process of organizational change, one day the future might just equal your wishes.

Links

Further details about Steve Hearsum and his work are accessible HERE.

Fighting the habitual urge to conclude with a long list of references, I have attempted to embed links into the post at the first reference, though please note academic references are invariably firewalled.

In terms of my publications, I am willing and able to share a draft of a paper or chapter if required and not accessible to you, please contact me HERE.
The Graveyard of Disappointed Hope
December 31, 2024
What is the problem with leadership studies?
Artificial intelligence

My academic engagement is no longer forward-looking, I do still reminisce and reflect on past leadership studies debates and moments. Artificial intelligence (AI) became mainstream a little too late in the day to either engage or inform me. However, I do find myself asking the AI programme (Google Gemini) questions which used to fascinate me. In later years, I was obsessed with a simplistic though rarely asked question.

Why was there a shift from managing change to leading change?

I recently asked the AI programme and it invoked Professor John Kotter, Harvard Business School and change tending to fail. This rubbish answer wasn’t good for my blood pressure. However, it did confirm my concerns that change orthodoxy remains very resistant to change, it was made in Harvard and remains very acritical. AI is the future (apparently), yet it is warming up dogma from the 1990s in the name of progress. If this is the future trajectory of AI, the future is bleak. Consequently, I was very pessimistic when I asked the AI programme another question which used to fascinate me.

What is the problem with leadership studies?

I concede there was a critical assumption embedded in the question, but still pleasantly surprised that the AI programme directed me towards the critical scholar Professor Mats Alvesson. They suggested his 2019 Leadership paper which identified eight problems and his 2020 Leadership Quarterly paper which challenged upbeat leadership studies (see full references at the end). Perhaps the future isn’t so bleak.

The problems identified by Alvesson and echoed by AI include:
- Lack of relevance – Research often ignores major issues
- Unreliable results – Methodologies can produce invalid, unreliable, and unreproducible findings.
- Positive bias – Positive results with ideological bias.
- The conflation of leadership and management.
- Lack of realism – Leadership is portrayed as seductive and positive, not reflective of corporate reality.
- Fragmentation – Large and divergent studies make generalizations difficult.
The laughing scholar

I strongly recommend exploring the large body of Mats Alvesson’s work if you want to critically engage with leadership studies. I even had a bit of an Alvesson academic crush back in the day.

It was fortunate that I had left academia when the pandemic forced us into lockdown. Everyone seemed to go into online/zoom mode, but my gardening was less adaptable to going online. I decided to do some video reviews in my study and a local forest, so as not to be left out. It proved to be mischievous fun. I don’t think the 69 views to date means that I can call myself an influencer. I have just watched my Alvesson review video again. I was pleasantly surprised by how happy and energized I was whilst problematizing leadership studies. Oddly, I had forgotten how much fun I had, see for yourself below:

Questioning “upbeat” leadership studies, let’s encourage questions, rather than success recipes. (YouTube Video published August 23rd 2020)

References

Academic journal papers are invariably firewalled, so you will need library journal access to follow up on these references.

Alvesson, M. (2019). Waiting for Godot: Eight major problems in the odd field of leadership studies. Leadership, 15(1), 27-43. https://doi.org/10.1177/1742715017736707

Alvesson, M. (2020). Upbeat leadership: A recipe for – or against – “successful” leadership studies. The Leadership Quarterly, 31(6). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2020.101439
What is the problem with leadership studies?
November 2, 2024
The Neglected Dark Side of Leading Change

Leadership was famously depicted as a seduction (Calas and Smircich, 1991) and to this day individuals, organizations and societies still appear to be seduced. It’s time to talk about the dark side of leading change. A counterbalance to this seduction is more open acknowledgement and discussion about the dark side of leading change. This brings realism to theories and practices and has the potential to inform leadership and leading change.

Initially, I share examples of the dark side of leading change practices. These may be isolated organizational ‘bad apple’ aberrations. My intent here is not to question these practitioners, but rather the academic theoretical intent informing these practices. I highlight how academics encouraged coercive persuasion, manipulation and aggression in the development of leadership. Rather than practices to be avoided, these developments were seen as beneficial even integral to what was being prescribed. I conclude on a positive note with a book encouraging combining ethics with organizational change and leadership.

1. Dark Side of Leading Change Practices

In Managing and Leading Organizational Change (Hughes, 2018), I was interested in sharing with readers research-informed illustrations of how not to lead change. When I encountered the case examples offered by Boddy (2017) and Espedal (2017) whilst not typical of all organizations they were troubling.

Boddy (2017) in his longitudinal case study of a UK charitable organization highlighted the presence of a psychopathic CEO. The longitudinal research design enabled comparison between the previous CEO and the current CEO of this charity.

The psychopathic CEO was found to rule via fear and intimidation and to deny any real voice to those working under him. In contrast, the previous CEO encouraged and facilitated employee suggestions and contributions to both organizational tactics and strategy. (Boddy, 2017:144)

The case study is well worth reading, but one example of the psychopathic CEO denying any real voice to subordinates was the working group convened by the CEO to look at organizational strategy. Instead of appointing staff including senior directors only junior staff and middle managers were invited to join the group. Junior employees were easier to manipulate towards the CEO’s point of view.

In organizations, we may encounter brutal and/or manipulative change leaders, but it is rare to read their testimony in research reports. In this context, Espedal’s (2017) research whilst disturbing is revealing. He was able to interview a group of fifteen leaders who had socially constructed reputations as good and efficient change agents. All respondents were senior executives and the two quotations are taken verbatim from his research interviews.

In leading change I confront the organization rather than serve it. In order to motivate me confront the organization (sic) I need freedom associated with ‘brutality’. (Espedal, 2017:158)

In leading change I must perform and get results. Thus, I need power to secure compliance to my domination through the shaping of beliefs and desires and through commitment to common goals. (Espedal, 2017:158)

Despite the questionable nature of these leading change practices, I want to focus on the involvement of academics. I question academic complicity in encouraging the dark side of coercive persuasion, manipulation and aggression in leading change practices.

2. Coercive Persuasion

Tourish’s (2013) chapter on ‘Coercive persuasion, power and corporate culturism’ in The Dark Side of Transformational Leadership is highly recommended. You can see my recommendation as I stand in the middle of a forest here:

The Dark Side of Transformational Leadership (YouTube Video)

Organizational Culture and Leadership (Schein, 1985) was an important milestone in studying organizational culture and change leadership. However, Schein’s (1985) honest and open acknowledgement that such cultural change would require coercive persuasion is largely overlooked. Cooke (1999) is one of the few scholars to highlight what has been omitted in accounts of Edgar Schein’s work. He (1999) highlighted how Schein’s research into the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) informed the writing of his book Coercive Persuasion (Schein, 1961).

This out-of-print book informs Schein’s (1985) influential account of organizational culture and leadership. His insights into understanding coercive persuasion arose out of studying the treatment of prisoners of war by the CCP during the Korean War. Schein (1961) separated coercive persuasion into three sub-phases.

Unfreezing – Destabilising a person’s sense of identity, diminishing confidence in prior social judgments and fostering a sense of powerlessness.

Changing – Offers a chance to escape punishing destabilisation by demonstrating that the preferred ideology has been learned, demonstrating zeal through displays of commitment.

Refreezing – Promoting and reinforcing behaviour acceptable to the controlling organization, the target is encouraged to understand the errors of his or her former life.

Schein (1985) regarded coercive persuasion as integral to changes in organizational culture and leadership. Yet academic accounts of either organizational culture or leadership rarely acknowledge the integral aspect of coercive persuasion. In terms of practice, Schein’s (1985) sub-phases of coercive persuasion offer a window on potential negative experiences arising out of cultural change and leading change.

3. Manipulation

I remain deeply concerned by Kotter’s (1996/2012) Leading Change being prescribed to university students and practitioners (please see LINK for further discussion). In this sub-section, I limit myself to his encouragement of manipulation in organizations, ‘to some degree, all management is manipulation…’ (Kotter, 1996: 128). He is probably more famous for his pyrotechnic analogies and this is one of his most famous.

Visible crises can be enormously helpful in catching people’s attention and pushing up urgency levels. Conducting business as usual is very difficult if the building seems to be on fire. But in an increasingly fast-moving world, waiting for a fire to break out is a dubious strategy. And in addition to catching people’s attention a sudden fire can cause a lot of damage. (Kotter, 1996: 45)

Multiple copies of Leading Change (Kotter, 1996/2012) can still be found on most university library book shelves and this book is still frequently favourably cited by academics, despite my best efforts. However, to this sceptical reader the quotation, rather than being a call to action is an endorsement of leading change through manipulation.

The fear of a fire and the threat to lives seeks to terrify people, increasing their sense of urgency and making them more malleable to leadership. However, in the absence of a fire if a leader pretends that there is a fire the subordinates will be terrified enough to follow the leader. Why, oh why aren’t more academics courageous enough to question the indoctrination of students into becoming the leading change manipulators of tomorrow?

4. Aggression

In my final years of academic employment I was fascinated by the shift from managing change to leading change and how this shift was academically informed. Eventually, I managed to convince at least myself on why this shift occurred (please see this LINK for further discussion). In my quest, I reflected on the 35 years of academic writing potentially informing the shift from management to leadership (Hughes, 2016).

One of the most frequently cited rationalizations for this shift was offered by the Harvard Business School professor Zaleznik (1977). The paradox is that this supposed rationalization for the shift was informed neither by literature nor original research. By way of mitigation, Zaleznik (1977) acknowledged that it was a working paper prepared for a conference. It did contain (for this reader) some of the funniest insights into leadership and management ever written.

Leaders work from high-risk positions, indeed often are temperamentally disposed to seek out risk and danger, especially where opportunity and reward appear high … Managers prefer to work with people; they avoid solitary activity because it makes them anxious. (Zaleznik, 1977:72)

In leadership development workshops, I would often suggest to participants that when they went back to their workplaces, they find a manager to befriend, lest that solitary manager becomes lonely and anxious. There had to be more substance to Zaleznik’s contribution than this stereotyped and pejorative dualism of leaders versus managers.

The substance was to be found in his book The Managerial Mystique: Restoring Leadership in Business (Zaleznik, 1989). Sadly, it is rarely cited by business school academics as it doesn’t help in promoting the favoured income-generating narrative – isn’t leadership great!

I would encourage anyone with the time and the money (it is very cheap second-hand), to buy the book and draw their conclusions. My conclusions are very biased, but they do offer another explanation for the dark side leading change practices featured earlier. The first chapter commences with this sentence ‘Business in America has lost its way, in a sea of managerial mediocrity, desperately needing leadership to face worldwide economic competition’ (Zaleznik, 1989:11).

Zaleznik (1989) organized the book into four major sections; argument, analysis, consequences and the cure: leadership. The book offers a detailed history of USA business/political leaders, businesses and the corresponding development of management studies over the previous century. Taylorism was presented favourably as being ‘…founded on a love of manufacturing and a humane desire to do things better’ (Zaleznik, 1989:75). Zaleznik (1989) was sceptical about Elton Mayo and to a lesser extent Kurt Lewin, in that he believed that they were guilty of promoting workplace cooperation.

Zaleznik (1989: 235) looked back fondly to early USA corporate leaders ‘modern management represents a sharp divergence from the early forms of corporate leadership in which a patriarchal figure, such as Andrew Carnegie or John D Rockefeller, constructed large enterprises’. It is telling that Zaleznik (1977) who had previously suggested that the mystique of leadership might relate to a longing for heroic parents, now offered USA patriarchal figures as leadership role models.

Zaleznik (1989: 123) lamented that ‘the corporate world, however, has a long way to go to understand the uses of anger in human relationships’. The potential darker side of leader/manager differentiations surfaces. Zaleznik (1989: 25) was critical of managers who ‘…tend to fear aggression as a force leading to chaos’ instead, he believed that ‘leaders comfortable with aggression often create a climate of ferment that intensifies individual motivation’ (Zaleznik, 1989: 26).

Cooperative managers fearful of aggression were to be replaced with solitary leaders ‘comfortable with aggression’ who were tasked with intensifying the motivation of individuals.

Zaleznik (1977/1989) was one of the main proponents of a shift from management to leadership. I pose this question to anybody who has studied leadership at a business school or attended a leadership development workshop in their organization. How explicit was the coverage of the aggression favoured within leadership?

5. In Conclusion

There are no performance, status or financial motivations in writing this post. However, the views expressed here had gnawed away at me for some time. In universities, I often encountered a pejorative stereotype that business school academics offered the ethical solution to problematic leading change practitioners. My lived experience was almost the opposite of this stereotype. For me, some of the favoured academic literature remains part of the problem, rather than part of the solution.

I began this post by introducing research-informed illustrations of the dark side of leading change practices. I then explained how Schein (1985) encouraged coercive persuasion, Kotter (1995/2012) encouraged manipulation and Zaleznik (1989) encouraged aggression. The shift from managing change to leading change was far less neutral than most business school academics are willing to acknowledge.

What gnawed away at me was that business schools in encouraging dark side behaviours of coercive persuasion, manipulation and aggression, problematically indoctrinate the leaders of tomorrow. Power and politics are other elements of the dark side of leading change (please see Hughes, 2018 for a chapter covering these debates).

Engaging with the dark side in this post has inevitably been gloomy, so I am going to end on a lighter note. I was delighted to be invited by Rune and Bernard to co-edit the second edition of their edited reader Organizational Change, Leadership and Ethics (By and Burnes, 2013). The second edition was published in 2023.

This book benefits from thought-provoking contributions from internationally respected leadership and organizational change academics. They help to restore my faith that academic writing still has the potential to positively change organizations and societies. Thankfully, not all academics encourage the dark side of leading change.

LINK Organizational Change, Leadership and Ethics (By, et al, 2023)

References

By, R.T. and Burnes, B. (2013). Organizational Change, Leadership and Ethics. London: Routledge.

Boddy, C.R. (2017). Psychopathic leadership a case study of a corporate psychopath CEO. Journal of Business Ethics, 145(1): 141-156.

Calas, M.B. and L. Smircich. (1991). Voicing seduction to silence leadership. Organization Studies, 12 (4): 567-602.

Cooke, B. (1999). Writing the left out of management theory: The historiography of the management of change. Organization, 6(1): 81-105.

Espedal, B. (2017). Understanding how balancing autonomy and power might occur in leading organizational change. European Management Journal, 35(2): 155-163.

Hughes, M. (2016). The Leadership of Organizational Change. London: Routledge.

Hughes, M. (2018). Managing and Leading Organizational Change. London: Routledge.

Kotter, J.P. (1996/2012). Leading Change. Boston: Harvard Business Press.

Schein, E.H. (1961). Coercive Persuasion. Norton: New York (out of print).

Schein, E.H. (1985). Organizational Culture and Leadership. San Francisco: Jossey Bass.

Tourish, D. (2013). The Dark Side of Transformational Leadership: A Critical Perspective. London: Routledge.

Zaleznik, A. (1977). Managers and leaders: Are they different? Harvard Business Review, 15 (3): 67- 84.

Zaleznik, A. (1989). The Managerial Mystique: Restoring Leadership in Business. New York: Harper and Row.
The Dark Side of Leading Change

June 14, 2022
How Studying Organizational Change Lost its Way
Introduction

A grandiose title, but as the claims that I am challenging have been equally grandiose, when in Rome…

At the end of this post, you will find a link to the published paper, Reflections: How studying organizational change lost its way. My focus in this post is broadly explaining and differentiating the three frames. If you want to delve deeper, you will find full references in the linked posts and papers at the end.

It is the repeated assertions that all organizational change tends to fail that I find so problematic. In a world of limitless social science funding, it would be difficult to envisage a research design that could meaningfully research such a silly sweeping generalization. It is unsurprising, that meaningful evidence in support of this generalization has not been forthcoming. In advancing this debate I introduce three potential frames for studying organizational change.
1. Organizational change tends to fail
2. The management of change is failing
3. Leading change will succeed
The first frame reflects the current orthodoxy if gauged by what elite journals and prestigious business schools are keen to promote. The second frame about the management of change failing has not been acknowledged to date. The third frame about leading change succeeding is implicit rather than explicit in theories and practices.

It isn’t just evaluating change that has lost its way in failing to challenge the assumption that change tends to fail. Current studies of change agency fail to explain the shift from managing change to leading change. They fail to either explain or debate failure being attributed to management and success to leadership. Instead, the unchallenged assumption is that a tendency for organizational change to fail was empirically established. Equally, the implication is that a shift from managing change to leading change was empirically driven.

The claims that I am making are not new. They have been informed by my scholarship around the shift from managing change to leading change and around change evaluation over the past decade. I am grateful to the Journal of Change Management for enabling me to voice my concerns about a field of study with which I have been involved for the past three decades.

Frame one – Organizational change tends to fail

I am neither an organizational change apologist nor an evangelist. I am very aware of change initiatives failing to achieve desired outcomes and I have worked in and with organizations in which changes failed. Equally, I am not persuaded by unrealistic rhetoric in which change universally succeeds.

The current failure versus success dualism is too simplistic to satisfactorily inform either theories or the lived experience of processes of changing.   Notions of all change tending to fail haven’t grasped the contextual, processual and dynamic nature of change processes and change outcomes. We shouldn’t underestimate these academic advances. I lived through the initial sweeping generalizations about organizational change and I was fortunate to witness a field of study evolving and maturing. Three decades ago, there was a heady enthusiasm in the literature and practice for change management success. In this sense counterclaims of change failure provided a healthy reality check.

However, attempting to replace change tends to succeed with change tends to fail isn’t good social science. When respected journals and respected academics want to take us back to an era of early organizational change generalizations, I am left perplexed and annoyed.

Organizational Change Tends to Fail – Framing

Career academics claiming that all change tends to fail, begs the question if they believe this why study organizational change? Why waste your life studying practices you perceive as pointless and futile? Equally, why are elite journals and prestigious business schools so keen to promote notions of organizational change failing?

The performative nature of academic journals and the enterprising nature of business schools make their failure rhetoric, so perplexing. The advertisement reads something like – Is your organization going through organizational change, come to our business school and we will explain to you in detail how it is failing and will continue to fail!

No, these individuals and institutions are clever and enterprising, there are darker arts at work here. There is a rationale behind depictions of all organizational change tending to fail and the repetition of these depictions over the decades. Business schools do business as well as reporting about business. This isn’t about reducing their involvement in organizational change business. This is about creatively developing new income streams, delivering on demanding institutional performance metrics through blurring distinctions between facts and fictions.

I have been one of the few scholars explicitly challenging unchallenged change failure assumptions. Putting it crudely, at times I felt like I was pissing in the wind! But then in 2021 that wind dramatically changed direction. Suddenly and surprisingly, I found myself being cited in support of the assumption that change tends to fail. On one level I was flattered to be cited in an elite journal. On another level, I was left perplexed at this apparent miraculous conversion.

The main opponent to change tends to fail generalizations was now cited as the main proponent. My paper highlighting that the 70% change failure rate was without evidence was reimagined as the change tends to fail evidence that had eluded academics for so long. I don’t want to become side-tracked on what was a challenging, although informative example of a debate actively being framed to serve powerful interests. In the Reflections paper (please see links at the end), if you are curious, I reflect upon my futile attempt to have this misrepresentation corrected. I get knocked down, but I get up again (Chumbawamba, 1997)!

Despite my agitation, we do need to be clear about the current organizational change studies orthodoxy, as I am certainly not orthodox. In prestigious business schools today, students are taught about a tendency for organizational change to fail. In elite journals, claims are still being made that organizational change tends to fail.

Academics and journals still promote the spurious statistic that 70% of all organizational change initiatives fail. This is the first way in which I believe organizational change studies lost its way. However, preoccupations with change failure, either intentionally or unintentionally, hide wider academic change agency confusions currently impeding organizational change studies.

Frame two – The management of change is failing

Over three decades, I observed and was academically engaged with a shift from managing change to leading change both in theory and practice. The fact that my career mirrored this shift was by default rather than design. That said, I was personally invested in making sense of a debate that ran parallel to my development.

In 2006, my first organizational change textbook had ‘change management’ in the title. In 2010, my second textbook had ‘managing change’ in the title. In 2019, my textbook had ‘managing and leading’ in the title. We moved from management as a ‘thing’, to managing as a ‘process’ and then to managing and leading as a ‘duality’.

The Management of Change is Failing – Framing

Over three decades, I became more and more critical of organizational change theories being espoused in journals and by business schools. Perversely, my respect for organizational change practices and practitioners grew as we worked with very different practitioners in very different contexts.

In the early heady days, there was a real (if unrealistic) enthusiasm to successfully manage change. Today we can contrast this with talk and writing focusing almost exclusively on successfully leading change. The either managing OR leading and failure OR success rhetoric still seems unrealistic.

However, I was more curious about why a shift from managing change to leading change had taken place. Ideally, the shift was empirically driven with research and theory demonstrating that leadership rather than management was required in facilitating successful change. The elephant in the room is that when you explore academic literature in support of the shift, it isn’t very convincing. So, if this shift wasn’t academically driven, what was driving it?

A shift from managing change to leading change was part of a broader shift from management to leadership. A greater emphasis on leadership rather than management has been apparent both in theory and practice. If we go back fifty years, we witness American corporations and billionaires requesting a shift from management to leadership.

In parallel, we witness academics beginning to question the utility of management and encouraging the adoption of leadership. However, contentiously I argue that this questioning wasn’t arising out of objective research. It was more a case of academics framing a debate that management fails and leadership succeeds to fit the cultural context requested by corporate America at that time.

Between 1990 and 2000 the titles of three Harvard Business Review articles appeared to frame organizational change and transformation as failing. For myself, this is part of the explanation why elite journals and prestigious business schools claim organizational change tends to fail. However, this raises a question about why would Harvard Business School depict change and transformation as failing? Perhaps, you believe it was an act of altruism to give up the lucrative change and transformation income stream.

I would disagree and it is informative to read beyond the headline titles of the three articles. In each article, it is the management of change that is depicted as failing. The articles claim that with the addition of leadership change and transformation will succeed.   This very different frame to Frame One is currently neither being acknowledged nor discussed in organizational change studies. At the very least, it merits further discussion in both change evaluation and change agency debates.

Organizational change studies lost its way in allowing Frame One to hide the existence of Frame Two. We should be more openly and honestly acknowledging and debating academic disparaging of management.   There are implications for practice when management is academically disparaged when it might still have a role to play in organizations.

Frame three – Leading change will succeed

The third frame is implicit in current leading change theories and practices. Change tending to fail (Frame One) necessitates leading change (Frame Three). There is an unchallenged assumption that leading change will succeed. The contrast between managing change and leading change is important here. Frame Two enables Frame Three in terms of shifting change agency from change management to change leadership. The authority of change managers was corroded as part of the construction of change leader authority.

Leading Change will Succeed – Framing

We begin to understand why organizational change had to be depicted as failing and how specifically it was the management of change that was failing. In parallel, we begin to see how such framing benefits business schools and leadership research, teaching and development that they now deliver. Business schools strive to be successful businesses. There is a wonderful symmetry when elite journals and prestigious business schools identify a tendency for change to fail and simultaneously offer a leadership solution.

I believe organizational change studies lost its way in failing to acknowledge and discuss how change agency and change evaluation debates were academically being framed. Idealized concepts such as we need strong leaders to lead change were never empirical realities. Performance metrics and academic institutional policies increasingly privileged gap-filling research over assumptions challenging critical scholarship.

Academics, business schools and journals echoed the desires for leading change. Socratic questioning which used to be so integral to academic work was lost. Academics, business schools and journals moved into the business of legitimating societal and organizational desires, rather than critically questioning these desires.

The debate needs to move beyond simplistic generalizations that organizational change tends to fail. We need to consider academic involvement in both the disparaging of management and the promotion of leadership. This is achievable and I offer seven constructive hopes for organizational change in the paper (please see below). It has been too easy to date for academics to highlight the failings of organizational change practitioners and their practices. It is now time to take the inventory of those academics, institutions and journals framing these debates and highlight their vested interest in promoting particular lucrative frames.

Links to previous posts and papers

If you want to explore further the three frames introduced here, you may find the following links useful (please click on the bold titles).

Do 70 per cent of all organizational change initiatives really fail? In this post, I share links to the publisher website for the 2011 paper published in the Journal of Change Management and a freely available draft version of this paper.

Leading changes: Why transformation explanations fail. In this post, I share links to the publisher website for the 2016 paper published in Leadership and a freely available draft version of this paper.

The leadership of organizational change. In writing this monograph I was interested in literature informing the shift from managing change to leading change. It was more of a narrative review than a systematic review, but my critical engagement with literature was wide-ranging. The link is to the Routledge website containing further details about the monograph published in 2016.

Managing and leading organizational change. This is a link to my textbook published by Routledge in 2019. I know many academics are ‘sniffy’ about textbooks, but I stand by the extensive critical scholarship I undertook in writing this text. In particular, the Evaluating organizational change chapter offers my most recent review of literature in this area. If you do not have access to the book, but would like to read the chapter, please email me via the contact page.

Reflections: How studying organizational change lost its way This is the link to the publisher website for the 2022 paper published in the Journal of Change Management. It appeared as part of the Reflections series in which Editorial Board members share their reflections on our field of study.

It shouldn’t be firewalled and freely downloadable using this link. Please use the email Contact form on my home page if there are any problems.
How studying organizational change lost it’s way
January 31, 2022