This article examines the origins of one of the most widely accepted mental models that drives organizational behavior: the idea that there is resistance to change and that managers must overcome it. This mental model, held by employees at all levels, interferes with successful change implementation. The authors trace the emergence of the term resistance to change and show how it became received truth. Kurt Lewin introduced the term as a systems concept, as a force affecting managers and employees equally. Because the terminology, but not the context, was carried forward, later uses increasingly cast the problem as a psychological concept, personalizing the issue as employees versus managers. Acceptance of this model confuses an understanding of change dynamics. Letting go of the term—and the model it has come to embody—will make way for more useful models of change dynamics. The authors conclude with a discussion of alternatives to resistance to change.
Spirituality and its relationship to workplace leadership is a compelling issue for management practitioners and researchers. The field of study is still in its infancy and as such is marked by differences in definitions and other basic characteristics. Much of what has been written on this subject has appeared in general, rather than academic publications and consequently may lack rigor. The purpose of this study is to analyze known academic articles for how they characterize workplace spirituality, explore the nexus between spirituality and leadership, and discover essential factors and conditions for promoting a theory of spiritual leadership within the context of the workplace. An emergent process was used to identify and validate eight areas of difference and/or distinction in the workplace spirituality literature: 1.) definition, 2.) connected to religion, 3.) marked by epiphany, 4.) teachable, 5.) individual development, 6.) measurable, 7.) profitable/productive, and 8.) nature of the phenomenon. Eighty-seven scholarly articles were coded for each of these areas. Findings conclude that most researchers couple spirituality and religion and that most either have found, or hypothesize a correlation between spirituality and productivity. The emergent categories offer provocative new avenues for the development of leadership theory. D
Performance management is an increasingly perilous and challenging activity for many firms, and involves understanding the drivers of performance as well as its measurement. Academics tend to see performance in terms of rationality, whereas business leaders tend to interpret drivers of overall performance in a broader context. When global crises and high uncertainty confound causal links to performance, practitioners often invoke the notion of 'luck' as a prospective explanation. Academics are less inclined to do so because they tend to conceptualize luck differently. This paper considers the academic/ business gap and how Mode 2 research into luck and causality could produce findings that are more meaningful to practising managers in both understanding and affecting performance. It concludes by identifying ways to encourage greater academiapractitioner congruence to meet the challenges of a volatile operating environment.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.