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Reimagining organisational change leadership requires revisiting the seminal work of Kurt Lewin and James M Burns. Being the 20th century's most influential organisational change and leadership scholars, both radically reimagined their respective fields. However, often misinterpreted, misunderstood and even misrepresented, their true recommendations were largely ignored. In this article, we discuss why this is so. Despite three decades of transformation and organisational change leadership discourse, leadership is still in crisis. Working towards an alternative to the current orthodoxy, we reimagine organisational change leadership as a utilitarian consequentialist process.

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PurposeAchieving intergenerational interaction and avoiding conflict is becoming increasingly difficult in a workplace populated by three generations – Baby Boomers, Generation X‐ers and Generation Y‐ers. This paper presents a model and proposes HR solutions towards achieving co‐operative generational interaction.Design/methodology/approachThis paper adapts Park's theory of race relations to explain the distinctiveness of generational work groups and the challenges and opportunities that these groups present when interacting in organisations. Rashford and Coghlan's cycle of organisational change, based on the Kübler‐Ross grief cycle, is then mapped onto Park's race relations cycle in order to link generational interaction to emotional reactions to change over time.FindingsThe paper sets out a research agenda for examining how generations interact in the workplace. It acknowledges the limitations of using Park's theory of race relations, in particular the criticisms levelled at assimilationist approaches.Originality/valueThe paper provides an alternative viewpoint for examining how generations co‐exist and interact and shows how HR solutions can respond to the needs of different generations.

Purpose - The purpose of this research is to test the moderating role of dispositional resistance in achieving sustainable organisational change. Design/methodology/approach - Four studies were conducted in the period 2005-2007. Each study included the participation of individuals experiencing ongoing organisational changes at the time, and was repeated with an independent sample in order to strengthen the meaning of the findings. Findings - The studies confirmed the assumed positive relationship between benefit of change and commitment to change. Furthermore, two studies confirmed the assumed negative relationship between extent of change and commitment to change, while the other two studies, in contrast to the hypothesis presented, found a positive relationship. Despite the assumptions, with the exception of one study it was not possible to show moderating effects of resistance to change. Research limitations/implications - The study casts doubt about resistance to change defined as a disposition and its stability across different contexts. In explaining these results, the authors draw on Lewin's work on resistance to change. Originality/value - The paper argues that the importance of dispositional resistance is that it predisposes individuals to view change in a particular way, either negatively or positively. However, the level of resistance towards a specific change event will be influenced by other factors, noticeably the organizational context and the way the change is managed. Consequently, the importance of dispositional resistance lies in its ability to influence an organization's readiness for change and to identify the level of resistance it might expect to meet, and thus the approach to change it needs to adopt