Leading Change

Change Leadership: Oxymoron and Myths

“…If we look to the most cited publications referring to change/transformation and leadership between 1 January 1978 and 31 December 2014 the following were the most cited (Hughes, 2015): 6,638 Citations -Leading Change (Kotter, 1996) 4,340 Citations -John Kotter on Leading Change: Why transformation efforts fail (Kotter, 1995) 3,539 Citations -Transformational leadership (Bass & Riggio, 2006) If gauged by citations it is the writings of John Kotter on leading change and Bernard Bass on transformational leadership which have framed the debate over recent decades. The commonality between both authors is their acknowledgement of Burns (1978) and his differentiation between transformational and transactional leadership (see Bass, 1985;Kotter, 1990).…”

“…In terms of critically taking stock, Kotter's (1996) eight steps appear to have become the orthodoxy for change leadership. A revised edition of Leading Change appeared in 2012, substantially the same book, but with new Penguin imagery and a new preface.…”

“…More substantively, whilst Kotter (1995) gave impetus to questioning why transformation efforts failed and offering an influential prescription for how to lead change (Kotter, 1996), today his contribution may be critically questioned. Weaknesses in Kotter's (1996) account of Leading Change include; employees being depicted as resistors, ethics, power and politics being underplayed, an overemphasis upon taking a sequence of linear steps, disparaging history limiting the potential for learning, a lack of appreciation of incremental change, leader communications being overemphasized, an under emphasis of unique cultural contexts and the rhetorical treatment of organizational success/failure (Hughes, in press).…”

“…Weaknesses in Kotter's (1996) account of Leading Change include; employees being depicted as resistors, ethics, power and politics being underplayed, an overemphasis upon taking a sequence of linear steps, disparaging history limiting the potential for learning, a lack of appreciation of incremental change, leader communications being overemphasized, an under emphasis of unique cultural contexts and the rhetorical treatment of organizational success/failure (Hughes, in press). The scale of the citation counts suggests that for the foreseeable future, Kotter's (1996) account of change leadership will prove influential, but if we are again to avoid the accusation of change leadership being an oxymoron, we need to be open to new accounts of change leadership.…”

Meanings and Motives before Measures: The ‘What’ and ‘Why’ of Diversity within the Mossos d’Esquadra and the Politie Utrecht

“…One of the preconditions for effective policies is that all involved actors have the same goal in mind, they understand it in the same way, and they share the motives for that goal (Dunn, 1994;Kotter, 1996). As such, the definition of and motivation for diversity are expected to have a significant influence on the effectiveness of diversity policies.…”