Leadership competencies for implementing planned organizational change

This paper bridges the leadership and organizational change literatures by exploring the relationship between managers' leadership competencies (namely, their effectiveness at person-oriented and task-oriented behaviors) and the likelihood that they will emphasize the different activities involved in planned organizational change implementation (namely, communicating the need for change, mobilizing others to support the change, and evaluating the change implementation). We examine this relationship using data from 89 clinical managers at the United Kingdom National Health Service who implemented change projects between 2003 and 2004. Our results lend overall support to the proposed theory. This finding suggests that treating planned organizational change as a generic phenomenon might mask important idiosyncrasies associated both with the different activities involved in the change implementation process and with the unique functions that leadership competencies might play in the execution of these activities.