The impact of leadership and change management strategy on organizational culture and individual acceptance of change during a merger

This article reports a longitudinal study that examined mergers between three large multi-site public-sector organizations. Both qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis are used to examine the effect of leadership and change management strategies on acceptance of cultural change by individuals. Findings indicate that in many cases the change that occurs as a result of a merger is imposed on the leaders themselves, and it is often the pace of change that inhibits the successful re-engineering of the culture. In this respect, the success or otherwise of any merger hinges on individual perceptions about the manner in which the process is handled and the direction in which the culture is moved. Communication and a transparent change process are important, as this will often determine not only how a leader will be regarded, but who will be regarded as a leader. Leaders need to be competent and trained in the process of transforming organizations to ensure that individuals within the organization accept the changes prompted by a merger.

Research in leadership, self, and identity: A sample of the present and a glimpse of the future

Researchers in leadership effectiveness are paying increasing attention to the role of follower self-concept and identity as a mediator and moderator of the effectiveness of leadership. In this introductory article, we provide a short outline of this rapidly growing field of research, briefly introduce the articles presented in this special issue on leadership, self, and identity, and highlight key themes for future research that we feel emerge from these studies. These themes include greater attention to the dynamic interplay between leaders and followers, the incorporation of theories of fairness, and the role of leader self-concept. (c) 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The moderating role of individual differences in the relation between transformational/transactional leadership perceptions and organizational identification

In this study, we examined the relationship between transformational/transactional leadership perceptions and organizational identification and further explored the moderating role of individual difference variables, such as separateness-connectedness self-schema, and positive and negative affectivity. Data from 502 services employees indicated significant positive effects of transformational and transactional leadership perceptions on organizational identification. Regarding the moderating role of individual differences, our data showed that the positive relationship of transformational leadership and organizational identification was stronger for individuals of low positive affectivity as well as for employees of high negative affectivity. In addition, results indicated that transactional leadership had a stronger positive effect on organizational identification for individuals characterized by a connected self-schema. (c) 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

An analysis of relational complexity in an air traffic control conflict detection task

Theoretical analyses of air traffic complexity were carried out using the Method for the Analysis of Relational Complexity. Twenty-two air traffic controllers examined static air traffic displays and were required to detect and resolve conflicts. Objective measures of performance included conflict detection time and accuracy. Subjective perceptions of mental workload were assessed by a complexity-sorting task and subjective ratings of the difficulty of different aspects of the task. A metric quantifying the complexity of pair-wise relations among aircraft was able to account for a substantial portion of the variance in the perceived complexity and difficulty of conflict detection problems, as well as reaction time. Other variables that influenced performance included the mean minimum separation between aircraft pairs and the amount of time that aircraft spent in conflict.

Cognitive asymmetry in employee emotional reactions to leadership behaviors

This article is predicated on the idea that leaders shape workplace affective events. Based on Affective Events Theory (AET), I argue that leaders are sources of employee positive and negative emotions at work. Certain leader behaviors displayed during interactions with their employees are the sources of these affective events. The second theoretical underpinning of the article is the Asymmetry Effect of emotion. Consistent with this theory, employees are more likely to recall negative incidents than positive incidents. In a qualitative study, evidence that these processes exist in the workplace was found. Leader behaviors were sources of positive or negative emotional responses in employees; employees recalled more negative incidents than positive incidents, and they recalled them more intensely and in more detail than positive incidents. Consequently, leaders may need to exercise their emotional intelligence to generate emotional uplifts to overcome the hassles in the workplace that employees seem to remember so vividly. (c) 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Demographic category membership and leadership in small groups: A social identity analysis

Developing the social identity theory of leadership (e.g., [Hogg, M. A. (2001). A social identity theory of leadership. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 5, 184-200]), an experiment (N=257) tested the hypothesis that as group members identify more strongly with their group (salience) their evaluations of leadership effectiveness become more strongly influenced by the extent to which their demographic stereotype-based impressions of their leader match the norm of the group (prototypicality). Participants, with more or less traditional gender attitudes (orientation), were members, under high or low group salience conditions (salience), of non-interactive laboratory groups that had instrumental or expressive group norms (norm), and a male or female leader (leader gender). As predicted, these four variables interacted significantly to affect perceptions of leadership effectiveness. Reconfiguration of the eight conditions formed by orientation, norm and leader gender produced a single prototypicality variable. Irrespective of participant gender, prototypical leaders were considered more effective in high then low salience groups, and in high salience groups prototypical leaders were more effective than less prototypical leaders. Alternative explanations based on status characteristics and role incongruity theory do not account well for the findings. Implications of these results for the glass ceiling effect and for a wider social identity analysis of the impact of demographic group membership on leadership in small groups are discussed. (c) 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Relational time for systems of oscillators

Using an elementary example based on two simple harmonic oscillators, we show how a relational time may be defined that leads to an approximate Schrodinger dynamics for subsystems, with corrections leading to an intrinsic decoherence in the energy eigenstates of the subsystem.

Toy model for a relational formulation of quantum theory

In the absence of an external frame of reference-i.e., in background independent theories such as general relativity-physical degrees of freedom must describe relations between systems. Using a simple model, we investigate how such a relational quantum theory naturally arises by promoting reference systems to the status of dynamical entities. Our goal is twofold. First, we demonstrate using elementary quantum theory how any quantum mechanical experiment admits a purely relational description at a fundamental. Second, we describe how the original non-relational theory approximately emerges from the fully relational theory when reference systems become semi-classical. Our technique is motivated by a Bayesian approach to quantum mechanics, and relies on the noiseless subsystem method of quantum information science used to protect quantum states against undesired noise. The relational theory naturally predicts a fundamental decoherence mechanism, so an arrow of time emerges from a time-symmetric theory. Moreover, our model circumvents the problem of the collapse of the wave packet as the probability interpretation is only ever applied to diagonal density operators. Finally, the physical states of the relational theory can be described in terms of spin networks introduced by Penrose as a combinatorial description of geometry, and widely studied in the loop formulation of quantum gravity. Thus, our simple bottom-up approach (starting from the semiclassical limit to derive the fully relational quantum theory) may offer interesting insights on the low energy limit of quantum gravity.

Workplace familism and psychological contract breach in the Philippines

The present study addresses the call for theory-based investigations on workplace familism. It contributes to the literature by proposing and testing the moderating role of workplace familism between psychological contract breach and civic virtue behaviour. We surveyed 267 full-time employees and found main effects of both types of workplace familism (i.e. workplace organisational and workplace supervisor familism) and breach of relational obligations on civic virtue behaviour. Workplace supervisor familism also moderated the relationship between breach and civic virtue behaviour, with the negative relationship between breach and civic virtue behaviour stronger when workplace supervisor familism was high. This suggests that employees with a high level of workplace supervisor familism may feel a sense of betrayal and, therefore, respond more negatively to contract breach. Implications for practice and directions for future research are discussed.