THE INFLUENCE OF LEADERSHIP BEHAVIOURS ON FOLLOWERS’ PERCEPTIONS AND REACTION TO CHANGE IN A MALTESE PUBLIC SERVICE ORGANISATION

Abstract

Organisational change consists of organisational actions aimed at changing organisational aspects such as culture, processes, delivery of service and so on. Such change can be incremental, aimed at fine tuning certain aspects of an organisation, or transformative, consisting of attempts to revolutionise one or more parts. Successful change, whether incremental or transformative, is critical for organisations to renew themselves and remain valid. Yet, many change initiatives fail. As a result, a lot of work has been done in the field of organisational change to understand what contributes to change success or failure. Change leadership was one of the areas that attracted most interest, yet most work has been leader centric, focusing on the positive aspects of leadership. However, researchers are increasingly focusing on the dark side of leadership to try and understand the effects on organisational change when leaders behave badly. This study aims to address some of this imbalance.

This research studies the influence of transformational and destructive leadership behaviours on affective commitment to change. It also looks at the mechanisms through which these two differing leadership behaviours exert such influence and explores the relationship between voice and affective commitment to change. To do so, the study uses a cross-sectional approach and collects data from two independent samples, followers and leaders of a Maltese public service organisation that experienced change. Transformational leadership behaviours were found to be positively related to affective commitment to change, whilst destructive leadership behaviours were found to relate negatively to affective commitment to change. Also, readiness for change was found to mediate the relationship between transformational leadership behaviours and affective commitment to change. Evidence of partial mediation was also found for resistance to change in the negative relationship between destructive leadership behaviours and affective commitment to change. A positive relationship between promotive voice and affective commitment to change was also found, though prohibitive voice was not found to be a significant predictor of affective commitment to change. As such, this study delivers several important findings with implications for both organisational change and change leadership literature.