When Do Leaders Initiate Changes? The Roles of Coping Style and Organization Members’ Stability-Emphasizing Values

Noga Sverdlik, Shaul Oreg, Yair Berson

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

8 Scopus citations

Abstract

We explore the roles of leaders’ coping style and organization members’ emphasis on stability in predicting leaders’ initiation of changes in their organizations. Specifically, we hypothesized that leaders’ problem-focused style will be positively, and emotion-focused style negatively, related to the initiation of change. We further proposed that organization members' emphasis on stability will moderate the effect of leaders’ problem-focused style. We tested our model using time-lagged data from 75 school principals and 495/409 (Time 1/Time 2) teachers. Our results support the moderating role that the emphasis on stability has on the effect of problem-focused coping on leaders’ initiation of changes and provide some support for the negative effect of emotion-focused coping. Our findings complement the psychological literature on recipients of change with psychological insights about the factors that make leaders become change agents.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1338-1360
Number of pages23
JournalApplied Psychology
Volume69
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Sep 2020

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Developmental and Educational Psychology
  • Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous)
  • Applied Psychology

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