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Introduction
The success of organizational change interventions relies heavily on the abilities and commitment of people to implement these interventions and see them through to completion. It has been said to be practically impossible for organizational change initiatives to succeed when employees are neither willing nor proactively engaged (Jacobs et al. , 2013). Ultimately, the job of generating this engagement and ensuring that people have the ability to implement these interventions rests on the shoulders of an organization's leaders. A key variable in organizational change, therefore, is the effectiveness of its leaders - in particular, their effectiveness in leading change.
A theory of leadership that has gained traction in the last decade or so is implicit leadership theory (ILT). In contrast to the leader-centric approach that describes what makes effective leaders, ILT takes a follower-centric approach by seeking to understand the expectations or schemas of followers of leaders. Although there is robust literature on ILTs, the approach used in eliciting leadership schemas of followers has not usually identified a specific context. We contend, however, that implementing organizational changes may require a different set of leadership traits and behaviors, compared with typical leadership functions. Hence, this study focused on the specific context of leading organizational change. The study aimed to explore the ILT model as it applies to the leadership of change; that is, to explore an implicit change leadership theory (ICLT).
Beyond the impact of leaders, another key variable in influencing the success of organizational change is the management of the processes involved in instituting change. In keeping with the philosophy of ILT, we suggest that the extent to which people perceive change management (CM) to be effective depends on their assumptions about change and how it should be managed. Mirroring the ICLT model, this study aimed to derive subordinate's schemas for effective CM.
ICLT
Much of the literature on leadership focuses on the leader. However, leadership is a social process and it is thus important to understand the context in which leadership occurs (Schyns et al. , 2011). An emergent perspective in leadership is that of a follower-centric approach that recognizes that the notion of effective leadership is a social construction and effective leadership is in the mind of the perceiver (Meindl, 1995;...