This project explores the effects of senior and middle managers' leadership on employees' emotional experiences, attitudes, and behavior in work groups during radical organizational change. Drawing on theories of organizational change and leadership in the field of organizational behavior and of emotion in the fields of psychology and neurobiology, we predict how and why middle managers' leadership behaviors (transformational, transactional, and emotional intelligence) will influence their employees' affective experiences during radical organizational change, either by alleviating negative affect (e.g., anxiety) and/or by inducing positive affect (e.g., excitement). Further hypotheses address a resulting chain of relationships from their affective experience to their attitudes toward change (openness to change and commitment to change), to their behavioral support for the change, defined in terms of cooperativeness and innovativeness, ultimately to employee enactment of the change, a performance outcome at the work group level, defined as the extent to which a radical, significant, and sustainable change is established in their daily work processes.
The multi-disciplinary research team combines a strong knowledge of the organizational change, emotion, leadership, and teams literatures with more than two decades of experience in conducting large-scale field studies. This team will empirically test these hypotheses on a number of work groups within a large US government agency undergoing radical organizational transformation. The research methodology will include an experience sampling procedure to assess employee affective experience, employee self-reports of attitudes and behaviors in support for the change, the employee assessment of middle managers' leadership behaviors, and the middle managers' assessment of their senior managers.
The intellectual merit of this research lies in its explication of the rarely studied, but critical role of employees' affective experience and senior and middle managers' leadership in radical organizational change. Findings will also enrich and inform theories of emotion in the field of psychology by examining attitudinal and behavioral consequences of affective experiences in a real- time, high-stress situation.
This research also will have an important and broad impact at the societal level for those who face the enormous challenge of radical organizational change in the private, non-profit, and public sectors. In addition to students' dissertation research, presentations at national conferences, and scholarly publications, results will be disseminated through a three-day research-to-practice conference on the role of middle manager leadership and work group affective experience in successful organizational change.
