Premium
When Do Leaders Initiate Changes? The Roles of Coping Style and Organization Members’ Stability‐Emphasizing Values
Author(s) -
Sverdlik Noga,
Oreg Shaul,
Berson Yair
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
applied psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.497
H-Index - 88
eISSN - 1464-0597
pISSN - 0269-994X
DOI - 10.1111/apps.12224
Subject(s) - coping (psychology) , psychology , social psychology , style (visual arts) , developmental psychology , clinical psychology , archaeology , history
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.