Change leaders and change managers: different or
complementary?
Keywords
Change, Change management,
Delphi method, Competences,
Management development,
Middle management
Abstract
The role of ``change leaders’’ in
initiating or sponsoring strategic
change in organisations is often
positively presented as the
counter-image of traditional
managerial roles. Managers, and
especially middle managers, are
viewed as individuals lacking in
the, apparently, proactive
attributes of flexibility, risk-taking
and openness to new ideas
essential for creating or managing ability to deal with uncertainty, and
change. However, there have been openness to new ideas. Unfortunately, this
few attempts to clarify these
counter-images, or the extent to
which the roles of leading and
managing change may in fact be
complementary. The research
presented here uses a Delphi-style conformists rather than innovators; they
panel of ten change agent experts
to identify and rank the sets of
``attributes’’ they perceive to
characterise the roles of leading
and managing change. The
findings suggest that the
attributes of the two roles are
different, yet complementary. It is change leadership has tended to amplify the
concluded that the distinction
between ``change leaders’’ and
``change managers’’ may be useful
in clarifying the nature of the
relationship between leadership
and management in processes of
organisational change.
Received: April 2002
Revised: December 2002
Accepted: January 2003
Leadership & Organization
Development Journal
24/5 [2003] 285-293
# MCB UP Limited
[ISSN 0143-7739]
[DOI 10.1108/01437730310485806]
Raymond Caldwell
Birkbeck College, University of London, London, UK
Introduction
The role and significance of ``change leaders’’
in organisations has become a subject of
enormous interest over the last two decades.
During the 1980s, the ``change master’’ and
``transformational leadership’’ literature
presented leaders as charismatic heroes of
radical corporate transformation that sought
to destroy rigid and inflexible structures
(Kanter, 1983; Devanna and Tichy, 1986; Bass,
1990). Various extraordinary qualities, traits
and attributes were associated with these
change champions, including risk-taking, the
positive affirmation of leadership was often
conceived against the negative counter-
image of traditional managerial roles.
Managers were categorised as ``adaptors’’ or
tended to be perceived as control-oriented,
lacking in vision and unwilling to take risks.
The idea that ``leading’’ and ``managing’’
are different activities is, of course, not new,
but the increased focus on the virtues of
purely rhetorical meaning of the distinction
(Kotter, 1990). This is unfortunate. For if
leadership is essential to initiate innovation,
it is equally clear that managers increasingly
play a vital role in implementing change
(Kirton, 1980; Kanter, 1989). Rather than
enacting their traditional role of directing or
controlling work processes, managers often
perform a new role as ``facilitators’’,
encouraging commitment and empowering
employees to be receptive to change and
technological innovation. Moreover, as new
flatter and more dynamic organisations have
emerged, managers and functional
specialists are now expected to embrace the
change-oriented attributes or behaviours
that will allow them to cope with uncertainty
The Emerald Research Register for this journal is available at
http://w ww .emeraldinsight.com/researchregister
and become leaders, innovators and risk
takers (Beatty and Lee, 1992; Ulrich, 1997).
Yet, despite this new awareness of the
complementary nature of leadership and
management roles in processes of
organisational change, there have been few
attempts to clearly delineate different types
of change agent roles, or to identify the
specific set of attributes associated with
leading and managing change. Instead, there
has been a tendency to conflate the image of
the ``change leader’’ into a single generic type
and to conceive the attributes of managers as
antithetical to change agent roles. In this
respect, middle managers are still presented
as potentially the most powerful
constituency to resist change: the notorious
``change-resistant lump in the middle’’.
Is it possible to explore the relationship
between leading and making change without
embracing simplistic or one-sided models of
change agency? What attributes differentiate
these roles? By using a Delphi-style panel of
ten change agent experts, the ``attributes’’
perceive to characterise the roles of leading
and managing change are identified and
ranked in their order of importance. The
findings suggest that the attributes of the two
roles are different, yet complementary.
The research is presented in four stages:
1 It begins with a selective review of some of
the existing literature on leadership and
managerial roles, and this is partly used
to identify the various attributes
associated with leaders and managers
performing change agent roles.
2 The Delphi methodology used to select
and rank attributes is then discussed.
3 This is followed by an outline of the main
findings of the panel of experts regarding
the ranking of the ten key attributes of
change leaders and change managers.
4 The complexity and overlapping nature of
the attributes are then discussed, and it is
concluded that the attributes may be
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
http://w w w .em eraldinsight.com /0143-7739.htm
[ 285 ]
Raymond Caldwell useful in clarifying the nature of the
Change leaders and change relationship between leadership and
managers: different or management in processes of
complementary?
organisational change.
Leadership & Organization
Development Journal
24/5 [2003] 285-293
Change leaders
The resurgence of interest in change leaders
began in the early 1980s when many large US
corporations faced severe challenges in
managing innovation and culture change.
New types of entrepreneurial and ``post-
entrepreneurial’’ change leaders were
required to create flatter, faster and more
flexible organisations guided by a shared
sense of strategic mission and values
(Kanter, 1983). The ``change master’’
literature highlighted the importance of
strong ``corporate entrepreneurs’’ and
``innovators’’ in transforming their moribund
organisations. These were people ``who test
limits and create new possibilities for
organisational action by pushing and
directing the innovation process’’ (Kanter,
1983, p.76). Similarly, research on
``charismatic’’ and ``transformational
leadership’’ focused on how visionary figures
can articulate a new strategic vision that
would inspire employees to embrace
innovation and change (Devanna and Tichy,
1986; Bass, 1990; Behling and McFillen, 1996).
Various traits and ``magic’’ qualities were
associated with these people and their impact
on employees: self-identification as a change
agent, courage and outspokenness, belief in
people, openness to lifelong learning, ability
to deal with complexity and uncertainty, and
their powerful strategic vision. In a number
of cases, successful large-scale organisational
change programmes appeared to be guided by
leaders who displayed these characteristics
and who were able to act as catalysts for
change (Howell and Higgins, 1990; Ginsberg
and Abrahamson, 1991; Dunphy and Stace,
1993; Ulrich, 1997).
Never strictly an extension of the myriad
trait-style-contingency perspectives of
leadership theory, but rather their
reinvention, the new change leader paradigm
blended a conventional focus on leadership
characteristics and behaviour with a
renewed emphasis on the dynamic between
leaders and followers. ``Leadership defines
what the future should look like, aligns
people with that vision, and inspires them to
make it happen’’ (Kotter, 1996, p. 35).
Leadership was essential to trigger or
sponsor strategic change, but without the
ability to create and sustain an inspiring
vision, change would simply fail. In this
sense, leadership and ``empowerment’’ were
[ 286 ]
mutually reinforcing aspects of the change
process. Unfortunately, most of the research
in this area was based on culturally specific
evidence or selective, post-hoc case studies
that offered a purely prescriptive paradigm
for a new style of change leadership (Dan
Hartog et al., 1999).
If the reinvention of leadership theories
was often presented in highly prescriptive
formulations, it also built on the traditions of
empirically focused research on leadership
characteristics. Kirkpatrick and Locke (1991)
restated many of the conventional ``traits’’ of
leadership, including personal drive, the
desire to lead, honesty and integrity,
cognitive ability, self-confidence and
knowledge of the business, but interestingly,
they also added a characteristic more often
associated with change leaders: ``flexibility’’.
A similar list has been identified by Dulewicz
and Herbert (2000), with the important
addition of ``risk-taking’’ as a characteristic
of high-flyers who can cope with change and
uncertainty while promoting innovation.
Despite the empirical and analytical
sophistication of some of the new approaches
to change leadership, they failed to clarify
the apparent differences between leaders and
managers in the change process, or the extent
to which these roles may be complementary.
Moreover, this was reinforced by a persistent
underestimation of the significance of change
agency as a ``distributed phenomenon’’ at all
levels in organisations facing radical or
continuous change (Senge, 1990, 2002). These
issues are increasingly important in
understanding the new roles of managers as
change agents.
Change managers
The role of managers, especially middle
managers, in implementing change is often
controversial. Traditionally, a manager is
thought of as a person with the legitimate
authority or power to direct the work-related
activities of one or more subordinates: the
manager is essentially a supervisor. This fits
the classical model of management, which
suggests that managers plan and organise,
direct and control, reward and punish. The
model is rational, functional, mechanistic
and ultimately prescriptive: it tells managers
what they should do.
From the earliest studies of managerial
practice, doubts were expressed about the
validity of this model of managerial
behaviour (Mintzberg, 1990). In a world of
constant organisational change the model
now looks increasingly outmoded (Beatty
and Lee, 1992, p. 961). The enormous
Raymond Caldwell processing and levelling power of
Change leaders and change information technology and the competitive
managers: different or imperatives of market forces and customer
complementary?
demands have led to the emergence of less
Leadership & Organization
Development Journal hierarchical and more flexible organisations
24/5 [2003] 285-293 that have significantly changed managers’
roles. This transformation is associated with
a paradigm shift from the traditional
``command and control’’ style of management
based on top-down directives and sanctions
to a new ``involvement and commitment’’
style in which managers devolve power while
enabling or ``empowering’’ individual
employees and self-managed teams to take
responsibility for front-line decision making,
customer care, quality standards and
performance targets (Fligstein, 1990).
The impact of this paradigm shift on the
role of middle managers is often very
significant, because they are both the
``object’’ and agency of change (Storey, 1992;
Newell and Dopson, 1996). They must accept
an overall decline in their traditional
supervisory role, while at the same time
expanding their new enabling and
empowering role (Goffee and Scase, 1992). As
hierarchy is weakened and authority
devolved, managers are increasingly
expected to overcome organisational
boundaries and bring teams and groups
together to manage innovation and change
(Rothwell, 1992). Usually this requires the
development of a new set of soft,
interpersonal skills: listening,
communicating, team building, facilitating,
negotiating and conflict resolution.
Moreover, managers are increasingly
expected to display a positive or exemplary
``change orientation’’ as demonstrated by
personal flexibility, the competence to deal
with uncertainty or ambiguity and the
ability to take risks (Farnham, 2002).
Most attempts to come to terms with the
shifting nature and change-oriented
attributes of managerial roles have been
disappointing. Certainly, the task of
identifying the managerial ``competencies’’ of
change agents has proved to be notoriously
difficult (Buchanan and Boddy, 1992). In
principle, the concept of competency offers
the hope of creating an integrative
framework for selecting, appraising, training
and developing managers (Boyatzis, 1982;
Albanese, 1989). There is, however, little
empirical evidence to suggest that the
identification and listing of competencies has
any universal application (Hays et al., 1998).
Indeed, the more rigorously and consistently
competencies are defined the less likely they
are to match the shifting empirical realities
and new agendas of management practice
(Watson and Harris, 1999). As organisations
``downsize’’ or become more flexible the issue
of fixed or static competencies becomes even
more problematic. In addition, the mere
possession of a set of competencies does not
ensure effective or consistent performance of
a role or task. Even two managers who
appear to possess the same level of
competency may use it differently; especially
in a context where their roles may change.
All of these issues are further complicated
for managers performing change agents
roles. Burgoyne (1990) points to the
overarching competencies associated with
``learning, changing, adapting, forecasting,
anticipating and creating change’’
(Burgoyne, 1990, p.23). These tend to be
future-oriented meta-competencies or
``capabilities’’ more often associated with
leadership and the ability to master the
context of change. Similarly, Senge (2002)
suggests that the attributes of change
leadership within ``learning organisations’’
are concerned with ``the capacity to sustain
change that brings forth new realities’’
(Senge, 2002, p. 7). Clearly, these sorts of
capabilities are not easy to define, develop or
integrate into conventional behavioural
models of management development, and
there is therefore growing disillusionment
with the competency-framework as an
approach to change agency.
Identifying attributes: the
methodology
Clearly, the difficulties of charting a course
through the competing perspectives on
leadership and managerial roles are very
considerable. How can we avoid the
exaggerated claims of leadership models and
the pitfalls of competency approaches to
management? Does the distinction between
leading and managing help in understanding
change agency? And more importantly, can
some general guidance be given as to some of
the attributes that may be relevant to
understanding the roles of leading and
managing change?
The research presented here seeks to
identify the ``attributes’’ perceived to be most
associated with ``change leaders’’ and
``change managers’’. ``Attributes’’ were
broadly conceived as a mix of skills,
knowledge, capabilities, competencies and
personal characteristics that are perceived to
be of considerable importance to change
agents in performing their role. The
definition was deliberately inclusive and
practice-oriented to ensure that no important
attributes were excluded from the initial
review process.
[ 287 ]
Raymond Caldwell An overall list of ``attributes’’ relevant for
Change leaders and change change agents was arrived at by: a review of
managers: different or some of the literature on leadership and
complementary?
change agency and an analysis of 147
Leadership & Organization
Development Journal recruitment advertisements in two major UK
24/5 [2003] 285-293 national newspapers over six months which
used keywords or phrases, such as ``change
agent’’, ``managing change’’, ``change leader’’,
``leading change’’ and ``change management’’.
This resulted in a comprehensive list of 67
attributes, some empirical others
prescriptive, which were identified as
relevant to change agents in general.
An expert panel then reviewed the
comprehensive list of attributes. The panel
consisted of ten members, three HR directors
routinely involved in selecting and developing
change agents as well as acting in a senior HR
change role, three experienced management
consultants involved in major change
projects, and four senior managers who had
or were performing important change agent
roles within their organisations. Two of the
HR directors were women; all the other panel
members were male. In addition, all the panel
members worked for large private sector
companies or major consultancy
organisations and had from 6 to 15 years
experience in the change management arena.
Having created a list of 67 potentially
relevant attributes of change agents, the role
of the panel of experts was to synthesise,
narrow-down and rank these attributes by an
evaluative decision process designed to
achieve a degree of expert consensus as to the
attributes of change leaders and change
managers. This was achieved by a four-step
process:
1 Step one. The panel was asked to select
those attributes that were directly
relevant to leading and managing change,
rather than those attributes,
``competencies’’ or traits often associated
with leadership or managerial roles. For
example, ``ambition and drive’’ is often
characterised as an essential leadership
``trait’’, although it is not necessarily a
characteristic that differentiates ``leaders’’
from ``change leaders’’. Some leaders may
have enormous ambition and drive while
being deeply resistant to change.
2 Step two. The panel was asked to further
narrow down the overall list of attributes
by agreeing two separate lists of ten key
attributes for those leading and managing
change. This was achieved by application
of the following rule: where at least seven
of the ten panel members agreed that an
attribute should be included on the two
lists this was taken to be a consensus
agreement and the attribute was included.
The objective was to get the expert panel to
[ 288 ]
agree on a separate and limited number of
key attributes that could be used to
differentiate ``change leaders’’ from
``change managers’’. The epistemological
presumption was that such differences
appeared to exist, certainly in the
literature and empirical research, and that
these differences needed to be clarified.
However, the panel members were allowed
to include the same attributes for change
leaders and change managers, if they
believed these attributes were necessary or
appropriate for both roles. This occurred
for three attributes, although some of the
other attributes included in the key
attribute listings were also equivalent or
complementary (Tables I and II).
3 Step three. Once the two lists of ten key
attributes were agreed, each individual
panel member was then asked to score the
attributes on a scale of importance (from 10
to 1). The scores were then used to produce
a ranking of the attributes (Tables I and II).
4 Step four. A follow-up discussion was held
with all the panel members to discuss
their individual rankings of the two sets of
key attributes.
The advantage of this four-step Delphi-style
decision process was that it allowed
attributes considered important by
practitioners and researchers to be evaluated
within the context of an expert discourse on
change agency. Alternative methodologies
are, of course, possible, and they may arrive
at different lists of attributes, or encourage
critical dissent, rather than expert
agreement, as to the validity of attribute
categorisation (Johnson and Cassell, 2001).
Nonetheless, the chosen methodology
produced some interesting findings:
The attributes selected and ranked by the
expert panel were congruent with some of
the attributes identified in the literature
and research.
The attribute lists provided an insight
into how change agent experts or
practitioners perceive the differentiation
Table I
Key attributes of change leaders
Score ou t of 100
Inspiring vision 92
E ntrepre neurship 87
Integrity an d hones ty 76
Lea rning fro m o thers 72
O pe nness to new ideas 66
R isk-taking 56
Ada ptability an d fle xibility 49
C reativity 42
E xperim enta tion 38
U sing pow er 29
Raymond Caldwell Table II
Change leaders and change Key attributes of change managers
managers: different or
complementary? Score ou t o f 100
Leadership & Organization
Development Journal E m p ow ering others 88
24/5 [2003] 285-293 T eam building 82
Lea rnin g from others 79
A dapta bility and flexib ility 69
O pe nness to new ideas 64
M an aging resista nce 58
C on flict resolu tion 53
N etw orking 52
K now ledge of the busin ess 37
P rob lem solving 29
between leadership and management in
the process of change.
The overlapping nature of some of the
attributes strongly suggested that the
roles of leading and managing change are
complementary (Tables I and II).
Change leaders: exploring
attributes
Against the background of research on
leadership and change, the ranking of the ten
attributes of change leaders by the expert
panel revealed some predictable, but also
some unexpected results (Table I). Of greatest
importance was the need for change leaders
to have an inspiring vision, a finding that
tends to reinforce the considerable emphasis
on this factor in the US research literature on
change leaders.
Entrepreneurship was also considered
very important by most panel members;
again a finding that fits well with some of the
research on the personal characteristics or
mould breaking ambitions of change leaders,
especially in commercial organisations. It is
also congruent with the associated attribute
of ``risk-taking’’ (Table I). However, although
entrepreneurship was broadly perceived as
an important engine of innovation and
change, there was concern that the personal
characteristics of entrepreneurs were
``intrinsically unsuited’’ to the ``long-
marches’’ required to implement or manage
organisational change. ``Founding a new
company is different from leading change’’,
was the view of one panel member. While
some members of the panel agreed with this
view, the counterview was also strongly
expressed that entrepreneurship had to be
embedded in all organisations, large and
small, and at all levels. Moreover, it was
suggested that the distinction between long-
term and short-term change was breaking
down as the pace of innovation in many
organisations became radical or
discontinuous.
One of the most interesting ethical
attributes included in the ranking was
integrity and honesty. It was given a
reassuring endorsement by almost three-
quarters of the panel, indicating the
importance they placed on these virtues. This
finding was followed up in discussions with
the panel members. A number of them
argued that leadership involved an ethical
inclusion of employees that could not be
based on pure self-interest or crude ideas of
market driven competitiveness. Increasingly,
``ethical competition was a corrective to the
worst imperfections of the marketplace’’.
There was also general agreement that a
leader’s consistency of purpose and openness
of communication was the best way of
gauging ``trust’’. Moreover, given the
uncertainties that change creates,
maintaining trust was considered very
important. Nevertheless, one panel member
felt there were ``realistic limits to honesty’’,
especially if it might exacerbate
uncertainties, generate anxiety or cause
greater de-motivation for those who might
loose out in the change process.
Another interesting attribute, learning
from others, was ranked highly by most of
the panel members. This appeared to confirm
a general endorsement of the concept of
``organisational leaning’’, at least in the sense
that learning has to take place at all levels
within organisations. Indeed, one of the
panel members did not hesitate to
enthusiastically endorse Senge’s view that a
learning organisation is defined by its
``capacity to create change’’, although this is
not precisely Senge’s formulation (1990, p. 14).
Openness to new ideas was considered a
characteristic attribute of both change
leaders and change managers. What is
interesting is that it is ranked fifth in both
lists of attributes. In discussion with the
panel, it became clear that this was an
attribute the change leaders and managers
shared because it differentiated them from
their change resistant counterparts. As one
panel member put it rather bluntly:
People at the top of the tree and those in
middle management positions have got there
by being dependable and predictable . . . You
can’t expect them to be open to new ways of
doing things, even more so, if they have got a
lot to lose.
Curiously, the apparently essential change
leader characteristic, risk-taking, did not
feature as prominently as one might have
expected from a reading of the research
literature on leadership. Again, this finding
was followed up in the panel discussions.
[ 289 ]
Raymond Caldwell Most of the panel members agreed that
Change leaders and change strategies of change are risk strategies. They
managers: different or involve organisations in setting new
complementary?
objectives or directions with unknown
Leadership & Organization
Development Journal outcomes. However, as one panel member
24/5 [2003] 285-293 observed managing risk was increasingly
linked to learning: ``risk is too complex today
for any one person to carry the
responsibility’’.
Interestingly, the emphasis on risk-taking
was complemented by the associated
attributes of creativity and experimentation.
But again, these attributes were perceived as
collective or team based, rather than
individual. One panel member observed that:
``leaders do not create all the new ideas, they
create the contexts in which they emerge’’.
Similarly, some of the panel spoke of
experimentation as a team process of
``prototyping’’, ``iteration’’ and ``learning by
practice’’ that had to emerge gradually if it
was to lead to change and innovation. One
panel member also insisted that by
identifying these attributes with leaders was
a case of ``attribution bias’’, of projecting
attributes onto leaders as way of deluding
ourselves that someone else would create
new ideas: ``everyone can act as a change
agent and everyone has a capacity to be
creative’’.
It comes as no surprise that adaptability
and flexibility were included in the list of
attributes for both change leaders and
managers. These attributes appear in
virtually every discussion of change agency
(Buchanan and Boddy, 1992, pp. 96-7).
Perhaps as a necessary reality check, using
power appeared on the list of attributes, but
what is surprising is the low ranking it
received. There are, of course, many
advocates of the view that the pace of change
can be quickened by the use of top-down
power or coercion (Eccles, 1994, pp. 24). Only
two of the panel members were willing to
fully endorse this view, but in a limited range
of cases:
Power is useful to take out the opposition
after a take-over or were immediate
organisation survival is at stake . . . It is not a
useful tool to motivate people to change. If
you want change to be self-sustaining you
have to switch from power to persuasion.
As a partial reinforcement of this view, none
of the panel members were enthusiastic
advocates of a ``big bang theory of change’’.
Interestingly, some of the more traditional
characteristics associated with leadership:
e.g. decisiveness and intelligence did not
appear in the ranking (Kirkpatrick and
Locke, 1991). This suggests, perhaps, that the
attributes of change leaders, as perceived by
the panel, differ in some fundamental
[ 290 ]
respects from those associated with
traditional models of leadership. This was an
issue probed in the discussion with the panel.
A number of panel members did believe there
was a ``profound difference’’; although some
argued that it was rather a question of
shifting ``leadership styles’’ to suit the
context of change. Another panel member
argued that the attributes were often difficult
to separate in practice:
An inspiring vision is important, but you do
not get to the top and stay there unless you
have the drive, ambition and ruthlessness it
takes to be successful.
This comment prompted another panel
member to suggest that change leaders were
unique, but they had a limited ``shelf life’’,
and each new change might require a
different leader capable of directing it.
Change managers: exploring
attributes
Heading the list of the ten key attributes of
change managers was empowering others,
followed by team building, with learning
from others ranked very highly by most of
the panel (Table I). This is an interesting
ranking of attributes. The ranking appears to
be congruent with a perceived shift in
managerial roles towards the ``soft’’
attributes associated with ``empowerment’’.
The emphasis is on managers’ ability to
empower employees, encourage team
working and manage their self-development
through learning.
Underlying the complementary nature of
change leader and change manager roles, the
attribute of learning from others was almost
equally scored in both rankings. This is
perhaps a reassuring confirmation of how
widely concepts of learning have been
espoused, although this tells us very little
about how deeply embedded this concept is in
management practice. Nevertheless, one
panel member was optimistic about the
prospects for progress:
The learning organisation is a far-off land,
every change is a small journey of learning
towards it.
It was also important for change managers to
show adaptability and flexibility. This
attribute was ranked fourth in the list of ten
attributes, although one might have expected
it to be given a little more prominence, given
its widespread espousal as the defining
attribute of change agents. It was also an
attribute that characterised change leaders.
Further underscoring the complementary
nature of the roles of leading and managing
change, openness to new ideas was an
Raymond Caldwell attribute ranked highly on both lists of
Change leaders and change attributes.
managers: different or Three attributes with similar ranking,
complementary?
managing resistance, conflict resolution and
Leadership & Organization
Development Journal networking, all appeared to be interrelated in
24/5 [2003] 285-293 that they reflected the front line aspects of
managing change in the face of obstacles,
conflict or opposition. Most of the panel
members agreed that managers are more
likely to experience the ``raw realities’’ of
how people experience change, and they have
to deal with the consequences. One panel
member summed up the dilemma as follows:
Leaders may create the big picture, it is
managers who have to deal with the devil in
the detail.
Interestingly, what might be considered the
two attributes of classical managerial roles
achieved a relatively lower ranking, with
knowledge of the business and problem
solving skills coming last on the list of ten
attributes. Does this again reinforce a
perceived shift in managerial roles away
from specialist or functional activities
defined by practical business knowledge and
problem solving abilities towards the
apparent panacea of ``empowerment’’ as a
mechanism of change (Kanter, 1989)? Or, did
the panel members’ disagreements over what
attributes to select and how to rank them
affect the ranking? These questions were
raised in discussion with the panel. Most of
the panel felt there had been a very
significant ``sea change’’ in managerial roles
over the last two decades in the UK, and that
the possession of change-oriented attributes
was a fundamental requirement of career
success in most large commercial
organisations. ``It’s the foundation of career
success’’ was one strong formulation of this
viewpoint. But, interestingly, most of the
panel did not view the emphasis on change as
simply a soft versus hard issue. Even if soft
attributes were ranked more highly than
hard ones, they had to be melded together in
practice. However, one panel member
highlighted the potential for ``dissonance’’
this might create:
Managers have to cope with the pressures of
being pulled in two different directions . . .
meeting profit or performance targets and
managing culture change are often two very
separate goals . . . it’s only the pragmatists
who can really cope with this tension and
avoid burn out.
Conclusion
What emerges most clearly from the ranking
of the two sets of attributes and the follow-up
discussion with the panel of experts is a
greater clarification of the distinction
between change leaders and change
managers. This can be broadly formulated as
follows: change leaders are those executives
or senior managers at the very top of the
organisation who envision, initiate or
sponsor strategic change of a far-reaching or
transformational nature. In contrast, change
managers are those middle level managers
and functional specialists who carry forward
and build support for change within business
units and key functions. Implicit in this
distinction is at least a partial clarification of
the relationship between leadership and
management in the change process. The
assumption is that change leadership is
about creating a vision of change, while
change management is about translating the
vision into agendas and actions. The two
challenges are different, yet complementary.
The idea that change leaders and managers
perform complementary roles is a useful
corrective to leadership models of change
agency, with their negative counter-images
of managerial roles. More generally,
however, the distinction between change
leaders and change managers proposed by
the research is a deliberately analytical-
prescriptive formulation of role types
designed to provide a tool for conceptualising
the multidimensional nature of change
agency (Doyle, 2001). As such, it is an attempt
to avoid both the conflation of change agency
with leadership models, or the ``one-model-
fits-all’’ of managerial ``competency’’
approaches, which reduce the qualities of
leadership to instrumental or behavioural
conceptions of management development and
learning. Equally, the attempt to
disaggregate the attributes into two separate
lists that overlap in many respects, was
designed to demonstrate just how complex
the issues are of separating the apparently
``innovative’’ attributes of change leaders
from the more ``adaptive’’ attributes of
change managers (Kirton, 1980). In practice,
of course, the two roles may often be
indistinguishable, because the attributes
required to lead and manage change are
simply inseparable aspects of managerial
work in organisations facing the ever-
increasing challenges of coping with
constant change.
The issue of overlapping roles raises, of
course, the validity and limitations of the
research methodology. The expert panel was
conceived as a Delphi-style tool to clarify the
change agent attributes of leaders and
managers, rather than a sampling
mechanism with claims to empirical validity.
It simply provided a way of establishing what
specific prototypical attributes may be
important differentiators of change leaders
[ 291 ]
Raymond Caldwell versus change managers. To validate the
Change leaders and change listings of attributes would require a larger
managers: different or
complementary? empirical survey, ideally with a cross-
cultural dimension (Dan Hartog et al., 1999).
Leadership & Organization
Development Journal For example, a survey might be able to
24/5 [2003] 285-293
establish whether there is a ``predicative
association’’ between the attributes
considered important by the expert panel and
a representative sample of respondents (e.g.
managers performing change agent roles).
Research using this ``expert predictor’’
methodology has certainly been valuable in
establishing some important empirical
differences between ``interim managers’’
acting as change agents and a more general
managerial sample (Robertson and Kinder,
1993; PA Consulting, 1999).
Unfortunately, even if this predictive
association could be established, it may not
be possible to operationalise this knowledge
of attributes as a form of learned expertise,
certainly not within the conventional
product-paradigms of management
development (Vloeberghs, 1998; Higgs and
Rowland, 2001). For example, ``learning from
others’’ and ``adaptability’’ are essentially
overarching or meta-competencies that are
difficult to fully clarify, although some
attributes (e.g. ``team-building’’ or ``conflict
resolution’’) may be open to ``competency’’
models. In this respect, the routine criticism
of management development programmes as
paying too much attention to operational or
line management issues, while neglecting
training in the ``specialist expertise’’ to
managing change, may be missing the point.
(Buchanan et al., 1999). There is rarely a
straightforward way to capture the
``expertise’’ of change agency, nor is it always
possible to translate change agent attributes
into competency profiles, training
interventions or empirical measures of
performance (Watson and Harris, 1999).
Despite these limitations, the research
presented here provides greater clarity and
some general guidance as to the key
attributes that may be useful in
understanding the specific change agent
roles of leading and managing change, as well
as illuminating the demanding requirements
and complexity of these roles.
References
Albanese, R. (1989), ``Competence-based
management education’’, Journal of
Management Development, Vol. 8 No. 2,
pp. 66-79.
Bass, B.M. (1990), ``From transactional to
transformational leadership: learning to
share the vision’’, Organisational Dynamics,
Vol. 18 No. 3, pp. 19-31.
[ 292 ]
Beatty, C.A. and Lee, G.L. (1992), ``Leadership
among middle managers: an explanation in
the context of technological change’’, Human
Relations, Vol. 45 No. 9, pp. 957-89.
Behling, O. and McFillen, J. (1996), ``Syncretical
model of charismatic leadership/
transformational leadership’’, Group and
Organisational Management, Vol. 12 No. 2,
June, pp. 163-91.
Boyatzis, R. (1982), The Competent Manager, John
Wiley, New York, NY.
Buchanan, D. and Boddy, D. (1992), The Expertise
of the Change Agent, Prentice-Hall, London.
Buchanan, D., Claydon, T. and Doyle, M. (1999),
``Organisational development and change: the
legacy of the 1990s’’, Human Resource
Management Journal, Vol. 9 No. 2, pp. 20-37.
Burgoyne, J. (1990), ``Doubts about competency’’,
in Devine, M. (Ed.), The Photofit Manager,
Unwin-Hyman, London, pp. 20-6.
Dan Hartog, D. and 174 co-authors (1999), ``Culture
specific and cross culturally generalizable
implicit leadership theories: are attributes of
charismatic/transformational leadership
universally endorsed?’’, Leadership Quarterly,
Vol. 10, pp. 219-56.
Devanna, M.A. and Tichy, N.M. (1986), ``The
transformational leader’’, Training and
Development Journal, Vol. 40 No. 7, pp. 27-32.
Doyle, M. (2001), ``Dispersing change agency in
high velocity change organisations: issues and
implications’’, Leadership and Organisational
Development, Vol. 22 No. 7, pp. 321-9.
Dulewicz, V. and Herbert, P. (2000), ``Predicting
advancement to senior management from
competencies and personality data: a
sevenyear follow up study’’, British Journal of
Management, Vol. 10 No. 1, pp. 13-23.
Dunphy, D. and Stace, D. (1993), ``The strategic
management of corporate change’’, Human
Relations, Vol. 46 No.8, pp. 905-18.
Eccles, T. (1994), Succeeding with Change:
Implementing Action-drive Strategies,
McGraw-Hill, London.
Farnham, A. (2002), ``Managers as change agents’’,
Journal of Change Management, Vol. 1 No. 1,
pp. 21-9.
Fligstein, N. (1990), The Transformation of
Corporate Control, Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, MA.
Ginsberg, A. and Abrahamson, E. (1991),
``Champions of change and strategic shifts:
the role of internal and external change
agents’’, Journal of Management Studies,
Vol. 28 No. 2, pp. 173-90.
Goffee, R. and Scase, R. (1992), ``Organizational
change and the corporate career: the
restructuring of managers’ job aspirations’’,
Human Relations, Vol. 45, pp. 363-85.
Hays, J., Rose-Quirie, A. and Allinson, C.W.
(1998), ``Senior managers’ perceptions of the
competencies they require for effective
performance: implications for training and
development’’, Personnel Review, Vol. 29 No. 1,
pp. 92-106.
Raymond Caldwell Higgs, M. and Rowland, D. (2001), ``Developing
Change leaders and change change leaders, assessing the impact of a
managers: different or development programme’’, Journal of Change
complementary?
Management, Vol. 2 No. 1, pp. 47-66.
Leadership & Organization
Development Journal Howell, J.M. and Higgins, C.A. (1990),
24/5 [2003] 285-293 ``Champions of change: identifying,
understanding and supporting champions of
technological innovation’’, Organisational
Dynamics, Vol. 19 No. 1, pp. 40-57.
Johnson, P. and Cassell, C. (2001), ``Epistemology
and work psychology: new agendas’’, Journal
of Occupational and Organisational
Psychology, Vol. 74 No. 2, pp. 125-43.
Kanter, R.B (1983), The Change Masters, Allen &
Unwin, London.
Kanter, R.B (1989), When Giants Learn to Dance,
Simon & Schuster, London.
Kirkpatrick S.A. and Locke, E.A. (1991),
``Leadership: do traits matter?’’, Academy of
Management Executive, Vol. 5 No. 2, pp. 48-60.
Kirton, M. (1980), ``Adaptors and innovators’’,
Human Relations, Vol. 3, pp. 213-24.
Kotter, J. (1990), A Force for Change: How
Leadership Differs from Management, Free
Press, New York, NY.
Kotter, J. (1996), Leading Change, Harvard
Business School Press, Boston, MA.
Mintzberg, H. (1990), ``The manager’s job: folklore
and fact’’, Harvard Business Review, Vol. 68
No. 2, pp. 163-76.
Newell, H. and Dopson, S. (1996), ``Muddle in the
middle: organisational restructuring and
middle management careers’’, Personnel
Review, Vol. 1 No. 4, pp. 4-20.
PA Consulting (1998), Interim Managers: A Breed
Apart?, PA Consulting, London.
Robertson, I.T. and Kinder, A. (1993), ``Personality
and competencies: The criterion-related
validity of some personality variables’’,
Journal of Occupational and Organisational
Psychology, Vol. 66 No. 5, pp. 703-16.
Rothwell, R. (1992), ``Successful industrial
innovation: critical success factors for the
1990s’’, R&D Management, Vol. 22 No. 3,
pp. 221-39.
Senge, P. (1990), The Fifth Dimension: The Art and
Practice of the Learning Organisation,
Century Business, London.
Senge, P. (2002), ``Illuminating the blind spot:
leadership in the context of emerging
worlds’’, available at: www.
dialogueonleadership.org
Storey, J. (1992), Developments in the Management
of Human Resources, Blackwell, Oxford.
Ulrich, D. (1997), Human Resource Champions,
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
Vloeberghs, D. (1998), ``Management development
in a context of constant change’’, Journal of
Management Development, Vol. 12 No. 9,
pp. 644-61.
Watson, T. and Harris, P. (1999), The Emergent
Manager, Sage, London.
Further reading
Westley, F. and Mintzberg, H. (1989), ``Visionary
leadership and strategic management’’,
Strategic Management Journal, Vol. 10,
pp. 17-32.
[ 293 ]