A Qualitative Study of a Planned Change Initiative in a Multi-Mission Organization

The constructs of organizational culture, leadership and resistance to change have been used to describe organizational life, particularly in business. Literature indicates that leaders play a key role in influencing organizational change and that modifying organizational culture is within the realm of their responsibility. However, the majority of literature is theoretical; limited to one of the three constructs, and focuses on the private sector. Empirical work exploring the relationship of organizational culture, leadership and resistance to change in a public sector organization is limited. The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore how leaders use their perceptions of culture to minimize resistance to change and how their own cultural perceptions limit their actions in the organizational change initiative. The subject organization was military and multi-mission. The employees represented a variety of workforce categories: active-duty military, reserve members serving on active-duty contracts, and civilians and contractors with and without prior military backgrounds. Six leaders were selected through the process of purposeful sampling from a group of eighteen employees in leadership roles involved in an organizational change initiative. Participants represented a mix of workforce categories; two career officers who had attended the service military academy at the start of their military career, two who served as enlisted members before attending Officer Candidate School to become officers and two reservists serving on active duty assignments. Interviews with designated leaders of the change initiative were the principal data collection method. Content analysis and coding were used to systematically analyze the data by distilling the information into categories or "themes". Several findings and conclusions surfaced from the study. Findings indicated that leaders used their knowledge of organizational culture to overcome resistance to change in followers despite their lack of trust and direction from senior leadership. One of the more interesting findings involved the observation of a cultural disconnect between branch chief level leaders and leaders senior to them in the organization and resultant barriers to overcoming resistance to change. Participants did not consider their leadership role to include changing aspects of organizational culture to overcome resistance to change. Typically, resistance is conceptualized as something that occurs at the lowest levels of the organizational hierarchy. In this initiative, the lack of direction and trust of senior leadership indicated either a dysfunctional organizational structure or resistance from the top of the organizational hierarchy. This study should be useful to leaders responsible for implementing change initiatives and for scholars to build upon in theoretical and empirical studies. It is recommended that future research include empirical data from leaders at different levels of public sector hierarchy on the use of culture as both an enabling and inhibiting factor in planned organizational change.