Visions of Change as Visions of Continuity

By M. Venus, D. Stam, D. van Knippenberg. Academy of Management Journal, 2019

103 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Despite wide consensus that leader vision is a key vehicle for leaders to motivate followers to support organizational change, it remains far from clear what characterizes an effective vision of change. Research on organizational change that uses a social identity perspective has asserted that one important reason why followers resist change is because change may pose a threat to their subjective sense of continuity of organizational identity. Accordingly, we hypothesize that leaders that communicate visions of change can address this resistance by assuring followers that the essence of the organizational identity will remain unchanged – making their vision of change also a vision of continuity. In line with our proposition that collective continuity is valued because it serves an uncertainty-reduction function, such visions should be more predictive of vision effectiveness the higher follower work-related uncertainty. Across a field study and an experimental study we found support for these predictions.

Subfields: Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/77752e43ca976d9cb7e1ca37b4289ae0868e81bf

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In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

Citations in the corpus

Team innovation through collaboration: how visionary leadership spurs innovation via team cohesion (2020, background): “Its importance is often highlighted, but processes of vision pursuit and its outcomes are not yet fully understood (Venus, Stam, and van Knippenberg 2019), in part because research on outcomes of visionary leadership has emphasized the individual rather than group level of analysis.”
Advancing the social identity theory of leadership: A meta-analytic review of leader group prototypicality (2020, background): “Groups may also vary over time in prototype strength not only in terms of group tenure but also in terms of changes to the group that may at least temporarily render the group identity less well-defined (e.g., in times of organizational change; Venus et al., 2019).”