Symposium: Drivers of change in organisations – and the importance of context

Improving working conditions and wellbeing in organisations is proving challenging with disappointing results (Richardson & Rothstein, 2008), despite the recommendations that poor wellbeing needs to be addressed at source (WHO, 2001, EU-OSHA, 2010). A growing body of research has suggested that a possible explanation for the disappointing results is that the process by which interventions are implemented are as important as the content of the intervention (Nielsen & Noblet, 2018). An important aspect of the process may be role of change agents or drivers of change. The drivers of change have often been defined as line managers or consultants (Nielsen & Noblet, 2018), however, also others may play an important role in making changes happen in the workplace.

In the present symposium, we present studies across a range of organisational settings to explore the context of drivers of change. Line managers have been identified as important drivers of change (Nielsen, 2017) and their transformational leadership style has been found to be of particular importance to making changes happen (Abildgaard et al., in press; Lundmark, Hasson, von Thiele Schwarz, Hasson, & Tafvelin, 2017), however, training transformational leadership is a challenge and leadership training often fails to achieve its intended outcomes (Avolio, Reichard, Hannah, & Walumbwa, 2017) and as a result the context of training transformational leadership has received increasing attention.

The first study explores the extent to which how followers and leaders agree on the degree of formalisation and leaders being employee oriented impacts leaders’ ability to change transformational leadership behaviours post-training. The second study, focuses on the role of safety representatives in making organisational interventions happen. It explores the mental models of safety representatives and the roles they take on to make the intervention happen. The third study focuses on employees as the drivers of change. In this study, selected employees were selected as drivers of change and trained in running dialogue workshops. We explore whether these employees’ job satisfaction increased if these drivers of change perceived they were a good fit to the role. In the fourth and final study, we explored teams as drivers of change. In this study we focused on whether leaders and followers’ agreement on a good participative safety climate influenced intervention outcomes.

These studies offer complementary perspectives on the drivers of change for organizational interventions, and combined, they clearly show how vital it is to not only focus on the intervention, but also the contextual factors that will have a significant impact on the success of organizational interventions.

CHAIR
Karina Nielsen
University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom

IN THIS SYMPOSIUM

Does seeing eye to eye on pre-training context influence followers’ perceptions of leadership training outcomes?
Susanne Tafvelin, Karina Nielsen, Robert Lundmark, Ulrica von Thiele Schwarz, Johan Simonsen Abildgaard, Henna Hasson
Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden.
University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom.
Mälardalen University, Västerås, Sweden.
National Research Centre for the Working Environment, Copenhagen, Denmark.
Karolinska institutet, Stockholm, Sweden

The role of safety representatives’ sensemaking in implementing organizational interventions
Eyvind Helland, Marit Christensen, Siw Tone Innstrand, Anne Iversen, Karina Nielsen
Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway.
University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom

What about me? The impact of organizational changes on organizational change agents
Karina Nielsen, Jeremy Dawson, Ulrica von Thiele Schwarz, Henna Hasson
University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom.
Malardalen University, Malardalen, Sweden.
Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden

Congruence rules! Increased self-efficacy after an occupational health intervention – but only if leaders and teams agree about participative safety climate
Ulrica von Thiele Schwarz, Carina Loeb, Henna Hasson, Susanne Tafvelin
Mälardalen University, Västerås, Sweden.
Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden.
Stockholm County Council, Stockholm, Sweden.
Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden