Leadership in transformation: a collaborative management research approach to bridge the rigor-relevance gap

Leading change is one of the most difficult task for leadership, but at the same time is one of the most important and characterizing responsibility leaders have to shoulder. The study of leadership and change is not new, yet the real impact of leadership on organizational transformation is not fully understood and scientific literature is inconclusive. This work aims to investigate the role of leadership in organizational transformation, with a two-fold objective. First, it aims to re-examine the theoretical assumptions about the phenomenon, taking into consideration not only individual perspective on leadership but also a plural perspective. That is to say, studying not only transformational leader(s), but leadership in transformation, setting as the unit of the analysis not the individual leaders but the concept of leadership itself, and the role that it plays during a transformation effort. Second, this work aims to address the call for the need to reflect on the traditional scientific approach used in conducting research in the behavioral and social sciences, especially in management literature. This call has been growing more and more in recent years, with scholars criticizing the tendency to produce formulaic research, which is auto-referential and too much focused on rigor but less and less on relevance. To address the above mentioned objectives, five articles have been realized on different cases involving organizations undergoing a major transformation.

Guidare il cambiamento è uno dei compiti più sfidanti ma necessari compiti della leadership negli scenari economici odierni. Nonostante il fenomeno sia rilevante, l'impatto che la leadership ha nell'implementazione di trasformazioni organizzative è ancora ambiguo nella letteratura scientifica. Il presente lavoro mira ad analizzare la leadership come unità di analisi nel contesto del cambiamento organizzativo, utilizzando un approccio action-oriented tramite l'adozione di una metodologia di ricerca collaborativa.