Fresh ideas can succeed if employees see the need but backfire if they’re happy with the status quo

Based on the research of David Harrison

When Ted Lasso became the coach of last-place AFC Richmond in a popular television show, he jumped in with a can-do coaching style that ignited a team ready for change.

Like Lasso, new leaders are more likely than their predecessors to improve motivation and organizational performance — but only if employees already believe change is needed.

However, a change-oriented style is also more likely to backfire for a new leader than for their predecessor. That can happen if organization members are satisfied with the status quo under the previous leader.

So finds new research from David Harrison, associate dean for research and Charles and Elizabeth Prothro Regents Distinguished University Chair in Business Administration at the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin.

“Leaders who come into a position with their own agenda or prior style will only succeed if that style happens to be a fit with the top manager behaviors the employees want to see,” Harrison says.

Successors vs. Incumbents

Harrison and five colleagues — Katherine Klein of the University of Pennsylvania, Shoshana Schwartz of Christopher Newport University, J.R. Keller of Cornell University, Jeffrey Vittengl of Truman State University, and Andrew Cohen of the University of Denver — studied a particular kind of leadership succession: principals at public schools. Their aim was to compare the powers of incumbents and successors to affect organizational change.

They looked at a sample of 112 elementary schools across the country from 2014 to 2017. Half of the schools turned over principals; half did not. The two types of schools were matched within their districts on size, age, local income, and other factors.

The researchers surveyed teachers before and after a principal came in. Teachers rated how strongly they agreed with their principal’s vision, how engaged they felt, and whether they felt a need for change.

The researcher found that if teachers perceived things weren’t going well, they were much more receptive to trying something new with a new leader.

“In that condition, the leader’s style matched the teachers’ relative dissatisfaction with the status quo.” Harrison says.

But did receptivity lead to actual change? To find out, the researchers tracked school-level standardized test scores.

The result surprised them. In schools where the principal’s leadership style aligned with teachers’ appetite for change, school-level standardized test scores improved significantly two years later.

“I was gobsmacked,” says Harrison. “It is incredibly hard to move those scores in public schools without wholesale changes in available resources. This wholesale change was in top leadership instead.”

Leaders Need Motivated Followers

To succeed at organizational change, a leader needs to hit a sweet spot among three interacting factors, the study finds.

Being the new leader on the block. Incumbents are mostly ineffectual in creating change — both positive and negative.

“Employees are just not responsive to them,” Harrison says. “They pay far less attention to the known quantity that is the continuing leader.”

By contrast, “A new leader grabs attention. Employees are looking to that person to signal what they’re all going to do.”

Existing attitudes. Successors have a window of opportunity to create change, but they need to read the room, Harrison says. Their style must align with the behaviors employees want to see.

If an organization has been having problems, employees are more likely to be hungry for change, he adds. “What they want to see depends on how well or poorly the organization is doing.”

Coaching beats vision. Leadership literature often celebrates visionary messages with lofty goals. That might work in large companies with layers of hierarchy, where CEOs don’t directly deal with employees, Harrison says.

But in a setting where a leader has frequent and direct interactions with employees — such as a school and its teachers — coaching in everyday skills and activities is what generates the good or the bad. Employees can be energized by the leader’s efforts on the ground or feel frustrated about disruptive intervention.

“Coaching doesn’t always work,” Harrison says. “Sometimes it is unwanted and interferes with employee effort. But other times, it helps to light a motivational fire.”

“For Good and for Bad: The Distinctive Effects of Successors’ Leadership Behavior on Collective Engagement and Organizational Performance” is published in Journal of Applied Psychology.

Story by Sally Parker