Leadership in Organizational Change. The leader’s role in an organizational change : a case study at Lantmäteriet

Abstract

In today’s society organizational changes have become more and more common. Organizations need to change or die and the only constant is change. That is what caught my attention before this study and made me curious. I wanted to make a study of leadership in an organizational change and wanted to study this in real life. The purpose of the study therefore became to examine and study a manager’s role in organizational change at Lantmäteriet and how their experience has affected their view on how one should handle a change in order to get a successful result. Subsequently three research questions were formulated: - How does a change process operate? - What is the leader’s role in an organizational change process at Lantmäteriet? - How should a leader manage an organizational change at Lantmäteriet? Since I wanted to make a study in real life I contacted an authority called Lantmäteriet who gave me an opportunity to perform a case study. They wanted me to study a specific change process performed 2011 and make a complete study by interviewing all involved managers at different levels. Thus, the methodology used is a qualitative study with semi-structured interviews. Further I used a descriptive approach as well as a deductive approach since there was plenty of existing literature already and I made research of this in advance to compare my empirical findings with. To increase my knowledge in this field before the interviews research of appropriate theories was performed within the fields of change process, managing change/change management and leadership. After doing this research I performed 11 interviews with mangers at Lantmäteriet. I interviewed the initiator of the change process, second line managers and first line managers and the result differed between the different management levels. The initiator had a more positive picture of the change process than the managers who were closer to the employees. Further some managers also had a different view of the process since they were not as affected as other managers situated in Gävle. The result I found was then compared to the theoretical framework. I analyzed the empirical findings with each theory presented in the theoretical framework to see if the change process at Lantmäteriet differed from suggested theories. I found rather soon that the change process at Lantmäteriet had several similarities to the literature, but was lacking some elements. Consequently I realized that the existing literature is an excellent foundation/framework for a change process. My conclusion from this study resulted in a few elements that could have been improved to reduce resistance and confusion in the change process. There were a lot of good elements in Lantmäteriet’s change process and you could tell that the initiator had experience from change processes and was aware of some critical aspects. Nevertheless, there were some elements missing that could have facilitated the process. I found that the critical aspects influencing the most were too little time, too little involvement, lacking plan and a huge change for the managers affecting their ability to handle the implementation.