Healthcare Managers/Executives/Administrators
OBJECTIVE This study focuses on senior managers' use of technical, political, and cultural dimensions in the change process, as well as middle managers' perceptions of senior managers' behaviors in these areas and their overall leadership effectiveness.
METHODOLOGY Participants included six members of the senior management staff and 30 department heads reporting to senior management in an acute care hospital. The large-scale organizational change questionnaire, adapted from Tichy (1983), consisted of 6 items for each for measuring the technical, political, and cultural aspects of change.. Mailed to homes, with follow-up reply cards, yielded a 100 percent response rate. The Kouzes and Posner (1987) Leadership Effectiveness Scale was used to measure transformational leadership effectiveness. Interviews were also conducted with key senior managers.
KEY FINDINGS No significant relationships were found between senior managers' attitudes and their self-reported use of various change behaviors; nor were relationships found between senior managers' change attitudes and their effectiveness as perceived by their direct reports, although a significant relationship was found between their attitudes and the view that they were effective in managing change by their direct reports.