Empowering leadership as a driver for overcoming resistance to change within organisations

Abstract

Change within organisations has become a constant occurrence especially given the increased rate of innovation that is required for organisations to remain competitive. However, organisations are still experiencing change failure and resistance to change from employees and departments within the organisation. Organisations are making conscious efforts to improve change management for successful change implementation. A key aspect in the change management process is the change agent or change leader; as such, many studies have investigated the role of leadership, mostly transformation and transactional leadership, within change management to reduce resistance to change. This study, however, looked specifically at empowering leadership as a driver for overcoming resistance to change; through continuous practicing of empowering behaviours by leaders, employees and accordingly the organisation should show a reduced resistance to change. This study conducted a survey to establish if a relationship was present between empowering leadership and resistance to change. The findings suggested that when empowering leadership was experienced, followers showed a reduced resistance to change.