Changing Leadership in Changing Times

MAD statement

This leading article is setting out to Make a Difference (MAD) through catalysing the further exploration and development of leadership theory and practice by facilitating the reimagining and reframing of challenges and solutions ahead. It does so by integrating the academic concerns of the current literature with the issues raised by recent events marked by the cataclysmic end of the Trump presidency in the United States.

KEYWORDS:

• Leadership
• organizational change
• purpose
• communication
• crisis

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stewart Clegg

Stewart Clegg, PhD, D. Litt & D. Phil, recently retired from the University of Technology Sydney, where he is an Emeritus Professor, has visiting appointments at the University of Stavanger, Norway and Universidade Nova, Portugal. He is a leading international researcher recognized in several fields in the social sciences for his work in organization studies and on power. Stewart is a prolific writer and contributor to top-tier journals and is the author or editor of over 50 books. In addition to Project Management: A Value Creation Approach, he has recently published volumes on Strategy: Theory & Practice; Managing & Organizations; Positive Organizational Behaviour; Media Management and Digital Transformation; Theories of Organizational Resilience and Management as well as Organizations and Contemporary Social Theory, with various colleagues. Of interest to the readers of this journal is the soon to be published Paradoxes of Power and Leadership. (London: Routledge, 2021) co-authored with his frequent writing partners, Miguel Pina e Cunha, Arménio Rego and Marco Berti, to be published by Routledge.

Lucia Crevani

Lucia Crevani, PhD is Editor (Leadership) of Journal of Change Management: Reframing Leadership and Organizational Practice and Head of Research for Industrial Economics and Organization at Mälardalen University, Sweden where she is a member of the NOMP research group. What fascinates her is the everyday-practices and interactions that make organizational processes develop in certain ways. She thus focuses on developing the leadership-as-practice stream of research, and contributing to processual understandings of organizing and place, as well as of organizational change and technology. Her ambition is also to contribute to increased inclusion and justice in organizing practices.

Mary Uhl-Bien

Mary Uhl-Bien, PhD is the BNSF Railway Endowed Professor of Leadership at TCU in Fort Worth, Texas. Prior to that she was the Howard Hawks Chair in Business Ethics and Leadership at the University of Nebraska. Her research, focusing on complexity leadership, relational leadership and followership, has been honoured with numerous best paper and two decennial awards. She was noted as the #6 most influential leadership scholar from 1990 to 2017 (Zhao & Li, 2019) and a Top 50 Undergraduate Professor in Poets & Quants in 2018. Mary is active in executive education nationally and internationally and was a regular commentator for CNBC Squawk Box from 2013 to 2018.

Rune Todnem By

Rune Todnem By, PhD is Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Change Management: Reframing Leadership and Organizational Practice and Professor of Leadership at University of Stavanger Business School, Norway, where he delivers on the Executive MBA and MSc Business Administration programmes. Following 15 years in British higher education, he returned to Norway in 2019 to continue his scholar-practitioner work on leadership and organizational change with a particular focus on reframing theory and practice to better address twenty-first century challenges. Rune is a member of the UNESCO Futures Literacy network, research affiliate at the Centre for Leadership, Ethics and Organisation (CLEO) at Queen’s University Belfast, co-founder and previous chair of the Public Leadership Foundation, and co-editor of The Psychology of Organizational Change: Viewing Change from the Employee's Perspective (2013) and Organizational Change, Leadership and Ethics (2013), both currently being updated for their second editions.