This will not change us: Leader's use of continuity rhetoric to promote collective change

Abstract

Although leaders are frequently tasked with initiating and implementing social and organizational change, facilitating widespread support for change initiatives is often challenging. One source of change resistance stems from perceptions that the change will fundamentally alter the authentic group identity. Leaders who are deemed legitimate representations of the group identity (i.e., group prototypical) are trusted to protect the “true” group identity and tend to be more successful change leaders than leaders who are perceived to be poor representations of the group identity (i.e., non-prototypical). Three experiments (total N = 989) tested the proposition that non-prototypical leaders can use rhetoric that promotes collective identity continuity to increase self-uncertain group members' support for change initiatives. Across two experiments, self-uncertain participants were more supportive of change initiatives proposed by a non-prototypical leader who used rhetoric emphasizing continuity of, rather than change to, the authentic group identity. In the third experiment, support for the hypotheses was only found after exploratory analyses excluded 27% of the sample. Thus, this work indicates that non-prototypical leaders who use continuity rhetoric may be able to leverage their group members’ uncertainty during change initiatives to improve their group’s support for the change. However, future work is needed to examine the strength and generalizability of these findings across different organizational contexts.