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Antoinette Kemp is an Industrial Engineer (MSc), with 15 years of leadership experience in metal working industries. She is currently working as Senior Lean Coach for an automotive company and deals with process optimization, cultural change, and people involvement.
She will defend her Executive Doctorate of Business Administration (EDBA) in March 2023, on the theme “C’est à nous de jouer !” … ou à “moi” ? – Les approches des dirigeants en matière de changement culturel et leurs dimensions politiques implicites” under the supervision of Professor Pauline Fatien, Associate Professor of Management at Grenoble École de Management, France.
Thesis Direction
Pr Pauline Fatien-Diochon
Thesis Title
“It’s up to us!”… or “me”? Leaders’ approaches to cultural change and their implicit political dimensions
Abstract
Purpose: Building on a growing call to rethink traditional romanticized leadership approaches, this research explores how leaders embody their role in times of organizational cultural transition, and how this shapes the associated change.
Methodology: The thesis looks at the case of an automotive company, which has embarked on a cultural change journey towards a purpose-driven organization. In this context, a 30-month qualitative, inductive, single case study was conducted, with 21 semi-structured interviews with leaders at middle management level, complemented by participant observations, and a reflexive journal.
Findings: My findings show that cultural change produces tensions that are addressed by leaders through two main approaches (individualization versus socialization), which can each be decomposed into two sub-approaches (depending on the reference to context or leadership). This generates four roles embodied by leaders and four respective types of change. Each approach and associated role bear a different political implication for leadership.
Contributions: This research emphasizes the under discussed political dimension of leadership and change, by offering a typology of 4 leadership approaches to change, with political implications. Managerial recommendations comprise the understanding of context and how leadership is a situated practice, embedded into a social context. From these, educational consequences are drawn fostering alternative approaches to leadership development.