"Is Change All in The Mind? A Study of Change Leadership, Leader Mindfulness and Change Success"

Organizations today are faced with a context of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA). This context gives rise to an ever growing need for organizations to engage with and implement continuous transformational change. However, research has shown a persistently high level of organizational change failure. This paradox of increasing need for change with significant difficulties in achieving successful implementation has given rise to considerations of alternative paradigms of change implementation. In essence it is suggested that a paradigm that conceptualizes change as a complex adaptive process of continuous transformation is seen to lead to higher levels of change success than the more established paradigm of “punctuated equilibrium”. This shift in focus leads to a need for higher levels of stakeholder involvement and engagement, presenting a need to consider the role and behaviors of leaders in achieving this. In turn this has led to an increase in the interest in the area of change leadership. However, the interest has not been matched by a related growth in empirical research that examines change leadership and many scholars are calling for more research into this phenomenon. In parallel with these developments has been a significant growth in interest in the concept of Mindfulness in terms of its applications in an organizational context, and in particular in its relationship to leadership. However, currently, whist there is a lot of evidence of the value of Mindfulness in clinical contexts, there is limited organizationally based evidence and a paucity of studies that explore the relationships between Mindfulness and leadership. Against this background this paper reports a qualitative study of the relationships between Mindfulness, change leadership behaviors and success in implementing organizational change. The study is based on interviews with 63 leaders from 56 organizations. Analyses of the data have found clear and positive relationships between leaders facilitating and engaging behaviors, leader Mindfulness and change success. The paper concludes with a discussion of the contributions of this study, its limitations and areas for future research.