Under What Conditions Do Public Managers Favor and Pursue Organizational Change?

Managerial leaders play a prominent role in organizational change--as champions for change and as key players in its implementation. This study seeks to understand why public managers choose to support change and initiate it within their organizations. A model of change-related attitude and behavior is developed and tested in the study. The results indicate that a complex pattern of internal and external factors influence a public manager's attitude and behavior relating to change. The results also suggest that top-down and bottom-up drivers of change work simultaneously to influence a public manager's decision to assume the role of a change agent.