Reflections: Bringing Power Back into the Study of Leadership and Organizational Change

The persistent omission of power relations in management studies' approaches to leadership and organizational change scholarship is the topic of this paper. We argue that power relations constitute a critically important, yet systematically neglected, process linking leadership and organizational change, shaping whether organizational change efforts succeed or fail. Despite power relations' centrality to both leading and changing organizations, dominant leader-centric theories, in particular, transformational and heroic leadership approaches, have systematically avoided explicit power analysis. We revisit foundational power theories including Lukes' three dimensions of power and Clegg's circuits of power, demonstrating how power operates across episodic, dispositional, and facilitative circuits to shape organizational change outcomes. We provide impetus for power-aware research designs and appropriate methodologies, and demonstrate that making power relations analytically visible enhances our understanding and management of organizational change. For practitioners, we outline power-conscious approaches emphasizing open acknowledgment of power dynamics and designing power-conscious organizational processes that are reflexively aware of the differences entailed in balancing power-over, power-with, and power-to.