Distributed leadership and employee cynicism: Trade unions as joint change agents

• Author: Peter Butler,Olga Tregaskis
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1748-8583.12199
• Date: 01 November 2018
• Published date: 01 November 2018

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Distributed leadership and employee cynicism:

Trade unions as joint change agents

Peter Butler

1

|Olga Tregaskis

2

1

Department of Politics, People and Place

De Montfort University, Leicester, UK

2

Norwich Business School, The University of

East Anglia, Norwich, UK

Correspondence

Dr. Peter Butler, Reader in Employment

Relations, People, Organization and Work

Institute, De Montfort University, Leicester

LE19BH, UK.

Email: pabutler@dmu.ac.uk

Abstract

The themes of change management and workplace partner-

ship continue to attract significant academic interest—albeit

within discreet literatures. Drawing on longitudinal, qualita-

tive data in a heavy engineering organisation, this article

details how a collaborative partnership between manage-

ment and trade unions, encompassing a distributed leader-

ship format, was configured to enhance organisational

capacity for change in the context of significant employee

cynicism. Bridging human resource management/

organisational behaviour and industrial relations perspec-

tives, the study makes a theoretical contribution to our

understanding of the factors underpinning the successful

implementation of workplace partnership and the utilisation

of distributed leadership configurations. More generally, the

work informs leadership theory through its scrutiny of dis-

tributed leadership in situations of high conflict.

KEYWORDS

change management,collectivism, leadership, social partnership,

trade unions

1|INTRODUCTION

The topic of change management has become a burgeoning field of study in international business schools. This

popularity is evidenced in a growing refinement in the theoretical modelling of the precursors to effective change.

The shift from normative accounts of change (e.g., Burns, 1996; Lewin, 1947) towards critical organisational analyses

more attuned to the politics of change (e.g., Pettigrew, 1985, 1990; Seo & Douglas Creed, 2002, p. 229) has been an

important and highly influential dynamic. Even within this more critical and politically sensitive work, however,the role

of trade unions in the process of change management—be it as change agents, facilitators, and enablers or reactionary

defenders of the status quo—has been largely overlooked. The complexities of managing a significant change agenda in

Received: 14 October 2016 Revised: 12 February 2018 Accepted: 25 April 2018

DOI: 10.1111/1748-8583.12199

540 © 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Hum Resour Manag J. 2018;28:540–554.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/hrmj