Strategic Leadership, Readiness for Change, and Innovative Work Behavior: A Field Study From Turkey

Introduction

At the present time, the business work environment is becoming more volatile and competitive. The development of information technologies, rapid changes in organizational structures, changeable customer attitudes are more important for today’s organizations. These features of the marketplace direct organizations to be in search of new methods to achieve and maintain sustainable performance. Leadership, employee’s favorable work behaviours, technological investments are some of the interesting methods to provide continuity of the organization’s existence.

Sustainability of an organization is related with leaders, employees and the market structure of the organizations. If leaders manage the organization with the orientation of the environmental requirements, the impact of the structural volatilities will be limited. In addition to that, employees’ behaviours will be determinative on the sustainability of the organization. Particularly, employee’s attitudes have a significant value when a change is planned or realized in the organization. If the logic of the environmental changes is perceived as favorable by the employees, it means that they are ready for a change. Besides, employees who expect a change is necessary for the organization generally demonstrate innovative work behaviours in the basic of related changes.

In this study, it is aimed to obtain the influence of strategic leadership on the employees’ innovative work behaviours. Furthermore, it is expected to obtain the mediator role of readiness for change in this relation. In the study, sample is composed of 4-star hotel employees who live in Antalya, Turkey. This hotel is competing with other hotels in the region. In this hotel, most of the daily activities were performed manually. They have not used technological systems and information technologies in operations until their supervisor noticed that technology is everything for a volatile sector’s organization. They bought technological practices, devices, and systems for the hotel’s services. With this investment they aimed to i) compete with competitors, ii) open up to the world, iii) increase employee’s performance, iv) minimize the failures. Managers decided to implement information technology applications on the hotel services. Most of the daily operations started to conduct through the use of new technologies. Hotelier and the leader of the employees know that the return of the investment will be profitable for them. In this study it is expected to prove mediator role of readiness for change on the relation between strategic leadership and innovative work behaviours.