Foxes and lions: How institutional leaders keep organisational integrity and introduce change. Kap. 7

Abstract

Using the concept of institutional work, we illustrate how leaders respond to external pressures for change and actively transform organisational practices and identities. We argue that a leader’s actions manifest either through projective, future-oriented agency or through habitual, routinised agency. The latter emphasises how institutional leaders act in spaces already occupied by bits and pieces of plural, often conflicting institutions. Particularly, a leader is an institutionally embedded individual, one whose patterns of thinking and acting are conditioned by field-level and organisational institutions. Drawing on empirical illustrations of public administration leaders, in a Polish context, who adopt field-level changes in governance patters, we develop a typology of leaders-innovators acting upon plural isomorphic pressures. We argue that one of the strategies specially fits conditions of institutional pluralism since it advances a value of dialogue between institutional logics and, therefore, builds a reflexive capacity into the organisation.