Leadership narratives and organizational change

Abstract

This paper focuses on the narrative of leadership as it relates to organizational change. Two theoretical positions are taken into consideration: The Evolutionary and Behavioral perspectives. After they are presented, and their respective ideas related to leadership are described, a proposal is developed which highlights the idea of narrative as a behavioral phenomenon and in doing so this proposal reinterprets the leadership cognitive frames in evolutionary approach and outlines them as an integrated functional verbal component of the Behavioral Systems Engineering Model. A specific hypothetical case is reconstructed from a professional experience of the author in order to show how such an understanding of leadership narratives reduces possible resistances to the design and implementation of an organizational change program.