Journal of Change Management

Vol. 12, No. 1, 1 5, March 2012

Change Management: Leadership,

Values and Ethics
RUNE TODNEM BY , BERNARD BURNES & CLIFF OSWICK

Staffordshire University Business School, UK, Manchester Business School, The University of
Manchester, UK, Cass Business School, City University London, UK

Where We Are and Where We Are Going

On behalf of all Associate Editors, Editorial Advisory Board and Editorial Board
members: welcome to the 12th volume of Routledges Journal of Change
Management (JCM). First, let us take this opportunity to wholeheartedly thank
you all for your contribution to the Journals development over the last year,
being that as a colleague, submitting and published author, reviewer, guest editor,
reader, author and teacher utilizing work published in JCM, member of the
Routledge team or librarian subscribing to the title. Without your personal support
and contribution JCM would not be in the strong position it is today Thank you!
Second, let us report back to you: we are on track! The aims of securing
inclusion in Thomson Reuters Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) and 3
ABS are both realistic targets thanks to the ongoing active support of a growing
and diverse community of scholars, students and practitioners with an interest
in the complex field of change management. Enjoying SSCI and ABS success
in itself is not an aim to us. However, the acknowledgement provided and
removal of the barrier of not being on the list is crucial to JCMs, and indeed
the whole fields further development.
It is, therefore, somewhat disappointing that the Association of Business
Schools (ABS) Executive Committee has decided not to publish a new version
(v5) of their biannual ABS Academic Journal Quality Guide until after the 2014
Research Excellence Framework (REF), despite of their promise in the current
version (v4, 2010) to provide a new and updated version in 2012. In the 2010
version it is indeed stated that The rankings made in the ABS Guide are not
Correspondence Address: Rune Todnem By, Staffordshire University Business School, College Road, Stoke-onTrent, ST4 2DE, UK. Email: r.t.by@staffs.ac.uk
1469-7017 Print/1479-1811 Online/12/0100015 # 2012 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14697017.2011.652371

R. T. By et al.

fixed, but have been reviewed annually, and from 2010 onwards biennially in light
of available evidence (Association of Business Schools, 2010, p. 5). The decision
of delaying the publication of version 5 of the ABS Guide, most likely taken under
considerable pressure and lobbying by special interest groups defending status quo
and vested interest, may very well delay the well deserved acknowledgment of all
the hard work undertaken by younger journals such as JCM. Based on feedback
from a range of stakeholders, including editors of journals highly ranked by
both ABS and SSCI, we would in fact expect JCMs ABS ranking to increase
from 1 to 2 in 2012, and we find this highly unjustifiable delay to be regretful.
However, in this Journal we dont take anything for granted and we dont cry over
spilt milk. We move upwards and onwards and take control over what we can
actually control.
We held two highly successful Editorial Board meetings in 2011. One at the
EGOS conference in Gothenburg, where we also ran a Meet the Editor
session, and one at the AOM conference in San Antonio (hot, hot, hot . . .). The
support, passion and ambition of individual board members took our breath
away, and it made us appreciate all the more what an honour it is to be the
caretakers of this great Journal with an even greater potential. We have yet to
decide on the approach for 2012, but we will at least be aiming at having a
strong presence at the AOM conference in Boston.
We take great pride in having a highly effective and efficient double-blind peer
review process where all articles that are desk approved are forwarded for review
by at least two colleagues. With an annual accept ratio of 12.9%, the average time
from submission to first decision in the prior 12 months was 19 days, and the
average time from submission to final decision in the prior 12 months was 25
days. Combined with the fact that authors receive extensive and high-quality
reviews this is somewhat of an achievement which provides clear evidence of
the enthusiasm and buy in from our fantastic reviewers.
So, what is on the JCM menu for 2012? Well, we can promise you exciting
special issues, starting with this first issue and new contributions to our highly successful Reflections series. We can also promise you a range of high-quality,
interesting and hopefully at times provocative articles.
For the remainder of this annual editorial article we would like to focus on what
so often is overlooked when it comes to change management: leadership, values
and ethics.

We Are All In This Together

According to Barker (2001, p. 491), . . . leadership is all about change and no

change is value free (Macleod and By, 2009). Burnes and Jackson (2011) argue
that all approaches to leadership and change are underpinned by a set of ethical
values that influence the actions of leaders and the outcomes/consequences of
change initiatives for good or ill. Ethics are not set in stone there is no rule
book. They are, however, highly individual beliefs some of which may be perceived as being universal distinguishing between what is right or wrong, good or
bad. These beliefs provide a basis for judging the appropriateness of motivation

Leadership, Values and Ethics

and consequences of behaviour and they guide people in their dealings with other
individuals, groups and organizations.
The argument that leadership and change need an ethical foundation is far from
new. Such arguments can be found in the work of Barnard (1938) on leadership in
the 1930s and in the work of Lewin (Burnes, 2004, 2009) on change in the 1940s.
Even before the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, there had been an increasing
volume of calls for organizations to act in an ethical fashion. Prominent in this
respect was the promotion of corporate social responsibility (CSR). However,
this did not necessarily lead to a diminution of unethical behaviour. As Joseph Stiglitz (2010), the Nobel Prize-winning economist, observed in his book on the 2008
Global Financial Crisis, the reverse seems to have been the case. Unethical and
criminal behaviour appears to have mushroomed out of control in many organizations as society seems to have encouraged the individualistic motto of every man
for himself in replacement of one for all, all for one. This development can
hardly be blamed on individual leaders good or bad, right or wrong. That is a
far too simplistic, if not nave understanding of a rather complex situation in
which we all have a role to play and responsibility to take. We are not just
dealing with a few rotten apples. We are in fact dealing with human nature, and
this regretful development of greed must be seen as a reflection of the wider
societal embracement of the individual at the cost of others. A development we
are all part of.
We are still living in an era where organizational leaders are allowed to, and
even rewarded for putting their own egos and self-interests ahead of the interests
of the many, often with disastrous results and consequences. As Stiglitz (2010)
observed, the short-term performance incentives of mortgage salesmen, of the
investors and purveyors of complex and ill-understood financial instruments and
of the corporate leaders who were supposed to supervise them were not aligned
with the long-run interests of the institutions for which they work. To put it succinctly, the long-term, sustainable interests of the many are sacrificed to the shortterm greed and arrogance of the few.
To avoid this in the future, we need to highlight the importance of promoting the
ethical dimension of change as a means of ensuring that leaders and their followers
act in the interests of the many rather than the few. If followers and other stakeholders are not to be so dazzled by the attraction of charismatic transformational
leaders that any change is seen as good change, they need to ensure that leadership
and change are underpinned by a clear and transparent system of ethics and
accountability. That is to say, leaders must be instilled with a moral compass
fitting the organization of which they are in charge. Leaders of tomorrow must
indeed be expected to make decisions in the interest of the many rather than the
few, and refrain from abusing the faith that is placed in them and the unique freedoms that they enjoy. This is a point made forcibly by Barker (2001, p. 491) when
he states that leadership is a process of transformative change where the ethics of
individuals are integrated into the mores of a community as a means of evolutionary social development. Therefore, a key question is how we can lead and manage
change more ethically?
The danger of not only allowing, but encouraging unethical leadership and
change can be reduced where there is openness about and alignment of values

R. T. By et al.

and objectives, transparency in decision-making and truly independent external

scrutiny. The axis on which acceptable and unacceptable outcomes revolve is
the ethical values which underpin and link together particular combinations of leadership and change. We believe the fundamental flaw in some approaches to
change is that not only are they not explicit about values, but they give the
impression that it is somehow unworldly or nave even to mention ethical considerations (Burnes and By, 2011).
Organizations have to move beyond general statements of ethics, such as those
found in CSR statements and policies, and actually evaluate the ethical values of
leaders and their actions and determine whether they are compatible with the
wider interests of the organization and its stakeholders. This requires an understanding of ethics both in policy and practical terms, and clarity about the
ethical basis of different approaches to leadership and change.
Consequently, followers and other stakeholders should not be passive observes,
but have a positive and active role to play in identifying and ending unethical practices. In terms of new directions in organizational change, it is perhaps apposite to
re-think the notion of stakeholders in the process of ethically motivated forms of
change. In particular, it could be argued that an often-overlooked group of stakeholders who are committed to the development of ethical practices in organizations are social activists. King and Soule (2007) have argued that we should
see social movements as extra-institutional entrepreneurs (p. 413). Indeed, we
would go further and assert that in some circumstances activists are synonymous
with external management consultants. The only major difference being that they
are generally unpaid and they typically have a passionate commitment to the
specific moral imperatives or social values they encourage an organization or
organizations to embrace. Hence, social activists can play an important part in stimulating value-driven change within organizations through constructive processes
of engagement and generative dialogue (Den Hond and Bakker, 2007).
A critical issue in the involvement of different groups of stakeholders (e.g.
employees, customers, clients and activists) is the extent to which it is possible
for them to recognize what is ethical and unethical. Most stakeholders would
agree that child labour is clearly unethical, but would they recognize which leadership and change practices are unethical? If stakeholders are to be able to monitor
leaders behaviour, they must have a yardstick for judging whether it is potentially
unethical or not. In order to do this, those of us who develop and promote particular approaches to leadership and change have to be clear about the ethical implications of these. Currently, there is often a damaging lack of clarity regarding the
ethical values underpinning approaches to change and its management.
A prime example is the famous quotation attributed to Charlie Wilson, who was
President of General Motors in the early 1950s: Whats good for General Motors
is good for the country. Many leaders appear to interpret this to mean: Whats
good for me is good for the organization. But what Wilson actually said was:
For years I thought that what was good for our country was good for General
Motors, and vice versa (Time Magazine, 1961). Therefore, a more accurate
interpretation of Wilsons words would be: Whats good for the organization is
good for me, which is a very different matter entirely.

Leadership, Values and Ethics

As Franklin D. Roosevelt (1937) commented on the causes of the Great

Depression of the 1930s:
We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that
it is bad economics. Out of the collapse of a prosperity whose builders boasted their
practicality has come the conviction that in the long run economic morality pays.

However, this economic morality will only prevail if all organizational stakeholders are able and prepared to ensure that ethical rather than unethical behaviour
is pursued by leaders, and this can only be achieved if those of us in the change
field do our part to identify ethical and unethical approaches to such change.
References
Association of Business Schools (2010) ABS Academic Journal Quality Guide, version 4 (London: ABS).
Barker, R.A. (2001) The nature of leadership, Human Relations, 54(4), pp. 469494.
Barnard, C. (1938) The Functions of the Executive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
Burnes, B. (2004) Kurt Lewin and the planned approach to change: a re-appraisal, Journal of Management
Studies, 41(6), pp. 9771002.
Burnes, B. (2009) Reflections: ethics and organisational change time for a return to Lewinian values, Journal of
Change Management, 9(4), pp. 359381.
Burnes, B. and By, R.T. (2011) Leadership and change: the case for greater ethical clarity, Journal of Business
Ethics (published online 2 November 2011, doi 10.1007/s10551-011-1088-2).
Burnes, B. and Jackson, P. (2011) Success and failure in organisational change: an exploration of the role of
values, Journal of Change Management, 11(2), pp. 133162.
Den Hond, F. and Bakker, F.G. (2007) Ideologically motivated activism: how activist groups influence corporate
social change activities, Academy of Management Review, 32(3), pp. 901924.
King, B.G. and Soule, S.A. (2007) Social movements as extra-institutional entrepreneurship: the effects of protests on stock price returns, Administrative Science Quarterly, 52(3), pp. 413442.
Macleod, C. and By, R.T. (2009) Organizational change management in public services: key findings and emerging themes, in: R.T. By and C. Macleod (eds) Managing Organizational Change in Public Services: International Issues, Challenges and Cases, pp. 241249 (Routledge, UK: Milton Park).
Roosevelt, F.D. (1937) Second Presidential Inaugural Address, 20 January. Available at www.bartleby.com/124/
pres50.html.
Stiglitz, J. (2010) Freefall: Free Markets and the Sinking of the Global Economy (London: Allen Lane).
Time Magazine (1961) Armed Forces: Engine Charlie, Time Magazine, October 6. Available at www.Time.com.

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