When new leadership takes the helm in an organization struggling with stagnation or decline, the potential for transformative change can be significant. Drawing a parallel from popular culture, the character Ted Lasso, who injects fresh energy and optimism into a floundering soccer team, exemplifies the impact a newcomer with a hopeful and can-do coaching style can have. Recent empirical research affirms that fresh leaders often catalyze improvements in motivation and organizational performance, but crucially, their success hinges upon the existing readiness and desire for change among their team members.
A groundbreaking study led by David Harrison, associate dean for research and a prestigious chair in Business Administration at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business, delved into the nuanced dynamics that differentiate the effectiveness of new leaders from their predecessors. Harrison’s investigation explored how a successor’s leadership behaviors resonate differently within the organizational fabric depending on the collective perception of the status quo. The research offers compelling insights into leadership transitions and their implications for organizational outcomes, especially within institutions operating under high-stakes accountability, such as public schools.
The research team, which included esteemed scholars from several prominent universities, focused on public elementary schools to examine how leadership change influences the collective engagement of employees and overall organizational performance. This context was strategically chosen to provide robust data encompassing a variety of environmental and socio-economic variables. They meticulously paired 112 schools across the United States, ensuring that factors such as school size, age, and district income levels were comparable to isolate the effect of principal turnover versus continuity.
Teachers within these schools were surveyed prior to and following the entrance of a new principal. Their responses assessed alignment with the principal’s vision, levels of engagement, and importantly, their perceived need for organizational change. This methodological approach allowed the researchers to gauge the psychological and motivational climate through which leadership styles either took root or faltered. The data indicated a striking pattern: new leaders found traction primarily in environments where teachers already sensed dissatisfaction with existing conditions and a readiness to embrace new approaches.
In settings where employees viewed their organization as functioning well under prior leadership, attempts by a new principal to implement change-oriented leadership styles frequently generated resistance or disengagement. This phenomenon underscores the delicate balance new leaders must achieve—it is not merely their behavior or agenda that determines success, but the preexisting attitudes and openness among the team to transform their work environment. Teachers’ receptivity to the successor’s coaching behaviors was tantamount to a tacit endorsement of the need to deviate from established routines.
Moreover, this exploratory study went beyond attitudinal metrics to investigate tangible organizational outcomes, specifically elementary school standardized test scores, a notoriously difficult metric to influence. Surprisingly, schools where the principal’s leadership style harmonized with the teachers’ demand for change experienced a substantial improvement in performance within two years. This improvement challenges prevailing assumptions about the rigidity of public school outcomes and highlights leadership transition as a potent lever for organizational transformation when conditions are optimal.
Harrison reflected on these findings with amazement, emphasizing the rarity of such pronounced improvements absent significant resource infusion. His comment reveals the often-underestimated power of leadership behavior in mobilizing collective effort and changing operational trajectories. The study thus repositions leadership succession from being a procedural inevitability to a strategic opportunity with measurable implications for institutional success and employee motivation.
The implications of this research extend to the broader literature on leadership effectiveness, which often valorizes visionary leadership as the critical ingredient for success. However, Harrison and his colleagues propose that in contexts characterized by close, frequent leader-employee interactions—like schools— the more pragmatic, hands-on approach of coaching eclipses abstract vision-setting. For employees directly engaged in daily tasks, tangible support, skill development, and immediate feedback foster engagement and performance more effectively than grand strategic pronouncements.
This study also illuminates why incumbents generally struggle to catalyze change. Their familiarity and continuity breed complacency both regarding leader visibility and the psychological impetus to modify existing routines. In contrast, successors benefit from a heightened attention effect; their arrival naturally disrupts established interaction patterns and signals a potential realignment of group priorities and behaviors. This window offers a strategic moment where motivational fires can be stoked or extinguished depending on the leader’s alignment with employee expectations.
However, coaching leadership itself is not guaranteed to be universally effective. The research points out the dual-edged nature of such interventionist styles. When employees welcome and resonate with coaching efforts, their collective engagement increases, and organizational performance improves. Conversely, unsolicited or misaligned coaching can breed frustration, decrease morale, and impede progress. Successors must therefore conduct an astute “read the room” analysis to assess the existing organizational climate before imposing their style.
These insights carry profound implications for human resource strategies and leadership development programs across sectors. They suggest that the success of new leaders depends as much on environmental readiness and employee motivation as on individual leader competence or ambition. Organizations might benefit from diagnostic assessments prior to leadership changes to tailor support and interventions that enhance alignment between incoming leaders’ styles and their followers’ expectations.
This research thus reframes leadership succession as a complex social-psychological event contingent on the interplay between leader behavior, follower attitudes, and contextual readiness for change. The measurable improvements in student standardized test outcomes further establish the concrete stakes involved, providing a compelling argument for education administrators and policymakers to consider leadership transitions as critical levers for institutional improvement.
Published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, “For Good and for Bad: The Distinctive Effects of Successors’ Leadership Behavior on Collective Engagement and Organizational Performance” challenges conventional wisdom and highlights the nuanced conditions under which leadership change can ignite transformative strides or inadvertently sow discord. Harrison’s contribution offers a data-driven narrative about the power—and perils—of leadership succession that resonates well beyond the educational context into broader organizational theory and practice.
Subject of Research: Organizational leadership succession and its impact on employee engagement and performance in public elementary schools.
Article Title: For Good and for Bad: The Distinctive Effects of Successors’ Leadership Behavior on Collective Engagement and Organizational Performance
Web References: https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2027-37690-001.html, http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/apl0001359
Keywords: leadership succession, organizational change, motivation, collective engagement, educational leadership, coaching leadership, public schools, employee attitudes, organizational performance, standardized test outcomes, leadership styles, employee motivation
