The study was led by Dr. Hyunjoo Lee and Professor Jiseon Shin, who set out to answer a question that has long frustrated change-management practitioners: why do some change initiatives galvanize a workforce while others, seemingly identical on paper, collapse into apathy or open resistance? Conventional answers have often focused on communication strategy, incentive design, or the charisma of senior executives. The SKKU team took a different route, looking downward into the everyday relationship between employees and their direct supervisors, the people who translate abstract corporate directives into daily tasks and expectations.

To capture that relationship in action, the researchers designed a two-wave field study conducted during a real, company-wide restructuring. They surveyed 42 team leaders and 282 employees at two separate points in time, spaced across roughly three months of ongoing organizational upheaval. This longitudinal design matters technically. By measuring leaders’ attitudes first and employees’ responses later, the team could establish a temporal sequence that a single snapshot survey could not. The separation in time reduces the risk of common-method bias, the well-known statistical artifact in which respondents’ answers to different questions correlate simply because they come from the same person at the same moment. It also allowed the researchers to observe how attitudes spread and hardened as the restructuring unfolded in real conditions rather than in a laboratory.

The central construct under investigation was what organizational scholars call leaders’ commitment to change: the degree to which a supervisor genuinely believes a new initiative is necessary, worthwhile, and worth personal sacrifice. The study’s first key finding is that this belief is contagious. When team leaders were convinced that the change was valuable, their employees adopted the same positive attitude toward it. The mechanism resembles a process of social learning. Employees under uncertainty watch their most proximal authority figure for cues about how to interpret ambiguous events. If the supervisor treats the restructuring as an opportunity rather than an imposition, that framing travels down the hierarchy and reshapes how team members understand the situation.

Crucially, the researchers then traced what that shared commitment actually does to behavior, and the results cut in two directions at once. On the positive side, employees who internalized their leader’s commitment engaged in more change-supportive citizenship: they voluntarily helped colleagues adapt, championed the new goals to peers, and went beyond their formal job descriptions to make the transition work. On the negative side, the same psychological state suppressed counterproductive work behavior, the umbrella term researchers use for actions such as taking excessively long breaks, neglecting assigned duties, ignoring workplace guidelines, or covertly sabotaging new procedures. In other words, a committed leader does not merely add enthusiasm to the workforce; it subtracts a measurable amount of friction and quiet defiance.

The second, and arguably most consequential, finding concerns the condition under which this chain reaction fires at full strength. The researchers examined ethical leadership, defined as the demonstration of normatively appropriate conduct through personal actions and interpersonal relationships, and the promotion of such conduct to subordinates. Ethical leaders are fair, honest, and principled; they care about doing things the right way rather than chasing quick results at any cost. The study found that ethical leadership acts as a powerful moderator, an amplifier that determines how loudly a leader’s commitment speaks to the team. Under high ethical leadership, the positive effect of a leader’s commitment on employees’ own change commitment and subsequent supportive behavior became remarkably strong. Under low ethical leadership, the signal degraded dramatically.

The explanation the authors offer is rooted in credibility. Employees are not passive recipients of managerial messaging; they continuously evaluate the motives behind it. When a leader with a track record of integrity announces that a restructuring is necessary and worthwhile, employees read the message as authentic and trustworthy, and they update their own attitudes accordingly. When ethical standards are low, the same announcement is filtered through suspicion. Employees doubt whether the leader truly believes in the change or is simply protecting a bonus, deflecting pressure from above, or performing loyalty. That doubt weakens the transmission of commitment, cooperation falls off, and support for the initiative erodes precisely when the organization can least afford it.

Professor Jiseon Shin summarized the practical implication in striking terms. Organizational change, she noted, cannot be achieved simply through top-down directives. What matters is how strongly leaders themselves are committed to the change and how that commitment carries over to employees. In her view, ethical leadership serves as a vital anchor, making leaders’ commitment far more credible and persuasive to employees. The finding reframes a familiar management problem: organizations that struggle to win buy-in for change often assume the message is wrong, when in fact the messenger’s moral standing may be the bottleneck.

The technical architecture of the study deserves attention because it strengthens the causal story. The researchers tested what statisticians call a moderated mediation model. In plain terms, they proposed that leaders’ commitment to change influences employees’ commitment to change, which in turn drives both positive citizenship behavior and reduced counterproductive behavior; that is the mediation pathway. Ethical leadership, meanwhile, moderates the first link, determining how much of the leader’s attitude is absorbed by the team. Testing this model required multilevel data, since employees were nested within teams led by the 42 supervisors, and the two-wave structure allowed the team to link leader attitudes measured at time one to employee outcomes measured at time two. The convergence of these design choices on a consistent pattern lends the findings considerable weight within the field of organizational behavior.

For organizations navigating major transitions, the study’s message is both demanding and encouraging. It is demanding because it locates responsibility not in a single communications campaign but in the daily conduct of every team leader: employees will calibrate their own commitment to the change against the sincerity and ethics of the person closest to them. It is encouraging because the levers are identifiable. Organizations can select and develop leaders who demonstrate fairness, honesty, and principled decision-making, and they can ensure that those leaders are genuinely convinced of the value of an initiative before asking them to sell it. When authentic conviction at the top of each team meets visible ethical conduct, the study suggests, uncertainty gives way to engagement, resistance gives way to cooperation, and the human side of organizational change becomes far less of a gamble.

Subject of Research: The role of leaders' commitment to change and ethical leadership in shaping employee attitudes and behaviors during organizational change

Article Title: SKKU researchers uncover the key to driving employee support during organizational changes

Article References: SKKU researchers uncover the key to driving employee support during organizational changes. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: organizational change, ethical leadership, leaders' commitment to change, employee behavior, change management, Journal of Business Research, Sungkyunkwan University, counterproductive work behavior, organizational behavior, restructuring, moderated mediation, workplace psychology

The study, led by Shahzad Haider of the School Education Department in Lasbela, Balochistan, together with colleagues from institutions across Sindh and Lahore, was designed as a qualitative descriptive investigation rooted in an interpretivist paradigm. Rather than measuring competence through standardized tests or administrative metrics, the researchers wanted to understand the phenomenon through the eyes of the people who live it daily. Ten university teachers were selected using criterion-based purposive sampling, a technique that deliberately recruits participants who possess direct, relevant experience of the issue under investigation. Semi-structured interviews formed the backbone of the data collection, allowing participants to speak at length while the interviewers gently steered the conversation toward the study’s core concerns.

Once the interviews were transcribed, the team turned to an inductive, codebook-informed thematic analysis—a method that lets patterns emerge from the data itself rather than forcing responses into predetermined categories. The analysis converged on a single overarching theme: professional factors shaping professional competence. Beneath that umbrella, five interrelated subthemes surfaced, each representing a distinct strand of the teachers’ understanding: professional attitude, professional development, ICT proficiency, research competence, and change management. Together, these five strands form what the authors describe as a situated and multidimensional form of practice, one that cannot be divorced from the institutional conditions in which it unfolds.

The first strand, professional attitude, speaks to the ethical and dispositional heart of teaching. Participants framed competence not merely as knowing one’s subject but as embodying a commitment to students, to integrity, and to the responsibilities of the profession itself. This aligns with a long tradition in the competence literature, which has repeatedly distinguished between technical skill and the moral orientation that gives that skill meaning. In the Balochistan context, where public universities operate under significant resource pressures, the teachers suggested that attitude functions as a kind of internal compass—sustaining professional behavior even when external incentives and support structures fall short.

Professional development emerged as the second pillar, and here the findings carry a pointed institutional message. The teachers described continuous learning as essential to staying effective, yet they also pointed to uneven access to structured development opportunities across the province’s public universities. The study situates this within a broader Pakistani debate: earlier research has documented how professional development programs can enhance university teachers’ knowledge, but also how provision remains inconsistent. The Balochistan participants’ accounts suggest that where formal programs are scarce, competence becomes something teachers must actively construct for themselves—through reading, peer exchange, and self-directed experimentation with new methods.

Perhaps the most contemporary of the five subthemes is ICT proficiency. The teachers identified digital readiness as an increasingly non-negotiable dimension of professional competence, shaped by the global transformation of higher education and the growing expectation that faculty can navigate learning platforms, digital resources, and technology-mediated pedagogy. This finding echoes international work linking digital competence to teachers’ conceptions of teaching, as well as recent Pakistani studies examining readiness for technology-rich approaches such as STEM education. In Balochistan, however, the researchers note that digital infrastructure itself is unevenly distributed, meaning that a teacher’s ICT proficiency is partly a function of institutional investment rather than individual effort alone.

Research competence formed the fourth strand, reflecting the dual mandate of modern universities: teaching and knowledge production. Participants described scholarly engagement—publishing, conducting studies, staying current with their disciplines—as integral to their professional identity and to the quality of their classroom work. Yet the study highlights that research support in the region’s public universities is limited, creating a gap between the expectations placed on faculty and the resources available to meet them. The teachers’ perspectives suggest that research competence is not simply an individual attribute but a capacity that institutions either nurture or neglect, with consequences for both academic output and student learning.

The fifth subtheme, change management, captures the adaptive dimension of competence. Universities everywhere are being reshaped by technological disruption, evolving student expectations, and shifting policy landscapes, and Balochistan’s public universities are no exception. The teachers in the study described adaptability—the ability to respond constructively to institutional and technological change—as a defining feature of professional competence. This reframes competence as inherently dynamic: what counted as a competent lecturer a decade ago may fall short today, and the professional teacher is one who can read the winds of change and adjust practice accordingly.

The authors are careful about the limits of their work. Because the study is qualitative and interpretive, it cannot establish causal relationships between any particular factor and measured teaching outcomes. What it offers instead is a rich interpretation of how teachers in a specific context make sense of competence—a contribution the researchers argue is overdue, given how little higher education research has focused on Balochistan. The methodological transparency, from the ethics approvals granted by institutional review boards to the written informed consent obtained from all participants before any interviews were recorded, underscores the rigor behind the findings. The authors also declare no competing interests and note that the study received no external funding.

The practical implications, however, are clear and actionable. The study recommends that institutions provide structured professional development, invest in research and ICT capacity building, and cultivate reflective leadership to strengthen professional competence across public universities. In effect, the researchers argue that competence is a shared project: teachers bring attitude and adaptability, but universities must supply the scaffolding—training, infrastructure, and research support—that allows those qualities to flourish. For policymakers in Pakistan and for higher education leaders in similarly under-resourced regions worldwide, the message is that investing in faculty capability is not a luxury but a precondition for institutional quality. As digital transformation accelerates and expectations on universities multiply, the Balochistan study reminds us that the question of what makes a teacher competent is ultimately a question about the systems we build around them—and whether those systems are designed to help educators grow, or left to let them improvise alone.

Subject of Research: University teachers' perceptions of professional factors influencing professional competence in public universities of Balochistan, Pakistan

Article Title: University teachers’ perspectives on professional factors influencing professional competence: a qualitative study in public universities of Balochistan, Pakistan

Article References: Haider, S., Ahmed, S. T., Imran, M., Oad, L., Shaikh, N., & Yaqoob, N. (2026). University teachers’ perspectives on professional factors influencing professional competence: a qualitative study in public universities of Balochistan, Pakistan. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 465. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01752-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01752-7

Keywords: professional competence, university teachers, professional development, ICT proficiency, research competence, change management, Balochistan, Pakistan, higher education, qualitative study, teacher attitudes, public universities

The starting point for the framework is a sobering observation from the change management literature: intentional change processes are frequently slow, meet resistance and fail outright, and they are a significant source of stress for employees. Scholars such as McFillen and colleagues have speculated that the failure to conduct an accurate organisational diagnosis, and the related failure to build readiness for change, plays a major role in the high rate of failed initiatives. Yet the diagnostic models most widely used in practice, including the McKinsey 7 S model, Weisbord’s six-box model and the Burke–Litwin model, have been criticised for presenting heterogeneous, atomistic categories without specifying how the factors interact, for omitting elements such as the external environment, and for lacking strong theoretical foundations. They offer managers step-by-step checklists, the authors argue, but little insight into why resistance arises or what lies beneath surface phenomena.

SyMOA is grounded in the systems psychodynamic tradition that emerged at the Tavistock Institute in London in the 1950s and 1960s. That approach combines open-systems theory, which sees organisations as self-sustaining systems in constant exchange with their environment, with Freudian and object-relations theories, which hold that unconscious processes, hidden conflicts and anxieties powerfully shape human behaviour. As researcher Yiannis Gabriel has succinctly put it, in a psychodynamic view conflict is unavoidable and constitutive of the subject. Systems psychodynamic scholars examine how organisations develop mechanisms to manage competing drives, such as the desire for change versus the desire for stability, or the need for independence versus the need for belonging, and they focus on group behaviour and the collective unconscious rather than isolated individuals. What has been missing, the Freiburg team contends, is a structured diagnostic system built directly from these insights.

To fill that gap, the authors turned to clinical practice. Their template is the Operationalised Psychodynamic Diagnosis, or OPD, a well-researched multiaxial system used in German-speaking psychotherapy that captures a patient’s psychological state across experience of illness, interpersonal relationships, life-determining unconscious conflicts and structural functioning. The OPD is typically administered through a semi-structured interview, and the resulting psychodynamic profile informs therapy planning and evaluation. The researchers stress that transferring psychodynamic concepts from the individual to the organisational level does not mean mapping intrapsychic processes onto companies. Instead, following the systems psychodynamic tradition, organisational structures, routines and relational patterns are understood as socially organised responses to anxiety, uncertainty and conflict, an abstraction of underlying principles rather than a literal transfer.

The resulting framework assesses organisations along three interrelated dimensions. The first, the organisation’s inner functioning, examines current challenges and how they are attributed, whether to technology, workforce, culture or an integrated socio-technical system, along with resources, barriers to change and organisational climate. Beneath these visible features lie the inner workings: regular, repetitive conscious and unconscious patterns through which the organisation deals with itself and the external world. These are rated across five categories, each considered both inwardly and toward the environment: internal and external awareness, regulatory capacity, communication, attachment, and organisational defence mechanisms. These workings change slowly over time and can be rated from well functioning to low functioning.

The second dimension addresses internal relational patterns and dynamics, which are shaped by organisational structure and the demands of communication, cooperation and coordination, but also by interpersonal affect and the history of shared interaction. Assessment focuses on observable relational behaviour and conscious emotional experience in specific situations, at horizontal levels such as between teams and vertical levels such as between senior management and employees. The approach explicitly captures how each party in an interaction experiences itself and the other, illuminating recurring and potentially dysfunctional patterns of relationship.

The third dimension probes the organisation’s unconscious conflicts. Just as people carry an inner experience shaped by early experiences and proven survival strategies, the authors argue, companies accumulate conflicts that begin as visible tensions between teams or managers and gradually shift inward, becoming part of the organisational DNA. Conflict here does not mean open dispute but the struggle between contradictory needs, such as how much freedom versus how much guidance, or how much responsibility versus how much security. When such basic conflicts are adequately resolved, an organisation can flex situationally between the poles of need; when it cannot, it rigidly pursues one pole, and the conflict is repeatedly activated by situational factors during the organisation’s development.

Conceptually, SyMOA is framed by a metamodern sensibility, drawing on the philosophy of Vermeulen and van den Akker, which holds modernist rigor and postmodern reflexivity in productive tension rather than resolving them. In practice this means organisational phenomena are analysed using structured dimensions while remaining open to multiple, potentially conflicting interpretations. The framework also aligns with critical theory’s project of revealing entrenched power relations: organisational culture, the authors note, can operate both as a collective social defence against anxiety, in the tradition of Menzies and Schein’s concept of learning anxiety, and as a subtle form of control in which employees internalise corporate values and police themselves. Through reification, historically contingent power relations become naturalised and appear as objective features of organisational life, resistant to critique. By surfacing hidden defences and covert emotional processes, SyMOA is intended to make these barriers to change visible and contestable.

The authors are careful to position the work as deliberately conceptual. SyMOA is not a universal or prescriptive model but one possible analytical framework, and its dimensions are conceptual categories derived from systems psychodynamic theory rather than validated measures. A companion study protocol published in JMIR Research Protocols outlines the next phases: a structured interview guide, application in instrumental case studies, and testing of intercoder reliability, construct validity, content validity and known-groups validity, with safeguards including informed consent, confidentiality, peer debriefing and triangulation to manage the ethical risks of deep, potentially sensitive inquiry. The authors also draw an analogy to psychotherapy research, where interventions succeed more often when structural aspects, relationship dynamics and conflicts are assessed in a differentiated way and matched to a client’s stage of readiness for change, from pre-contemplation through maintenance. If that logic holds for organisations, they suggest, a SyMOA profile could indicate an organisation’s readiness for change and help tailor interventions accordingly. Whether the framework can deliver on that promise will depend on the empirical studies now underway, but the ambition is clear: to give organisations a clinical-grade instrument for understanding not just what they do, but why they keep doing it.

Subject of Research: A systems psychodynamic diagnostic framework for assessing unconscious organisational dynamics

Article Title: A systems psychodynamic framework for understanding and assessing organisational dynamics

Article References: Lahmann, C., Rank, O., & Müller, A.-M. (2026). A systems psychodynamic framework for understanding and assessing organisational dynamics. Discover Psychology, 6(1), Article 272. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44202-026-00885-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44202-026-00885-3

Keywords: organisational diagnostics, systems psychodynamics, organisational change, psychodynamic theory, organisational culture, clinical diagnostics, metamodernism, critical theory, organisational psychology, change management, OPD, organisational dynamics

The study, published in Global Surgical Education, the Journal of the Association for Surgical Education, examined a program struggling with low adoption of the System for Improving and Measuring Procedural Learning, known as SIMPL. The smartphone-based platform was designed to let faculty deliver rapid, structured workplace-based assessments of residents using entrustable professional activities, or EPAs, which describe the discrete tasks a surgeon must be able to perform without supervision. The American Board of Surgery now requires EPA-based assessment for general surgery residency, typically delivered through SIMPL, but programs nationwide have reported inconsistent engagement that undermines the reliability of the resulting data.

Researchers at Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University and Jefferson Einstein Philadelphia Hospital, led by Jandie Posner and Ramsey M. Dallal, approached the problem not as an education question but as an organizational change problem. They turned to ADKAR, a change-management model developed by Jeff Hiatt that breaks successful change into five sequential elements: awareness of the need for change, desire to participate, knowledge of how to change, ability to implement new skills, and reinforcement to sustain the change. Rather than simply asking faculty and residents to use the platform more, the team first diagnosed why they had stopped.

The diagnostic phase took the form of a faculty survey completed by 66 surgeons, whose responses were mapped onto the five ADKAR domains to identify where the implementation was failing. The findings informed a multicomponent intervention delivered between August and December 2024. It included re-education sessions for both faculty and residents on the purpose and mechanics of EPA assessments, a monthly leaderboard that gamified participation by ranking assessment activity, and formal recognition of high performers. The bundle was designed to act on multiple ADKAR domains simultaneously, raising awareness of the national mandate, cultivating desire through competition and recognition, restoring knowledge through refresher training, and building reinforcement into the program’s monthly rhythm.

To measure the effect, the investigators compared matched calendar quarters before and after the intervention: January through March 2024 served as the baseline, and January through March 2025 as the post-intervention period. The analysis included 48 resident-periods representing 31 unique residents, with 24 residents in each period. Because assessment counts are skewed count data, the team used count-data regression adjusted for postgraduate year and resident type, a statistical approach that accounts for the fact that senior residents and categorical residents might naturally accumulate more assessments than junior or preliminary residents. The model also accounted for residents who were present in both periods, allowing a within-person comparison.

The results were striking. Total EPA assessments rose from 36 to 100 across the two periods. Adjusted for training level and resident type, residents completed approximately 2.6 times as many assessments after the intervention, with an incidence-rate ratio of 2.58 and a 95 percent confidence interval of 1.17 to 5.73, reaching statistical significance at p equals 0.019. The confidence interval spans a range from a modest to a large effect, a nuance the authors acknowledged rather than smoothed over. Resident participation rates doubled, climbing from 37.5 percent to 75 percent, also statistically significant. Assessment activity expanded across all phases of surgical care, indicating that the gains were not confined to a single rotation or service line.

The statistical model revealed an additional pattern: activity varied significantly by training level, peaking among mid-level residents, but did not differ between categorical and preliminary residents. This distributional detail matters for program directors, because it suggests that mid-level trainees, who are often entrusted with greater operative autonomy, may be the natural center of gravity for workplace-based assessment, while interventions may need tailoring to activate junior and senior cohorts differently.

The authors were notably candid about the limits of their success. Decomposing the increase, they estimated that roughly 40 percent of the program-level gain reflected resident cohort turnover rather than behavior change among existing faculty and residents, as new interns arrived in a climate of heightened engagement. When the analysis isolated residents present in both periods, the within-resident change was not statistically significant, and a concurrent national trend toward increased EPA use may have contributed to the observed rise. The study was a single-center before-after design reported according to SQUIRE 2.0 quality-improvement standards, without a concurrent control group, so these uncontrolled results warrant caution. The team also emphasized that the study measured only EPA utilization, not the quality of feedback, resident learning, or actual competency outcomes, leaving open the question of whether more assessments translate into better surgeons.

Those caveats, however, do not erase the study’s practical value. The authors frame the intervention as a reproducible bundle: diagnose barriers systematically, map them to a recognized change framework, deliver targeted re-education, and embed reinforcement through gamification and recognition. The gamification element builds on a growing literature showing that leaderboards and competition can increase engagement in health professions education, while the ADKAR mapping gives other programs a vocabulary for figuring out which stage of change their own implementation is stuck at. A program whose faculty are unaware of the EPA mandate needs a different fix than one whose faculty know the mandate but lack the desire to comply, and the ADKAR lens makes that distinction actionable.

The work also extends a lineage of re-implementation studies. A prior BMC Surgery report from a different program, published under the pointed title When the First Try Fails, documented a similar recovery effort, and earlier multi-institutional trials had established SIMPL’s feasibility for real-time intraoperative assessment. What the new study adds is a theoretically grounded, low-cost template that programs facing low EPA engagement can adapt without new technology or funding. The research received no specific grant funding, the institutional review board deemed it exempt, and the authors report no conflicts of interest. As EPA-based assessment becomes a fixed feature of surgical training, the study’s central message resonates beyond surgery: implementing an assessment platform is a change-management exercise, and treating it as one may be the difference between a tool that collects dust and one that transforms how surgical competence is measured.

Subject of Research: ADKAR-guided re-implementation of the SIMPL EPA assessment platform in a general surgery residency program

Article Title: When implementing SIMPL is not so simple: an ADKAR-guided re-implementation and engagement strategy in a general surgery residency

Article References: Posner, J., Kardan, R., Godbole, M., Lei, J., Moran, B., & Dallal, R. M. (2026). When implementing SIMPL is not so simple: an ADKAR-guided re-implementation and engagement strategy in a general surgery residency. Global Surgical Education – Journal of the Association for Surgical Education, 5(1), Article 160. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44186-026-00569-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44186-026-00569-5

Keywords: entrustable professional activities, SIMPL, ADKAR, change management, surgical education, general surgery residency, resident assessment, faculty engagement, gamification, quality improvement, workplace-based assessment, competency-based education