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

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.