ABSTRACT As organizations adapt to evolving work practices, many are turning to activity-based work environments with the aim of enhancing employee interactions, particularly communication and collaboration. Despite the growing popularity of activity-based work environments, evidence on their actual impact remains limited and mixed. This study investigates how transitioning to activity-based work environments affects employee communication and collaboration, and how these effects depend on person-environment fit. Drawing on longitudinal survey data from three small organizations in Iceland, we analysed employee responses collected once before and three times after the activity-based work environment was implemented. Using hierarchical linear modelling, we find modest but statistically significant increases in communication and collaboration following the transition. Furthermore, the improvements were more pronounced among employees with a higher person-environment fit, suggesting that alignment between individual preferences and workspace design plays a key role in shaping outcomes. These findings contribute to a clearer understanding of how flexible workspace arrangements influence day-to-day employee interactions and highlight the importance of accounting for individual differences in evaluating such changes. MAD statement This study provides important insights into how activity-based work environments influence workplace communication and collaboration, offering scholars and practitioners evidence-based guidance on designing workspaces that support effective employee interaction. By using longitudinal data and examining the moderating role of person-environment fit, the research demonstrates both the overall benefits of activity-based work environments and the value of aligning workspace design with individual needs. These findings address a growing organizational challenge: fostering communication and collaboration in increasingly flexible and dynamic work settings. As such, this work is highly relevant for those seeking to improve employee interaction, teamwork, and performance through thoughtful workplace design.

ABSTRACT This study investigates how communities navigate the tensions that arise when agile and hierarchical organizing intersect within a financial organization. Drawing on an ethnographic study, we explore how communities navigate the contradictory demands of maintaining hierarchical consistency while pursuing agile adaptability. The paper argues that such tensions can produce organizational zombification, in which autonomy and self-organizing are gradually constrained by demands for control and predictability. In such situations, agile organizing remains visible in form but loses much of its collective and adaptive potential. Complexity leadership theory is used to understand how communities mitigate these tensions through shared coordination routines and visualization practices. The study describes how these practices connect actors and communities, structuring and facilitating interactions to reconcile needs for both alignment and autonomy. This balancing process is conceptualized as cyborgification, an organizational state where structural consistency merges with collective agency to ensure both predictability and adaptability. In doing so, the paper contributes to discussions of collective leadership by emphasizing how organizations can sustain collective agency by attending to both structural design and the social dynamics of power. MAD statement In this paper, we align with the Anti-Zombie Leadership Alliance (Haslam et al., 2024), which argues that leadership must first and foremost be considered a collective endeavour. However, leadership is also a messy, ambiguous, and contested process, where responsibilities, capabilities, and interests in ‘making leadership happen’ are strongly shaped by specific actors. Our research shows how additional actors and communities can and should be involved in leadership practices to avoid leader-centricity that may zombify and stifle the organization. The study contends that communities have the potential to contribute considerably to collective leadership processes if we are willing to attend to recurring power imbalances, embrace organizational contradictions, and promote structures that enable collectivity.

ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to contribute to research on responsible management by developing knowledge on how managing responsibly together in a Top Management Team (TMT) may be accomplished, thus complementing research in the area that focuses on the work of individual managers. To this end, we mobilize the concept of obligation to characterize what emerges as what a TMT needs to respond to. Having followed the TMT for a municipal company working together in meetings over time, we propose that three accomplishments (making the obligation present, making the obligation enable action and accounting for the obligation) shape how an obligation is made to matter. This is no linear process, but rather it unfolds in a series of materializations of the obligation in text and talk, as the TMT goes about its work. The article thus provides a contribution to research on responsible management but also has practical consequences for developing how a TMT works in order to address the urgent demands for change related to sustainable development. MAD statement In this article, we develop knowledge on how managing responsibly together may be accomplished in a Top Management Team (TMT). Besides adding to the responsible management literature, we also provide theoretical tools that may be mobilized in order to develop the work practices of TMTs that want to contribute to sustainable development.

ABSTRACT The Kotter eight-step change model has a pervasive influence in the practice of change management; founded on building urgency towards the desired change through convincing employees that the status quo is more dangerous than the future state. We critique this positioning of the current state as dangerous, the proposition of using it to drive urgency, and the resultant employee anxiety and stress that is synonymous with organizational change. We reveal that positioning the current state as dangerous is a combative (and futile) strategy given the inescapable nature of status quo bias. To address this complication, we propose a theory adaptation that appreciatively leverages status quo bias and recommends invoking approach motivation based on communicating the pressing importance of the future state. MAD statement Change practitioners utilize change models to support organizations to adapt, with the hope that they simultaneously support employee well-being during transition. Our theory adaption, as justified and described in this paper, provides both practical and theoretical contributions to those who want to prioritize the well-being of employees during change efforts through leveraging empirically-established status quo bias.

ABSTRACT This paper develops a conceptual framework for understanding how organizations create an accepted purpose for organizational change initiatives related to business processes. The framework is based on a longitudinal study related to an Action Research project and the ‘higher level learning’ from using a performance measurement system for change initiatives. Over more than four years, we followed and measured the developments and progress in two separate, major change initiatives related to different business processes in one case organization. The framework has a specific focus on the need for a clear and accepted change purpose. It tries to explicate the nature of change purpose and proposes different interrelated attributes related to the clear content of a change purpose (relevant, justified, urgent, clear destination, clear scope and explicit goals) but also attributes of how the change purpose then should be communicated to be jointly accepted. This operationalization of the nature of change purpose could also inform the current general discussion on purpose related to leadership. MAD statement The intention of this article is to Make A Difference (MAD) by addressing problems with change readiness by focusing specifically on change purpose. We explicate the nature of change purpose and operationalize it, proposing a conceptual framework grounded in a longitudinal study of two major change initiatives. The framework could help organizations create an accepted purpose for organizational change initiatives related to business processes. We discuss attributes related to the clear content of a change purpose (relevant, justified, urgent, clear destination, clear scope and explicit goals) and how the change purpose should be communicated to be jointly accepted.

ABSTRACT Despite a plethora of frameworks and processes, in planned organizational change models (POCMs), the role of change organizations, i.e. organizations dedicated to change, remains rarely explored. In this paper, we delve into this subject via a multiple case-based research design studying eleven large Finnish companies via 33 interviews. We find that although all studied case companies bear some component(s) of change organizations, these vary substantially. To this end, our findings bear three contributions. First, we propose a typology on change organizations as consisting of change networks, change teams and individual change roles, incorporating varying dimensions each. We further found three interrelations between these dimensions. Second, we demonstrate that change organizations exist in company practice more than they appear in the POCM literature. Third, we develop a framework for the evaluation of the maturity of a company’s change organization. Going forward, our findings are a call for further research on change organizations and their role in planned organizational change. MAD statement This article aims to Make a Difference (MAD) by offering a coherent lens that can be used both in the research and in the development of change organizations, in theory and in practice. Change organizations (networks, teams and roles dedicated to change) are a somewhat underrepresented dimension in classic planned organizational change models. However, in practice, companies’ change organizations play various active roles in planned change. Building on evidence from a multiple case study of eleven Finnish large companies, we suggest a multi-dimensional typology on change organizations. Through identified interrelations, we suggest that certain types of change organizations may be preferred over others in particular circumstances. In addition, we offer a change organization maturity framework for developing and evaluating companies’ change organizations.

MAD statement The intention of this leading article is to help reframe our take on capitalism and leadership. Rather than presenting a linear, one-solution approach, it promotes an often messy, uncertain approach based on purpose, co-creation, creativity, courage and action delivering on a multitude of stakeholders’ needs and interests.

ABSTRACT The practice perspective of leadership de-emphasizes purpose and rather recognizes pre-reflective forms of intentionality carried out in embodied practices that may be subsequently guided by democratic, emancipatory and reflexive processes. Although leadership-as-practice should be classified as a descriptive metaethical theory, it can be animated by normative accounts derived from exploratory and critical discourses. MAD statement The contribution of the telos of social justice and sustainability needs to be accompanied by the exploratory study of the processes that detail social and material interactions that may alter the trajectory of the flow of practices within the organization. By focusing on process, we observe the actual doings or enactments of leadership that require mining prior to diving into goal attainment.

ABSTRACT Often, the space for agency and leadership for middle managers is understood to depend on their capacity to escape standardized controlling systems. In this paper, we challenge this view, and instead explore the possibility for middle managers to engage with and make systems enabling rather than constraining, thereby supporting locally relevant change initiatives. We specifically explore how managers engage with employee surveys, as organization wide standardized systems, and work to make these enabling. Based on interviews with 48 managers and observations of 10 meetings in 5 different organizations, we identify three main strategies: reinterpretation, prioritization, and embedding. Drawing on complexity leadership theory, we argue that through these strategies, the managers succeed in creating a temporary adaptive space, thereby facilitating development and innovation. Our findings contribute to the literature on middle managers by developing a detailed understanding of the possibility for enabling leadership in this position. MAD statement Standardized measurement and control systems are often expected to drive change and development, but risk constraining rather than enabling middle managerial leadership. Our study of how managers engage with an organization wide standardized employee survey reveals that through their work, the system can be ‘tamed’ and made to facilitate rather than hinder development. The study suggests that to make the survey useful for change and development, aligned with organizational goals but at the same time adapted to local needs, the managers’ extensive effort is a critical factor.

ABSTRACT Patients with rare diseases, as well as their caregivers, sometimes develop new solutions to deal with their health conditions but only a small fraction share the solution with their doctor or other health professionals. When the value of patient-developed solutions is considered, the evidence is that these solutions consistently help improve the overall quality of life. Patient-developed innovations are very heterogeneous in nature, level of quality, sophistication, and cost; nonetheless, the majority are frugal in cost and design. In this paper, we explore the organizational lessons of the patient innovation platform and community, and its leadership expressions, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Multi-sided online platforms for collecting, curating, and distributing those innovations can help in the fight against the pandemic by centralizing decentralization and we consider this theme in terms of our understanding of when leadership is distributed and when it is not. Distributed leadership can be considered as a paradox, a process in which leadership is retained and dispersed.