Role of leaders in building organizational readiness to change – case study at public health centers in Indonesia

Abstract

Leaders play a strategic role in the process of organizational change. Various studies were conducted to show the role of leaders in succeeding change. One famous concept of leaders’ role was the Mintzberg managerial role, which divides the role of the leader into three main roles: interpersonal, informational, and decisional. This research was conducted to explore the leaders’ role in creating organizational readiness to change. The study was conducted at 40 government-owned public health centers in Indonesia, involving 190 midwives as respondents. The study results show that all three leader’s roles were well implemented by the head of the public health center with the best score in the informational role. However, organizational readiness to change at public health centers is not on the same level. The linear regression test indicates that the decisional role has the largest contribution in building the organizational readiness to change. The successfully implemented role of entrepreneurs, disturbance handlers, resource allocators, and negotiators was the key to the successful implementation of changes. Therefore, the advice given was the need for leaders to improve their decision abilities so that the organizational readiness to change becomes better. Acknowledgment The researcher thanked the Ministry of Research, Technology and Higher Education, Republic of Indonesia, for funding this research.

Keywords

• decision-making
• decisional role
• entrepreneurship
• informational role
• interpersonal role
• organizational change