The Effect of Strategic Leadership on the Integration and Success of Organizational Change

Introduction

Change is an integral part of life and this includes not only humans but also organizations (Ntalakos et al., 2023a,b). Especially today change management on many organizations is part of their daily routine (Belias et al.2022a,b,c,d). Indeed, organizations need to adjust on uncertainty and the need to change so to deal with uncertainty in a daily basis (Belias and Trihas, 2023,b). For this reason the case of change management is an emerging case for all companies while there is a need to better understand all aspects of change management (Cameron & Green, 2019). It should be noted that change management is about people management first and foremost. More specifically, the interaction between the organization and the behavior of its people and how this contact affects the organization's performance in change (Hockenberry, 2019). Hence management and leadership of change is a difficult task for a manager or in general for the management of organizations (Rossidis et al. 2020, 2021a, 2021b). The fact that change often fails is a result of not paying attention to a number of parameters that supposedly influence change. For example, elements such as organizational culture (Ntalakos et al, 2022; Belias & Koustelios, 2014), staff training (Belias & Trihas, 2022) and the good use of information available in relation to the organization and its environment they are just some of the parameters that can decisively influence change (Cohen & Karatzimas, 2014). All of the above requires the existence of the corresponding leadership that can bring about the change (Račaitė-Samušienė et al, 2021).

From the above it has been understood that change is a process that requires excellent leadership but also an understanding of some critical variables. In order, important elements that will judge a change. These may be the nature of leadership, initially, in terms of its style and how strategic it is in direction of change (Holter & Brenner, 2015). Also, an important factor is the commitment of the leadership and the employees towards the change. In this case there are studies such as Lok & Crawford (1999), Lo et al (2010) and many others that link strategic leadership with ensuring staff commitment to change. In this case the staff consider the change to be their “ownership” and ensure the success of the change. In addition, an important element is to be able to integrate the change into the organization, in the sense of systems and processes in an organization, as well as in the perception of employees (Fuchs et al., 2000).