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The aim of this special issue is to better understand the strategy and change interface, in particular, the (sub)processes and cognitions that enable strategies to be successfully implemented and organizations effectively changed. The ten papers selected for this special issue reflect a range of scholarly traditions and, thus, as our review and integration of the relevant literatures, and our introductions to the ten papers demonstrate, they shed light on the strategy and change interface in starkly different ways. Collectively, the papers give us more insight into the recursive activities, and structural, organizational learning and cognitive mechanisms that are encouraged or deliberately established at organizations to allow their people to successfully implement a strategy and effect change, including achieve greater levels of horizontal alignment. Moreover, they demonstrate the benefits associated with establishing platforms and/or routines designed to overcome decision-makers’ cognitive shortcomings while implementing a strategy or making timely adjustments to it. We conclude our editorial by identifying some yet unanswered questions.

The purpose of this study is to examine whether and how abusive supervision climate impacts team conflict from a mindfulness perspective. Prior research has identified serious dysfunctional effects of abusive supervision climate in teams. Team conflict, which is often a signal for dysfunctional relationships in teams, has however received limited attention. To contribute to this line of research, this study develops and tests a theoretical model on the role of team mindfulness in understanding the link between abusive supervision climate and task, process, and relationship conflict.

To test the theoretical model, this study collected and analyzed two-wave time-lagged data from 499 employees in 92 teams.

The results showed that abusive supervision climate aggravated task conflict and process conflict via diminishing levels of team mindfulness. Abusive supervision climate also exacerbated relationship conflict, but the effects did not occur via a decrease in team mindfulness.

While it may not always be possible to prevent the development of an abusive supervision climate in workplaces, other interventions may prevent conflict in teams with abusive leaders. As indicated by the findings, task conflict and process conflict may be reduced if teams are high on mindfulness. Interventions that stimulate team mindfulness might thus improve collaboration in teams with abusive leaders.

This research offers novel insights regarding how abusive leaders might instigate conflict within teams. Specifically, through the unique perspective of mindfulness, the authors are able to offer new insights into how abusive supervision climate affects task, process and relationship conflict. This study offers a novel, yet important, lens to examine how conflict occurs in teams.

This study seeks to examine how follower’s emotional intelligence influences their emotional reactions to leadership.

Data were collected at two points in time. First, I assessed the emotional intelligence of 157 participants in a laboratory setting. Then, a few weeks later, an experiment manipulating leadership behavior was conducted with same participants. After viewing the leader, the participants’ emotional reactions to their attributions of the leader’s behavior were assessed.

In line with expectations, emotional intelligence was associated with different emotional responses to attributions for the leader’s behavior. Specifically, participants lower on emotional intelligence had more extreme emotional responses to the leader than their more highly emotionally intelligent counterparts.

Although emotional intelligence has received a lot of scholarly attention with regard to predicting performance and leadership emergence, we need to learn more about how it influences emotional responses at work.

If emotional intelligence helps promote less extreme emotional reactions at work, emotional skills should be developed in employees.

This study is the first to examine emotional intelligence as a moderator of emotional reactions to attributions of leadership charisma and intent.

Despite ongoing controversy, emotional intelligence is emerging as a potentially important variable in furthering our understanding of individual behavior in organizations. In this respect, however, most of the research in relation to emotional intelligence has been at the individual level of behavior. In this chapter, we develop a framework for considering the impact of emotional intelligence at the organizational level. Specifically, we map Mayer and Salovey's four emotional intelligence abilities onto Shein's three-level organizational culture schema. We conclude with a discussion of implications for managers and suggest that the model we propose may prove to be a useful starting point for future research into emotional intelligence as an organizational phenomenon.

The authors explore employees’ emotions during a structural change (merging departments) in the higher education sector. The purposes of this paper are to identify how employees’ perceptions shape their emotional responses toward organizational change; and the variation of collective employee emotions pre-merger and post-merger.

This interpretative study uses phenomenography to better understand the phenomena of change.

Employees perceived their experiences as being promising (an opportunity to look forward to), threatening (a threat to be carefully managed) or inevitable (unavoidable). Emotional responses are collective, with male/older/more senior respondents experiencing different emotions as compared to others.

This study is exploratory and is limited by small sample size, location and temporal specificity.

Managers should recognize that employees’ experiences of change are perceived quite differently and therefore should not simply be lumped together as one homogenous group. This knowledge can be used to facilitate the change process by better managing employees’ emotions to achieve positive outcomes.

Investigating emotions through an interpretive lens highlights new areas for improvement in the change management process. The authors are able to better understand why people are feeling positively or negatively toward organizational change and how and why their emotions shift over time.

Accumulating evidence suggests that Team-member exchange (TMX) influences employee work attitudes and behaviours separately from the effects of leader-member exchange (LMX). In particular, little is known of the effect of LMX differentiation (in-group versus out-group) as a process of social exchange that can, in turn, affect TMX quality. To explore this phenomenon, this chapter presents a multi-level model of TMX in organizations, which incorporates LMX differentiation, team identification, team member affect at the individual level, and fairness of LMX differentiation and affective climate at the group-level. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our model for theory, research, and practice.

This paper serves two purposes: first, it is an apology for a failure to produce a planned special issue, along with the rationales as to why the authors decided to withdraw it; and second, a commentary on the apparent failure of the research community to address a neglected area of inquiry in emotional intelligence (EI) research.

The authors provide a commentary.

The authors draw attention to the possiblity that employing highly emotionally intelligent individuals may not always yield desirable outcomes for organisations, thus seeking to ignite a more balanced debate as to the merits of EI in management and leadership studies. The authors also detail briefly several avenues for future research.

The theme of the planned special issue was situated at the forefront EI research, so this commentary succinctly highlights the theorising that informed the background to it.