DBA 8030 Module 4 Comprehensive Assessment: Four Essays on Leading Strategic Change Example

Leading Strategic Change at a Community Bank: Four Essays on Leadership, Culture, and Change

Student Name

Doctor of Business Administration, Thomas Edison State University

DBA-8030: Seminar in Organizational Dynamics: Leadership, Culture, and Change

Mentor Name

Month Day, Year

Leading Strategic Change at a Community Bank: Four Essays on Leadership, Culture, and Change

Introduction

The comprehensive assessment asks four questions spanning the course. I answer them through one strategic change at the bank where I work: the move of small business lending from branch officers to a digital application platform, decided by the board in 2026. Using one case lets each essay build on the last, from theory to culture to national context to the change itself.

Essay 1: How Has Leadership Theory Developed, and What Does Each Stage Offer a Leader of Change?

Leadership theory progressed by answering gaps left by earlier approaches. Trait research looked for the qualities that set leaders apart, but Stogdill (1948) found no consistent set across situations. Behavioral research shifted attention to what leaders do, separating task from relationship behavior, but could not say which mix works best. Contingency and situational approaches answered that the right style depends on the situation, with Fiedler (1967) arguing that style is fixed and must be matched to situations and the situational approach holding that leaders can flex.

Contemporary theories turned to how leaders change followers. Bass (1985) described transformational leadership as raising followers' motivation through vision, example, challenge and individual attention, and Judge and Piccolo (2004) found it strongly related to follower satisfaction and leader effectiveness. Authentic and servant leadership added attention to self-awareness, transparency and service.

Each stage still offers something to a leader of change. Traits such as integrity and determination matter when a change is resisted. Task and relationship behaviors map onto the two halves of a change effort: the plan and the people. Situational thinking reminds the leader that the same staff need direction in one phase and support in another. Transformational leadership supplies the vision that makes a change worth the disruption. Rather than replacing one another, the theories form a toolkit, each suited to a different part of the work. The toolkit view also guards against a common mistake in change efforts, assuming that a leader who inspired staff through the last change will succeed with the next one. The digital platform asks officers to give up part of their craft, a different situation from the merger's call to grow, and the contingency theorists would expect a different mix of task and relationship behavior to fit it.

Essay 2: How Do Leaders Create and Change Organizational Culture?

Schein and Schein (2019) describe culture as the shared lessons a group draws from solving its problems, lessons that worked often enough that newcomers are taught them as simply how things are done. Culture shows at three levels: artifacts, espoused values and basic assumptions. Leaders create culture when they found organizations, because their assumptions become the group's if they lead to success. In established organizations, leaders change culture mainly through primary embedding mechanisms: the things they notice and track, their reactions in a crisis, the way they hand out rewards and status, and their choices in hiring, promotion and dismissal. Secondary mechanisms, such as structures, rituals, buildings and formal statements, reinforce the primary ones but cannot substitute for them.

The digital lending change tests the bank's culture directly. Its loan officers assume that good lending depends on knowing the borrower personally, an assumption that served the bank well for sixty years. A platform that scores applications by data challenges that assumption, and a mission statement about innovation will not change it. What will change it is what leaders measure and reward. If the bank measures loan losses on platform loans alongside branch loans and shares the results openly, officers can test their assumption against evidence. If leaders react to the first platform loan default by blaming the system, they will teach that the old assumption was right.

Culture change also needs a reason to unlearn. Schein and Schein (2019) describe survival anxiety, the sense that the organization must change to survive, which must exceed learning anxiety, the fear of being unable to learn the new way. Leaders lower learning anxiety through training, practice space, coaching and support rather than by raising fear. For the loan officers, learning anxiety is high: many fear the platform will make their judgment worthless. The bank should show that officers will review the platform's borderline cases, so their judgment remains part of the process. Raising survival anxiety alone, by warning that online lenders will take the bank's customers, would only increase resistance if learning anxiety stayed high.

Essay 3: What Does Cross-Cultural Research Teach About Leadership?

Hofstede (2001) placed national cultures along several scales, such as how far people accept unequal power and how strongly they put the group first, and warned that a practice that works at home can misfire abroad. The GLOBE study extended this work to leadership. House et al. (2004) asked managers in 62 societies what makes a leader outstanding; integrity, vision and decisiveness won approval almost universally, while status consciousness and individualism split the countries.

Two lessons follow. First, some parts of leadership travel well: a leader with integrity and a clear vision has a good chance of being seen as effective in most cultures. Second, many behaviors do not travel, and a style that works in one setting can offend in another. Participative leadership, for example, is valued highly in some cultures but less in those with high power distance.

The bank is local, but its workforce is not uniform. Its tellers and loan processors include recent immigrants from India, the Dominican Republic and Poland, and its new platform vendor's team works in Bangalore. The change team should not assume that silence in a training session means agreement; in cultures with high power distance, staff may not question a manager in a group. Small group sessions and anonymous questions give everyone a channel to raise concerns. The same caution applies to the vendor team: deadlines set by the bank may be accepted in a meeting and quietly missed if the team does not feel able to object. A weekly check on progress with a named contact on each side, and an explicit invitation to report problems early, fits the GLOBE finding that what counts as good leadership varies while integrity and clarity are valued nearly everywhere.

Essay 4: How Should Leaders Lead Strategic Change?

Lewin (1947) pictured change as thawing the present arrangement, shifting it and setting it again, and his advice to reduce the forces holding things in place, not only to push harder, still applies. Kotter (1996) laid out an eight-step sequence for change, opening with urgency and a guiding team, passing through a vision spread across the whole organization, removing barriers and winning early, and closing by building on gains and making the change part of the culture. Models of this kind give a change sequence and remind leaders that change fails most often when steps are skipped. Their weakness is that they treat people as forces to be managed rather than as individuals with different stakes in the change.

Research on change leaders adds what models omit. Herold et al. (2008) found that transformational leadership was related to employees' commitment to a change more strongly than leaders' change-specific behaviors, and that this was most true when the change affected employees' own jobs. Followers' trust in a leader, built before the change, shapes how they receive it. Battilana et al. (2010) found that the skills that mattered shifted as a change unfolded, with task skills counting most when mobilizing and evaluating and people skills counting most when winning others over.

For the digital lending change, I would combine the two.

Leading the change is also personal. Herold et al. (2008) suggest that the president's standing with staff before the change matters more than any single change tactic, so the listening and consideration recommended for the merger in Module 2 are also groundwork for this change.

Conclusion

The four essays connect. Leadership theory supplies a toolkit for change, from vision to situational flexibility. Culture determines whether a change sticks, and leaders shape it through what they measure, reward and do in crises. Cross-cultural research warns that styles do not always travel, even within a diverse local workforce. Leading strategic change combines a model's sequence with the trust and commitment that research shows leaders build over time. For the bank, the digital lending platform will succeed if leaders treat it as a change in assumptions, not only in software. The board should judge it at a year by loan quality, officers' commitment and whether customers still name a person at the bank they trust.

References

Bass, B. M. (1985). Leadership and performance beyond expectations. Free Press.

Battilana, J., Gilmartin, M., Sengul, M., Pache, A.-C., & Alexander, J. A. (2010). Leadership competencies for implementing planned organizational change. Leadership Quarterly, 21(3), 422-438. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2010.03.007

Fiedler, F. E. (1967). A theory of leadership effectiveness. McGraw-Hill.

Herold, D. M., Fedor, D. B., Caldwell, S., & Liu, Y. (2008). The effects of transformational and change leadership on employees' commitment to a change: A multilevel study. Journal of Applied Psychology, 93(2), 346-357. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.93.2.346

Hofstede, G. (2001). Culture's consequences: Comparing values, behaviors, institutions, and organizations across nations (2nd ed.). Sage.

House, R. J., Hanges, P. J., Javidan, M., Dorfman, P. W., & Gupta, V. (Eds.). (2004). Culture, leadership, and organizations: The GLOBE study of 62 societies. Sage.

Judge, T. A., & Piccolo, R. F. (2004). Transformational and transactional leadership: A meta-analytic test of their relative validity. Journal of Applied Psychology, 89(5), 755-768. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.89.5.755

Kotter, J. P. (1996). Leading change. Harvard Business School Press.

Lewin, K. (1947). Frontiers in group dynamics: Concept, method and reality in social science; social equilibria and social change. Human Relations, 1(1), 5-41. https://doi.org/10.1177/001872674700100103

Schein, E. H., & Schein, P. A. (2019). The corporate culture survival guide (3rd ed.). Wiley.

Stogdill, R. M. (1948). Personal factors associated with leadership: A survey of the literature. Journal of Psychology, 25(1), 35-71. https://doi.org/10.1080/00223980.1948.9917362