Responses of senior managers to externally imposed change: A study of senior executives in the Queensland public sector

Managers have important roles in organisations as it is through managers that organizations establish, maintain, and develop relationships with their environments. While there is a wealth of prescriptive literature about how managers should behave in situations of change, surprisingly little research that has been carried out with senior managers and their actual responses to change. The purpose of this research is to investigate the responses of senior managers to externally imposed change in fast changing environments. Specifically the focus is how senior managers respond to change in changing environments and how they respond in different changing environments. Because of the exploratory nature of this investigation, the objective was to develop a framework which could explore the responses of senior managers within changing environments. A conceptual framework based on the open systems model of systems/environment interaction of the individual managers and the relationship with environment was developed from early work on purposeful systems, and idealseeking systems. Theoretical premises and propositions were developed and used to investigate and analyse the responses of senior managers.