The Influence of Leadership Style on the Project Teams' Readiness to Change

The purpose of this study is search of the interaction between the parameters "leadership style" and "readiness to change", whether the parameter "readiness to change" dependent on the personal characteristics of the employees or the mechanism of involvement of employees by the leader in the process of the project implementation. To check the hypothesis about the influence of leadership style on the readiness to change of the project team, the questioning was conducted that contained questions of three methods: "Big five", test Bagrationi, Reshetko, Tishchenko and ROC2. Questionnaires were administered to 165 employees of the four companies in different industries – banking, energy, textiles and telecommunications. Three of these companies were Russian and one was office of a foreign energy company in Russia. Moreover, the interview was conducted with three top managers of Russian companies from the energy sector. The cluster analysis marked out two styles of leadership: conservative and open. Further, by using the factor analysis, it was determined the existence of a relationship of belonging to one of the leadership styles depending on the type of company (branch of a foreign or Russian). The parameter "readiness to change" was classified into four categorical groups: negative, moderately negative, moderately positive and positive readiness to change. The distribution of employees working in each company showed that the parameter "readiness to change" is different due to the employees of Russian and foreign companies. The comparison of the results received for the two parameters allowed us to conclude the following: at the conservative leadership styles employees have a negative or moderately negative readiness to changes and, conversely, when leaders have an open style the employees have a moderately positive or positive readiness to change. At the same time open leadership style are characterized by top-managers of branches of foreign companies.