رفتار رهبری و نتایج مهندسی مجدد فرایند کسب و کار (BPR) : تجزیه و تحلیل تجربی از 30 پروژه BPR

Lack of leadership is frequently a cause for the high failure rate of business process reengineering (BPR) projects. According to many experts, BPR implementation requires a top-down, directive leadership style. Yet, it also requires the management of motivated, skilled, independent-thinking people doing non-programmable tasks for which a non-directive leadership style is most suited. This creates an inherent conflict for BPR leaders on choosing the appropriate style. Applying the leadership effectiveness framework, this study conducted an in-depth empirical analyses of the relationship between IS leadership behavior and BPR outcomes for 30 BPR projects. We found that successful BPR leaders use leadership styles that fit the type of task that needs to be done and the needs of the people that will perform the tasks. Also, successful BPR leaders balance their efforts between meeting the needs of the people doing the work and the needs of the work. The results provide guidelines for both leadership practice and empirical research.

BPR has been proclaimed the ‘single best hope’ for restoring competitive advantage [22]. Indeed, it was estimated that companies would spend $52 billion on BPR in 1997, $40 billion of which would go to information technology [52]. However, BPR is notorious as a challenging pursuit; even advocates estimate that 50–70% of all BPR efforts fail [20] and [23]. There are a variety of reasons cited for this high BPR failure rate: employees’ resistance to change, inadequate attention to employee concerns [41], inadequate and inappropriate staffing, flawed objectives, inadequate tools for the developers and users, goals not aligned with strategy, lack of measurable and attainable goals, and a lack of oversight during implementation and follow-up phases. While some projects fail from poorly formulated strategy, one principal cause is a failure in committed leadership [21]. Yet, the message to leaders embarking on BPR especially IT leaders who usually play a key role in BPR is inherently conflicted. On one hand, BPR is a top-down phenomenon where a directed, committed leadership is critical for success particularly in the implementation phase [8] and [30]. On the other hand, BPR implementation is highly non-programmable requiring highly motivated, skilled and independent people who can solve all the unforeseen problems and challenges that BPR poses. Thus, there is a potential conflict between the nature of BPR and the style of leadership typically used; BPR leaders are required to be directive while they must also allow people to be motivated and independent. This leads to an unresolved question: is a directive or non-directive leadership style more effective in implementing BPR projects? Unfortunately, few theoretical analyses offer insights to scholars, and no systematic guidelines are available to practitioners. Applying the Flamholtz Leadership Effectiveness framework [15] and [16], this study analyses the relationship between IS leadership behaviors and BPR outcomes for 30 completed BPR projects.1

The major conclusions are: (1) successful BPR leaders employ leadership styles that fit better the critical situational factors; and (2) successful leaders of BPR projects perform their leadership tasks in a reasonably well balanced manner. This study has several limitations. First, it involved only a small sample. Second, the study’s findings may not be generalizable to situations where there are multiple leaders on a BPR project. Third, because this study asks informants questions on events that had already occurred, thus its results depend on the memories of the informants with all the inherent informant biases that this implies. This study provides several contributions to theory. It extends leadership theory into today’s business environment where higher-order change is desired. This study confirms that a relationship exists between effective leadership as the Flamholtz framework defines it and the successful outcome of a higher-order change. A second contribution is the operationalization of the Style-Situation Fit construct. This was previously untested and could not be examined using recognized statistical methods. The development of this construct is important because it opens up more areas of organizational theory to empirical testing. A final contribution to theory is the lack of support for consistency of leader involvement affecting BPR outcomes (H3). This study operationalized the level of leader involvement as a series of statements on the level of involvement in executing various leadership tasks. Yet, no significant relationships were found. This research supports the premise that leaders play a critical role in affecting BPR outcomes. It has long been known that leaders can literally ‘make or break’ a BPR project. What has been lacking for practitioners is a set of useful guidelines that show leaders the steps they need to take for a successful project. What has been lacking is a set of measures for operationalizing the fit concept in the Flamholtz framework. This study provides such a construct.