Leading Change in the New Professional Service Firm: Characterizing Strategic Leadership in a Global Context

This chapter examines the impact of adopting a global strategy upon leaders’ roles and identities in an engineering consultancy firm. Drawing upon process and social practice perspectives on leadership; our results explain leaders’ resistance to changing practices despite major process changes as due to the threats to their identity caused by the new role requirements to implement a global strategy. Our emerging process and social practice model of leadership highlights the complementary nature of process and practice change, creates a distinction between good and malign ambiguity in professional services firms and has implications for regulating the pace and timing of major changes which impact upon professional identities.