Amplify or Suppress? Top Leader Perspective on External Stakeholders' Influence on Organizational Change Outcomes

Based on a collaborative auto-ethnographic approach, this paper examines how external stakeholders can influence organizational change processes and outcomes in a public sector context. Existing change literature suggests that stakeholder management and collaboration are critical for achieving change results. Although the role of internal stakeholders has been documented, we know less about how external stakeholders can influence planned change. To explore this, we adopted a variant of collaborative auto-ethnography in which the first-hand experiences of a top manager combined with extensive media coverage were retrospectively made sense of through joint reflection and theorizing with an outside academic. Drawing on stakeholder theory and the concept of momentum for change, we show how external stakeholders can either amplify or suppress the momentum for change, thereby ultimately affecting goal attainment. The slightly adjusted CAE methodology offers new opportunities for academic/practitioner collaborations to advance change practice and theory.