Abstract
We explore the roles of leaders’ coping style and organization members’ emphasis on stability in predicting leaders’ initiation of changes in their organizations. Specifically, we hypothesized that leaders’ problem‐focused style will be positively, and emotion‐focused style negatively, related to the initiation of change. We further proposed that organizational environments in which members emphasize stability will moderate the effect of leaders’ problem‐focused style. We tested our model using time‐lagged data from 75 school principals and 495/409 (Time 1/Time 2) teachers. Our results support the moderating role of the emphasis on stability on the effect of problem‐focused coping on leaders’ initiation of changes and provide some support for the negative effect of emotion‐focused coping. Our findings complement the psychological literature on recipients of change with psychological insights about the factors that make leaders become change agents.