Change Resilience Strategy and Strategic Change Management: The Mediating Effect of Transformational Leadership Style

: One common feature among human beings is that everyone is more or less driven by emotions. Leaders, being humans, are not exception to this. Emotions thus play a vital role in managing people especially in times of strategic change. Emotional intelligence consists of a range of fundamental skills or strategies, key among them being change resilience, that allow one to confidently respond to people and changing situations. The study sought to determine mediating effect transformational leadership style on the relationship between change resilience strategy and strategic change management in the Judiciary in Kenya. The study used an explanatory research design. The study targeted 968 managers in the Judiciary. Stratified random sampling was used to obtain a sample size of 158. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were used. Multiple regression results indicated that the extracted factors of change resilience strategy had a positive and significant effect on strategic change management. Hierarchical regression results indicated that transformational leadership style fully mediates the relationships between change resilience strategy and strategic change management. Hence the study concludes that the use of emotional intelligence strategies predisposes a manager to use a transformational leadership style and hence he or she becomes more adept at managing strategic change. Mixed measures of EI demonstrated a strong relationship between EI and transformational leadership when same-source ratings were used, and a weak relationship when multi-source ratings were used. The authors also conducted meta-analyses of the studies which assessed the relationship between EI and the MLQ (Avolio, 1995). The relationship was moderate in strength for same-source ratings (r=.54), and weak for multi-source ratings (r=.09). Regarding transactional leadership, Robert (2008) reported that EI had a positive relationship with the contingent reward scale for same-source ratings (r=.35) and a weak relationship for multi-source rating (r=.13). There was no significant relationship between EI and the management-by-exception active scale. Both scales of passive/avoidant leadership were negatively related to EI. Notably, EI demonstrated a moderate negative relationship with the management-by-exception passive scale for same-source ratings (r= -.22) and a weak relationship for multi-source ratings (r=.12). EI also demonstrated a moderately strong negative relationship with the laissez-faire scale of passive/avoidant leadership for same-source ratings (r=.36) and a weak relationship for multi-source ratings (r=.17). of both emotional intelligence and transformational leadership 2010). Further self management strategy and change resilience strategy underlies inspirational motivation because one needs to face failure positively (change resilience), work hard in unfavorable settings (change resilience), be self-motivated (self management), and feel competent (self management) before one can talk optimistically about the future, and express confidence that goals will be achieved. The results indicated that the relationship between emotional literacy and strategic change management is mediated by transformational leadership style. These finding are in tandem with William and Carol (2014) study that showed that there are a number of linkages between emotional intelligence abilities of managers that are referred to as strategies in this study and transformational leadership style.