8.3 Leadership Styles and Organisational Climate

APMG Change Management Foundation Exam

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1 Chapter 1: The v3 Foundation Exam and the Organisational Context

1.1 Exam Structure, the Five Syllabus Areas and the Certification Path 1.2 Scene Setting: External and Internal Factors Shaping Change 1.3 Change Management, Benefits and Dis-benefits

2 Chapter 2: Understanding the Change Context

2.1 Kelman's Three Levels of Adoption 2.2 VUCA and the Cynefin Framework 2.3 Planned Change versus Emergent Change 2.4 Systems Thinking in Change 2.5 Organisational Culture and Its Three Levels

3 Chapter 3: Diagnosing and Structuring the Change Approach

3.1 Lewin's Force Field Analysis 3.2 Co-Design 3.3 The ADKAR Model 3.4 Evolving the n-Step Process and Kotter's Eight Accelerators

4 Chapter 4: Delivery Strategy, Agile Practices and the Change Strategy

4.1 Delivery Strategy: Big Bang, Phased, Voluntary and Iterative 4.2 Agile Practices and Agile Change Practices 4.3 The Continuous Change Management Cycle 4.4 The Change Strategy

5 Chapter 5: People and Change — Individual Difference and Response

5.1 Differences in People and Personality Preferences 5.2 Neuroscience and Change: SCARF, Mindset and Insight 5.3 The Change Curve 5.4 Bridges' Transition Model

6 Chapter 6: Motivation, Resilience and Learning

6.1 Rewards, Punishment and Pink's Three Motivators 6.2 Positive Psychology, Resilience and Appreciative Inquiry 6.3 The Beckhard-Harris Change Formula and Schein's Two Anxieties 6.4 Competence, Learning and the Learning Dip 6.5 Learning Preferences: Kolb, Honey and Mumford

7 Chapter 7: Key Roles in Change Leadership

7.1 Key Roles in the Change Process 7.2 The Role of the Change Sponsor 7.3 The Change Agent's Role and Personal Influence 7.4 The Role of Local Leadership in Change

8 Chapter 8: Psychological Safety, Leadership and Culture

8.1 Psychological Climate and Psychological Safety 8.2 Carolyn Taylor: How Leadership Shapes Culture 8.3 Leadership Styles and Organisational Climate

9 Chapter 9: Teams and Change

9.1 Team Structures and Change Agent Networks 9.2 Tuckman's Stages of Team Development 9.3 Lencioni: Assessing and Growing Team Effectiveness 9.4 Harvesting the Value of Team Diversity

10 Chapter 10: Stakeholder Identification, Analysis and Engagement

10.1 Stakeholder Definition and Identification 10.2 Stakeholder Analysis, Segmentation and Empathy Mapping 10.3 Stakeholder Mapping and Sources of Power 10.4 Barriers to Engagement 10.5 Planning Stakeholder Engagement

11 Chapter 11: Communication Theory, Messaging and Emotional Connection

11.1 Communication Theory and the Communication Process 11.2 Barriers to Communication and Cognitive Biases 11.3 Messaging: Setting Context and the Tell, Sell, Include Approach 11.4 Appealing to Hearts and Minds

12 Chapter 12: Communication Channels and Planning

12.1 Ways of Communicating and VARK Language Style Preferences 12.2 Communication Channels: One-Way, Two-Way, Lean and Rich 12.3 Communications Planning

13 Chapter 13: Assessing Change Impact and Severity

13.1 Change Management as Risk Management and the Two-Step Assessment 13.2 Step 1: Categorising Impacts and Identifying Impact Areas 13.3 Step 1 Continued: Gap Analysis, Impact Profiles and Monitoring 13.4 Step 2: Change Impact Severity

14 Chapter 14: Resistance to Change

14.1 Causes of Resistance and Oreg's Four Neural Factors 14.2 Common Reasons for Resistance and How to Deal With Them 14.3 Building a Strategy to Manage Resistance

15 Chapter 15: Change Analytics and Exam Readiness

15.1 Measurement Types and the Change Delivery Scorecard 15.2 Building a Change Analytics Strategy 15.3 Exam Technique and Final Revision

8.3 Leadership Styles and Organisational Climate

Key Takeaways Explain This Topic AI

The prevailing leadership style directly affects culture and the feeling of what it is like to work here, referred to as climate

Hay McBer identifies six dimensions of organisational climate influenced by leadership styles and choices

The six dimensions are flexibility, responsibility, standards, rewards, clarity and commitment

Flexibility means people feel freedom and autonomy to innovate without unnecessary red tape

Clarity refers to how clear people are on the organisation's mission and values
Last updated: September 2026

The prevailing leadership style can directly affect culture . This is especially true of the feeling around the organisation of "what it's like to work here" — sometimes referred to as the organisation's current climate .

Climate and culture

The two are related but distinct, and the distinction echoes the earlier culture-versus-mood point.

Culture is the established system of accepted behaviours, values, beliefs and assumptions widely shared in the organisation. It is deep, slow-moving and hard to change directly.

Climate is the felt experience of working here right now. It is more responsive — a change of manager can shift a team's climate within weeks — and it is heavily influenced by leadership styles and choices.

This makes climate the more tractable target during a change. You cannot change basic assumptions in a quarter, but you can change what it feels like to work in a team by changing what the leader does.

The six dimensions of organisational climate

The consultancy Hay McBer identifies six dimensions of organisational climate that are very much influenced by leadership styles and choices:

Dimension Definition
Flexibility People feel freedom and autonomy to innovate without unnecessary red tape
Responsibility People have real delegated authority to act and can be truly accountable
Standards The level people set for themselves and expect of those around them
Rewards Aptness of rewards and the provision of consistent, accurate feedback
Clarity The clarity people have on the organisation's mission and values
Commitment A sense of shared commitment to a common, worthwhile purpose

Note two definitions that are easy to get wrong. Standards is about the level people set for themselves and expect of each other — it is an internalised standard, not an imposed target. And rewards is not simply about pay; it covers the aptness of rewards and the provision of consistent, accurate feedback , which costs nothing and is far more within a leader's control than remuneration is.

Reading a change through the climate dimensions

Each dimension gives a change manager a diagnostic question and a lever:

Dimension Diagnostic question during change Lever

Flexibility Can teams adapt how they implement this, or must they follow a script? Give latitude on method; strip approval steps

Responsibility Do local leaders have real authority over their part of the change? Delegate genuine decisions, not just delivery

Standards Do people hold themselves to a standard in the new way of working, or only to compliance? Involve teams in defining what good looks like

Rewards Are people getting consistent, accurate feedback on how they are doing with the change? Build feedback into the change routine, not just measurement

Clarity Can people state what this change is for and how it connects to the organisation's mission? Simple, repeated purpose messaging from the top

Commitment Is there shared commitment to a common purpose, or individual compliance? Connect the change to something people already consider worthwhile

Why these dimensions matter during change

Change puts pressure on every one of the six, usually downward.

Flexibility falls because change programmes standardise and add governance. Responsibility falls because decisions get pulled up to the programme. Clarity falls because people are unsure what the future looks like. Commitment falls where the change is imposed. Rewards deteriorate because feedback becomes about the change rather than about the person's work. And standards can fall simply because people are working at conscious incompetence in the learning dip.

Recognising this gives a change manager something specific to protect. Much of what reads as generalised change fatigue is a measurable drop across these six dimensions, and each has a known lever. Deliberately preserving local decision authority, keeping approval routes short, and maintaining honest individual feedback through a difficult transition are inexpensive interventions that hold the climate up while the change works through.

Connections in the syllabus

The climate dimensions overlap significantly with SCARF — flexibility and responsibility both speak to autonomy, rewards to fairness and status, clarity to certainty, and commitment to relatedness and purpose. They also connect to Pink's motivators , with flexibility and responsibility mapping to autonomy, standards to mastery, and commitment to purpose. Where several models converge on the same construct, that construct is worth prioritising in practice — autonomy appears in all three.

Measuring climate during change

Because climate responds relatively quickly to leadership, it is one of the few cultural constructs a change manager can usefully measure inside the life of a programme.

The six dimensions convert readily into short pulse-check statements that people rate — for example, whether they feel free to adapt how they work, whether they have real authority over decisions in their area, whether they are clear what the change is for, and whether they are getting accurate feedback on how they are doing. Repeating the same items at intervals shows movement, which is more informative than any single reading.

Two cautions apply. First, climate readings are qualitative in nature even when expressed as numbers, so they belong to the qualitative side of a change analytics strategy and should be read alongside behavioural evidence rather than instead of it. Second, the data-distortion limitation is live here: if climate scores are used to judge managers, the scores will improve without the climate doing so.

Used properly, a climate reading gives early warning. Clarity and commitment tend to fall before adoption does, which makes them leading indicators of an adoption problem that has not yet surfaced.