Leadership of Transformational Change: The Assessment and Development of Change Practice in a UN Agency

The study is focused on Leadership of transformational change. It was undertaken in 2016-2018 in the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), a specialized UN agency. It aimed at producing actionable knowledge for improvement of management practices in the organization. The study was grounded in Action Research framework (AR) with two parallel processes, research and action, taking place at every step of study implementation. Using organizational ethnography as a research methodology, the study reconstructed the context of leadership of changes from the views and reflections of people working in the organization. Through face-to-face interviews with IFAD managers and focus group discussions with staff, the study identified 4 priority areas for improvement of management of changes in IFAD: strengthening Leadership of changes at collective and individual levels; developing a thorough corporate Change Strategy and building trust in management