The influence of managers’ successful change experience on organisational change: performance crisis and managers’ tenure

Change experience studies based on organisational learning research have focused on the change experiences of entire organisations and shown that previous change increases the likelihood of further change. This study extends the theory to examine top managers’ change experience, a topic overlooked by most research. Using original Japanese baseball data, this research examines the effect of the top manager’s change experience in each team, especially that of successful change, on the extent of further change. The findings show that the manager’s successful experience in implementing large change decreases the possibility of large change in the future, although change experience studies have little examined the influence of the results of previous change on further change, assuming instead that the results of prior changes do not influence further change, regardless of the degree of success. Furthermore, this study presents the moderating effect of the manager’s tenure on these associations.