History and leadership: How a head monk uses historical narratives to facilitate change in a Buddhist temple.

Abstract

Leadership and historical narrative studies suggest that leaders strategically use history as a source of narratives to facilitate change. Yet the dynamic microprocess of how leaders craft and recraft their historical narratives to shift the organizational members' understanding of current reality and thereby facilitate change remains unexplored. Using the case of a Korean Buddhist temple that confronts significant societal change and financial shortage, this study investigates how the head monk-the leader of the temple-strategically creates and modifies historical narratives to achieve change and how the organizational members respond to the leader's narratives. To deeply immerse myself in the context, I engaged in 4 months of ethnographic fieldwork in a Korean Buddhist temple where the tension between tradition and change was most salient. The findings show that some narratives effectively reshaped the members' understanding of the need for change while others unexpectedly failed. By theorizing this sensegiving and sensemaking process, this study reveals that crafting effective historical narratives is a messy process, which manifests as an evolving trial-and-error process of leaders' sensegiving and members' sensemaking. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).