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Recent studies into the political aspects of large scale change in organisations have highlighted the need for a deeper understanding of managerial elites in the change context. The extant literature is guilty of conflating large scale change into a single process, and commentators describe and prescribe political processes and behaviours without differentiating between the proposal and implementation stages of change. The research presented in this thesis provides insights into the nature and characteristics of large scale change proposal coalitions and the behaviours and tactics of coalition leaders in top management teams across a range of organisational settings in the UK private sector. Data was collected and analysed using a qualitative methodology. An elite style semistructured interview schedule was used with a research sample of fifty members of top management teams drawn from across fourteen organisations in thirteen industries. The findings suggest that large scale change proposal coalitions follow a five phase lifecycle: initiate, build, sustain, dissolve, and capture and transfer. Within these phases coalition leaders tend to perform three primary roles: builder, sustainer and dissolver. The sequence of gathering support to build a coalition is heavily influenced by the hierarchical position of the builder, and the behaviours and tactics used are contingent upon whether an individual is engaged in an upward inter-tier, intra-tier, or downward inter-tier support gathering exercise. Once a large scale change proposal coalition had been established the leadership role changes from building to sustaining. Four principal types of coalition are identified: aligned coalitions, unaligned coalitions, unfocused coalitions and fragmented coalitions. Different leadership skills are required for each. Once a proposal has been approved or rejected the evidence suggests that coalitions should be dissolved as rapidly as practically possible using one or a combination of three dissolution techniques. These findings have important implications for academic enquiry and practitioners.

Dans un contexte où l'injonction d’innover atteint son paroxysme, les différentes fonctions de l’entreprise sont à la recherche de processus susceptibles de renforcer leur capacité d’innovation. Notre recherche a pour objectif d’apporter un éclairage sur l’implication et la contribution de la fonction Achats dans le processus d’innovation des entreprises Agro-Alimentaires en construisant, d’une part, une typologie des acheteurs et en identifiant, d’autre part, certains facteurs organisationnels déterminants du succès de l'implication de cette fonction. Sur la base de nos résultats, l’implication réussie de la fonction Achats dans le processus d’innovation n’est pas l’affaire d’une performance particulière des facteurs inter-organisationnels mais plutôt le fruit d’une performance équilibrée sur un ensemble de composantes comme l’alignement des services et organisations en interne et externe, les compétences métacognitives des acheteurs, l’implication dans l’idéation, ainsi que l’attractivité interne et externe. / At the heart of the company's strategy for a long time, and compounded by globalisation, innovation is becoming increasingly collaborative, open to external organisations such as suppliers who can play a prominent role in innovations (product or service design, organisational or technical). As Purchasing is the internal/external interface, this function may have an impact on the companies' ability to innovate. Beyond the suppliers' contribution, and within the other departments, the purpose of this thesis is to help clarify and characterise innovation by the Purchasing department, a multi-faceted notion, as well as identify the endogenous and exogenous factors conducive to innovation.