How do I adapt my leadership style to engage my whole team through change?

Adapting your leadership style through change means reading how actively, not just how positively, each person is responding, and engaging your proactive, accepting, resisting and disengaged team members in four different ways. This article covers the research behind that distinction and the specific leadership moves that work for each response.

What you will find here:

Why most change leadership optimises for the wrong half of the problem
The two dimensions that actually shape how people respond to change
A profile of the four change responses and what drives each one
How to adapt your leadership style to each response
Why today’s response is often shaped by yesterday’s changes
The counterintuitive research finding that active dissent beats passive agreement
A weekly checklist for reading your team’s responses in real time
A practical FAQ covering the questions leaders may ask most

Article

Ask most leaders what they’re managing for during a change programme and you’ll get some version of the same answer: turning resistance into support. Reduce the “no”, increase the “yes”. It’s a reasonable instinct, and it isn’t wrong. It’s just incomplete.

I’ve sat in enough change conversations to notice a pattern. A leader reports that a team has “accepted” the change because nobody is objecting in meetings. Three months later, adoption has stalled and nobody can explain why, because on paper everyone agreed. What the leader read as buy-in was often something closer to quiet compliance, and the two are not the same thing.

Recent research gives this pattern a name, and more usefully, a framework for doing something about it.

Why most change leadership optimises for the wrong half of the problem

A 2024 study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, by Shaul Oreg, Noga Sverdlik, Jill Paine and Myeong Gu Seo, developed and validated what they call the Change Response Circumplex Scale. Their argument starts from an observation that most of us take for granted: change leadership has traditionally been measured along a single line, running from negative to positive. Resistance sits at one end, openness at the other, and the leader’s job is to move people along it.

The researchers show this single line is missing something. People don’t just differ in whether they feel positive or negative about a change. They also differ in how actively they engage with it, whether they speak up, get involved and push back, or whether they go quiet, comply and let it happen to them. That second dimension, which the researchers call activation, is largely invisible if you’re only tracking sentiment.

Put those two dimensions together and you get a much more useful map of your team than “for” or “against” ever gave you.

The two dimensions that actually shape how people respond to change

The framework rests on two independent axes.

Valence is the dimension leaders already know. It runs from negative to positive: how much someone likes or dislikes the change.

Activation is the dimension most change programmes never measure. It runs from passive to active: whether someone’s response shows up as visible engagement, speaking up, asking questions, offering to help, or whether it shows up as withdrawal, going quiet, doing the minimum, waiting it out.

Because these two dimensions are independent, they combine to produce four distinct responses, not two. A person can be positive and active. They can be positive and passive. They can be negative and active. They can be negative and passive. Each of those four combinations behaves differently, needs something different from you as a leader, and gets missed entirely if you’re only asking whether someone supports the change.

The four responses to change, and what drives each one

Change proactivity: active and positive

These are the people who don’t just accept the change, they help shape it. They ask questions to understand it better, volunteer to test new ways of working, and often become informal advocates among their peers. Their energy is genuinely valuable, and it’s also easy to take for granted, because they require the least management. That’s precisely the risk: leaders who lean on their proactive people without investing in them can burn out their best allies.

Change acceptance: passive and positive

These team members are supportive but quiet about it. They’ll do what’s asked, follow the new process, and raise no objections. It’s tempting to read this as the finish line, a team that has “accepted” the change. But passive agreement is fragile. It rarely produces the feedback that catches problems early, and it can tip into disengagement if nobody ever asks what these people actually think.

Change resistance: active and negative

These are the people who push back, raise objections and voice concerns loudly enough that they’re hard to ignore. Most change leadership treats this group as the primary obstacle to manage down. The research suggests a more useful reframe: active resistance, however uncomfortable, is a rich source of information. People who care enough to argue are still in the conversation. They’re telling you something specific about what isn’t working, and that’s a different problem to solve than indifference.

Change disengagement: passive and negative

This is the quadrant most change programmes fail to notice, and the one the research suggests deserves the most attention. These team members have withdrawn. They’re not arguing, not raising concerns, not participating meaningfully. On the surface, a disengaged team can look calm. Underneath, it’s often where change efforts quietly die, through reduced discretionary effort, slow attrition and a steady erosion of the change’s momentum that nobody flags because nobody is being loud about it.

Adapting your leadership style to each response

Naming the four responses is only useful if it changes what you do. For each one, it helps to know how it shows up day to day, what it costs you if you leave it alone, and the specific moves that shift it.

Leading the proactive

How this shows up: They ask questions before you’ve finished explaining. They volunteer to test new processes, offer to help colleagues catch up, and raise ideas you hadn’t considered. In meetings, they’re often the ones filling the silence.

What happens if you don’t act: Their energy gets treated as a given rather than a resource. Left unmanaged, your most proactive people either get overloaded because they’re the reliable “yes”, or they quietly disengage themselves once they notice their contribution isn’t being recognised or developed.

Leadership moves:

Give them real ownership: ask them to co-design parts of the change, not just implement it.
Put them in front of colleagues who are struggling, as informal mentors or peer champions.
Recognise their contribution formally, in reviews and in front of others, not just in passing.
Ask what they need to sustain the pace, rather than assuming their energy is unlimited.
Route some of the feedback they generate back into the design of the change, so they can see their input landing.

Leading the accepting

How this shows up: They comply without complaint. They adopt the new process, attend the training, and say the right things when asked. You rarely hear a concern from this group, which is exactly what makes them easy to overlook.

What happens if you don’t act: Passive agreement is mistaken for commitment. Because this group generates so little visible signal, problems they’ve noticed go unreported, and their support can quietly erode into disengagement if nobody ever checks in.

Leadership moves:

Ask directly for their view rather than waiting for them to volunteer it.
Invite them into a specific, low-stakes activity connected to the change, a pilot, a feedback session, a working group.
Name what you’re noticing: “you’ve been supportive of this, what’s your honest read on how it’s going?”
Give their agreement somewhere to go, a concrete next step, rather than leaving it as passive endorsement.
Check in on this group as deliberately as you check in on your resisters, since their silence is easy to mistake for satisfaction.

Leading the resisting

How this shows up: They ask hard questions, push back in meetings, and are often the first to point out what won’t work. It can look like obstruction, but it’s usually a sign they’re still engaged enough to argue.

What happens if you don’t act: Leaders who shut resistance down or route around it lose their earliest and most specific warning of what the change will get wrong. Resistance that isn’t heard rarely disappears. It tends to go underground, resurfacing later as disengagement or covert non-compliance.

Leadership moves:

Engage directly rather than managing around them: ask what’s behind the objection.
Listen for the root cause, not just the surface complaint, since the stated concern often isn’t the real one.
Acknowledge the concern openly, even when you can’t resolve it immediately.
Channel their energy into structured feedback and problem solving, a working group, a review of the plan, a standing forum for concerns.
Avoid marginalising them in front of others. Public dismissal of a resister silences everyone else who shares the concern but hasn’t said so yet.

Leading the disengaged

How this shows up: Withdrawal, not argument. Reduced participation, minimal effort, going quiet in meetings they used to contribute to. It’s easy to miss, because disengagement rarely announces itself the way resistance does.

What happens if you don’t act: This is where change efforts quietly fail. Momentum erodes through reduced discretionary effort and slow attrition, and because nobody in this group is being loud about it, the problem often isn’t visible until adoption has already stalled.

Leadership moves:

Re-engage through one-to-one conversations rather than group settings, where withdrawal is easiest to hide.
Look for the underlying cause: fatigue, a loss of trust, or a sense that their input doesn’t matter.
Rebuild participation through small, achievable steps rather than expecting a sudden return to full engagement.
Reconnect the change to something they value personally, rather than repeating the organisational case for it.
Watch this quadrant specifically and proactively. It’s the one that won’t come looking for you.

Why today’s response is also about yesterday’s changes

Before you read a quadrant as a reaction to this change, it’s worth asking what it’s actually a reaction to. Nobody arrives at a new change announcement with a blank slate. They arrive with a history of every change your organisation has run before this one, and that history does a lot of quiet work in shaping what happens next.

Pedro Neves, writing in “The Psychology of Organizational Change” (Oreg, Michel and By, Cambridge University Press, 2023), makes this argument directly. He proposes that resistance to a new change isn’t just a response to that change in isolation. It’s shaped by the organisation’s history of change, filtered through organisational, leadership and individual factors, and combined with what’s specific to the current change and the wider context it’s landing in. Together, these form a team’s intentions to resist before the change has even properly started, and those intentions are what turn into the workplace behaviours you actually see.

This matters because it changes what you’re diagnosing. A team that jumps straight to disengagement on a new change, with almost no active phase first, is rarely reacting only to what’s in front of them. More often, they’re reacting to a pattern: changes that were announced and then quietly dropped, promises about involvement that weren’t kept, previous “final” restructures that turned out not to be final. Their quadrant position on day one is partly a verdict on your organisation’s track record, not a blank assessment of this specific change.

The practical implication is that the leadership moves in the previous section will only get you so far if the underlying history hasn’t been acknowledged. Before launching a change, it’s worth asking your team, explicitly, what previous changes taught them to expect. Ask what’s worked well before, and what hasn’t. If the honest answer is that changes here tend to stall or get imposed without consultation, say so, and explain specifically what will be different this time. Skipping that conversation doesn’t make the history disappear. It just means you’re applying quadrant tactics on top of an unaddressed trust deficit, which is a slower and less reliable way to get the same result.

The finding most leaders miss: active dissent beats passive agreement

The study’s most useful finding for practising leaders is this: when they measured what change recipients actually contributed, in terms of feedback and ideas, active responses, positive or negative, produced meaningfully more than passive ones. People who engaged actively with the change, even when they disagreed with it, generated more usable input than people who quietly went along with it.

This doesn’t mean resistance is preferable to support, or that positivity doesn’t matter. The best outcome is still active, positive engagement. But it does mean leaders should stop treating silence as success. A disengaged, compliant team gives you almost nothing to work with. A vocal, engaged team, even a critical one, gives you the raw material to actually improve the change as you go.

Activate before you persuade

The practical implication is a change in sequencing. Most change leadership tries to persuade first: build the case, win people over, then hope engagement follows. The research points to a more effective order. Get people talking before you try to change their minds.

That might mean opening with questions rather than answers, creating structured opportunities for people to react before you’ve finished shaping the plan, or explicitly telling your team that early scepticism is welcome and useful. Activation is the precondition for everything else. You can’t shift someone’s view, or use their insight, if they’ve never engaged with the change in the first place.

A weekly audit for reading your team through change

These are worth checking regularly, ideally weekly, while a change is in motion:

The silence check: Which team members haven’t said anything about this change, positive or negative, in the last two weeks? That silence is data, not neutrality.
The resistance check: Am I treating the people who are pushing back as a problem to manage, or as a source of information I’m not using?
The acceptance check: Have I actually asked my “supportive” team members what they think, or am I assuming their quiet agreement means genuine commitment?
The disengagement check: Who has gone quiet after previously being engaged? A drop in participation is often a stronger signal than an outright objection.
The activation check: In my last update or meeting about this change, did I create space for people to react, or did I only present information?
The sequencing check: Am I trying to persuade people before I’ve genuinely invited their engagement?
Three things to do now

First, map your team against the four quadrants, honestly. Not who you’d like to be proactive or accepting, but where their actual behaviour currently sits. This alone usually surfaces at least one disengaged team member you hadn’t clocked.

Second, run a short one to one with anyone who has gone quiet during the change. Don’t lead with the change itself. Ask how they’re doing, what’s on their mind, and let the conversation find its way to the change naturally.

Third, build one structured channel for dissent into your next change update, a genuine invitation for pushback, not a token “any questions?” at the end. Make it clear that disagreement, expressed constructively, is useful to you.

A final thought

The instinct to chase agreement is understandable. It feels like progress, and it’s measurable in a way that engagement often isn’t. But agreement without engagement is a fragile thing to build a change on. It tells you what people are willing to say, not what they’re willing to do.

The leaders who get the most from their teams during change aren’t the ones who generate the most nodding along. They’re the ones who know how to read the difference between a quiet team and a genuinely engaged one, and who treat their loudest sceptics as a resource rather than a problem. That distinction, once you can see it, changes how you lead every change that follows.

Some reflection questions

If you’re honest, are you managing your team’s engagement, or their compliance?
Whose silence have you been reading as agreement, and what would it cost you to ask them directly?
Next time someone pushes back on this change, will you treat it as a problem to shut down or information to use?

Frequently asked questions

What is the Change Response Circumplex Scale?

It’s a framework developed by Oreg, Sverdlik, Paine and Seo, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology in 2024, that measures how people respond to organisational change across two independent dimensions: valence (positive to negative) and activation (active to passive). Combined, these produce four responses: change proactivity, change acceptance, change resistance and change disengagement.

Why does activation matter more than valence in leading change?

Valence tells you whether someone supports the change. Activation tells you whether they’re engaged enough to give you anything to work with. The research found that active responses, whether positive or negative, produced more useful feedback than passive ones. A passive, compliant team can look successful while giving you almost no information about what’s actually working.

Isn’t this just resistance management with extra steps?

It’s a genuine reframe, not a relabelling. Traditional resistance management treats the goal as reducing objections and increasing agreement, one axis, one direction of travel. This framework treats agreement and engagement as separate problems, which is why a compliant, silent team and a resistant, vocal team need entirely different leadership responses even though only one of them looks like a problem on the surface. The practical shift is that you stop optimising for fewer objections and start optimising for more genuine engagement, wherever it currently sits.

How do I deal with a disengaged team during change?

Start with one to one conversations rather than group settings, since disengaged people rarely raise their hand in a meeting. Look for the underlying cause, whether it’s fatigue, a loss of trust, or a sense that their input won’t change anything, and rebuild participation through small, achievable steps rather than expecting a sudden return to full engagement.

How do I tell the difference between someone who is resisting and someone who has become disengaged?

Watch the trend, not the snapshot. A resister is still showing up: asking questions, pushing back, turning up to the conversation even if they don’t like what’s being said. Someone sliding into disengagement typically goes quiet after a period of visible resistance, their objections stop rather than get resolved. That drop off is the signal to worry about. A resister who suddenly stops arguing hasn’t necessarily come round. They may have concluded that arguing isn’t worth the effort, which is disengagement wearing resistance’s old clothes.

Is resistance to change always a bad sign?

No. Active resistance means someone is still engaged enough to argue, and that argument usually contains genuine information about where the change is falling short. The leadership task isn’t to shut resistance down, it’s to listen for the root cause and channel the energy into constructive feedback.

How do I tell the difference between genuine acceptance and passive compliance?

Ask directly, and create low-stakes opportunities for people to participate, such as a pilot or a feedback session. Genuine acceptance shows up as willingness to engage further when invited. Passive compliance tends to stay exactly as passive as it started, regardless of the opportunities offered.

What should I do differently in how I communicate change updates?

Build in structured opportunities for people to react before you’ve finished presenting the plan, rather than saving questions for the end. The research suggests that getting people to activate, engage, ask, push back, matters more for the change’s success than getting them to agree with you immediately.

What does this look like practically in my first team update about a change?

Open with a question rather than the plan. Before you present what’s changing, ask the team what they’d want to know or what concerns they’d expect people to raise, and give that airtime before you get to your slides. Say explicitly that early scepticism is useful to you, not something you’ll hold against people. End with a specific, low-effort way to respond, a short survey, a standing slot in your next one to one, rather than a general “let me know if you have questions”, which activates almost nobody.

Does a team’s history with change affect how they respond to this one?

Yes, and research on anticipated resistance backs this up directly. Pedro Neves, writing in “The Psychology of Organizational Change” (Oreg, Michel and By, 2023), argues that intentions to resist a new change are shaped by an organisation’s history of change, filtered through organisational, leadership and individual factors, not just by the specifics of the change in front of you. A team that has been let down by previous changes will often default to resistance or disengagement faster, regardless of how well the current change is designed. The practical response is to ask directly what previous changes taught your team to expect, and address that history openly before asking them to engage with a new one.

Sources

Neves, P. (2023) ‘Preparing for change starts now: Intentions to resist future changes’, in Oreg, S., Michel, A. and By, R.T. (eds) The Psychology of Organizational Change: New Insights on the Antecedents and Consequences of Individuals’ Responses to Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 15–41. doi: 10.1017/9781009086721.004.

Oreg, S., Sverdlik, N., Paine, J.W. and Seo, M.G. (2024) ‘Activation and valence in responses to organizational change: Development and validation of the Change Response Circumplex Scale’, Journal of Applied Psychology, 109(1), pp. 135–155. doi: 10.1037/apl0001132.

How do I adapt my leadership style to engage my whole team through change?

Article

Why most change leadership optimises for the wrong half of the problem

The two dimensions that actually shape how people respond to change