Royston Greenwood: The Hockey Fan Who Understood How Teams Change at Work

People in Edmonton, Canada watch the National Hockey League Stanley Cup Playoffs on June 15, 2024. — People in Edmonton, Canada watch the NHL Stanley Cup Playoffs on June 15, 2024. Source: Shutterstock

Published on: June 16, 2026 at 10:18 am

The late Academy of Management Scholar Royston Greenwood of the University of Alberta School of Business was a sports fan who used discussions of hockey coaches’ decisions to illustrate lessons in mentorship and leadership. One of the world’s most highly cited researchers in the field of management and organization studies, he is best known for his research into the dynamics of group change.

Academy of Management Scholar Alan Meyer of the University of Oregon

Two ideas stand out as particularly relevant to leaders navigating change right now, Meyer said.

“First, organizations don’t resist change because people are stubborn—they resist because change threatens the ‘interpretive scheme’ that makes the current arrangement feel coherent and legitimate,” Meyer said. “When a reorg fails, it’s often not because the new structure is poorly designed on paper—it’s because nobody has done the harder work of shifting the underlying beliefs about what the organization is for and how things should be done. The actionable lesson is this: Before redesigning structure, diagnose the meaning system that the current structure expresses. Change efforts that only rearrange boxes on an org chart, without addressing the values and assumptions those boxes encode, tend to revert.”

Second, Greenwood and his colleague Academy of Management Scholar C. R. “Bob” Hinings of the University of Alberta showed that organizational designs aren’t neutral—they reflect and protect the interests of whoever benefits from them.

“This is why change so often stalls: The people with the most power to block reorientation are usually the people the existing design favors,” Meyer said. “For leaders, this means anticipating that resistance to change is going to cluster around whoever has the most to lose under the new arrangement.

“A third, more personal lesson, comes from how Royston himself worked: He treated rigorous critique as a form of generosity—an investment in someone’s development rather than a judgment of their worth,” he said. “For managers and mentors, that’s a practical model for giving tough feedback in a way that builds people up instead of shutting them down.”

Greenwood was one of the architects of modern thinking about organizational and institutional change—but Meyer said that his deepest legacy may be less about his publications than about how he worked and who he mentored and brought along with him.

“Academically, Royston—along with his 53-year collaborator and close friend Bob Hinings—developed foundational ideas about why organizations settle into particular configurations and how they sometimes break free of them,” Meyer said. “Their work showed that organizations aren’t just structures—they’re held together by shared belief systems—‘interpretive schemes’—that link strategy, structure, and process.

“Change, as Royston saw it, isn’t just about redesigning an org chart; it requires dislodging the underlying logic that makes the old structure feel natural and inevitable to the people inside it,” he said. “But beyond the ideas themselves, Royston built something that outlasted any single paper: an ‘invisible college’ of scholars.

“Through decades of workshops, conferences, and mentorship at the University of Alberta, he and Hinings turned their research partnership into a generative community—one that trained generations of Ph.D. students who carried Royston’s intellectual values—rigor combined with generosity, critique offered as invitation rather than takedown—to institutions worldwide.”

Meyer said that people who encountered Greenwood consistently described an almost uncanny combination of incisiveness and warmth—he was someone who would tell students and colleagues bluntly when their work wasn’t good enough yet and then spend an entire Friday afternoon helping them to fix it.

“There’s something almost recursive about Royston’s career,” Meyer said. “He and Hinings spent decades studying how groups of committed people—deploying shared values, staging gatherings, building coalitions—can deliberately reshape institutions from within.

“And meanwhile, without quite framing it this way, they spent those same decades doing exactly that: convening workshops, founding conferences, one of which grew into a major international research event still running today, and building a department at the University of Alberta into a globally influential research community,” he said. “The theory wasn’t just describing organizations out there—it was describing the very mechanism by which Royston built his own academic home and his own field of influence.

“He didn’t just theorize about how embedded actors change institutions—he was quietly demonstrating it the whole time.”

Academy of Management Scholar Roy Suddaby of the University of Victoria

“Most scholars will remember Royston Greenwood for his extraordinary academic accomplishments. His intellectual legacy is immense: a body of work that shaped institutional theory, transformed our understanding of organizational change, and influenced generations of scholars around the world. I was fortunate to experience that legacy firsthand as his student, colleague, and friend.

“Yet when I think of Royston, my first memories are not of conferences, publications, or editorial appointments. They are of hockey.

“Although Royston grew up as a devoted football supporter in England, he embraced Canadian hockey with characteristic enthusiasm after moving to Alberta. He became a passionate Edmonton Oilers fan, and some of the most important lessons I learned about academia took place not in classrooms or offices but in conversations at the old Edmonton Coliseum. Between periods, over coffee, or while dissecting the latest coaching decision, Royston would talk about ideas, people, careers, and the peculiar craft of academic life.

“At the time, I thought we were talking about hockey. Looking back, I realize we were talking about mentorship and leadership.

“Royston loved scholarship and excelled at it, but his greatest gift was recognizing potential in others and helping them become more than they imagined possible. Like the best coaches, he could see strengths before others saw them. He knew when to challenge, when to encourage, when to offer advice, and when to simply let people find their own way. Many of us who were fortunate enough to work with him owe a significant part of our careers to his judgment, generosity, and belief in us.

“What made Royston special was that he invested in people with the same energy and seriousness that he invested in ideas. His success as a scholar was remarkable, but his success in developing scholars may be even more enduring. His influence lives on not only in his writings but in the many students, colleagues, and friends whose lives he shaped.

“I learned a great deal from Royston about institutional theory, organizations, and research. But the lessons I value most were about how to build a scholarly community, how to support younger colleagues, and how to combine intellectual rigor with generosity and humanity.

“I will miss his wisdom, his wit, and our conversations. Most of all, I will miss the coach behind the scholar.”

A sample of Greenwood’s AOM research findings::

Author

Daniel Butcher

Daniel Butcher is a writer and the Managing Editor of AOM Today at the Academy of Management (AOM). Previously, he was a writer and the Finance Editor for Strategic Finance magazine and Management Accounting Quarterly, a scholarly journal, at the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA). Prior to that, he worked as a writer/editor at The Financial Times, including daily FT sister publications Ignites and FundFire, as well as Crain Communications’s InvestmentNews and Crain’s Wealth, eFinancialCareers, and Arizent’s Financial Planning, Re:Invent|Wealth, On Wall Street, Bank Investment Consultant, and Money Management Executive. He earned his bachelor’s degree, Cum Laude, from the University of Colorado Boulder and his master’s degree from New York University. You can reach him at [email protected] or via LinkedIn.

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