Paradoxes of Power and Leadership: A Key Business Idea 2020053465, 2020053466, 9781138482838, 9781138482845, 9781351056663

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Endorsement
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
About the authors
Glossary
Introduction
Both Equal and Different
Paradoxical Leadership As a Meta-Competence
A Guide to this Volume
Crossing Types and Levels of Paradox
A Sketch of Each Chapter
Challenges Rather Than Absurdities
Conclusion
1 Leadership and Paradox
Neither a Morality Tale Nor a Manichean View
Implications of Power-To
What Is Leadership?
Leadership As Competency Than Can Be Learned
Results and Ethics
From a Leader-Centric to a Leader-Centric-Follower-Centric Approach
Capacity to Articulate Tensions
Leadership As Process
A Relational Process
Implications of the Processual Nature of Leadership
Leadership As Pluralistic
Diffuse Power
Divergent Objectives
Competing Logics
Leadership and Paradox
An Introduction to Paradox
Opposite But Mutually Defining Forces – That Interact and Persist
Contradiction
Persistence
A Classification of Paradoxes
Difficulties With Navigating Paradoxes
Paradoxes are Nested
Difficult to Detect
A Paradoxical Mindset Or Orientation
Paradoxical Leadership in a Nutshell
Paradox Dont’s
Taking Consistency As Sacred Cow
Representing Paradox As Strange
Representing Paradox As Positive
Representing Paradox As Recipe
Conclusion
Guide for Further Exploration
Notes
2 Paradoxes of Self-Leadership
Leading Oneself and One’s Self
Why Is Self-Leadership Paradoxical?
Janus-like Leadership
Chameleonic Leadership
Level 5 Leadership
Paradoxes and the Self
Self and the Paradoxes of Performing
Self-goals
Independence Versus Interdependence
Intuition Versus Rationality
Self and the Paradoxes of Learning
Paradox of Excellence
Humbition
Grit
Self and the Paradoxes of Belonging
Similar and Different
Role Makers and Rule Breakers
Talking to Listen to Oneself
Self and the Paradoxes of Organizing
Project Leadership
Define Priorities
How to Manage the Paradoxes of Self-Leadership
Natural Propensity Towards One of the Poles
Lack of Self-Awareness
Reflexivity
Mindsets
Conclusion
Guide for Further Exploration
Notes
3 Paradoxes of Dyadic Relationships
“The Backbone of Successful Organizations”
Why Are Dyadic Relationships Paradoxical?
Tensions in Dyadic Interactions
Paradoxes at the Dyadic Level
Dyads and the Paradoxes of Performing
The Paradox of Equality and Difference
Star Performers
Tough Love
Dyads and the Paradoxes of Learning
Multiplying Versus Diminishing
Learning Dyads (I): Coaching
Learning Dyads (II): Reverse Coaching
Dyads and the Paradoxes of Power and Belonging
Intimacy in the Absence of Intrusion
Empathy
Helping Behaviours
Dyads and the Paradoxes of Organizing
Reciprocity
Contradictory Obligations
Dis/empowering
Managing Dyadic Paradoxes
Conclusion
Guide for Further Exploration
4 Paradoxes of Team Dynamics
Teams Are Not Collections of Individuals
Why Are Teams Paradoxical?
Teams and the Paradoxes of Performing
Performance
Cohesiveness
Team Versus Individual Goals
Teams and the Paradoxes of Learning
Psychological Safety and Accountability
Team Porosity
Expose Your Team to Different Logics
Teams and the Paradoxes of Belonging
The Hedgehog Effect
Consensus and Dissent
Winning and Losing
Teams and the Paradoxes of Organizing
Team Fault Lines
Less Hierarchical Designs
X-teams
How to Manage Team Paradoxes
Confronting Groupthink
Virtual Teams
Teaming Rather Than Teams
Conclusion
Guide for Further Exploration
Note
5 Paradoxes at Organizational Level
Diverse and (In)compatible Goals
Why Are Organizations Paradoxical?
Leading Organization and the Paradoxes of Performing
The Paradox of Meritocracy
Planning and Improvising
Governance Mechanisms
Leading Organizations and the Paradoxes of Learning
Ambidexterity
Forgetting to Learn and Learning to Forget
Enabling Environments
Leading Organizations and the Paradoxes of Belonging
Constructive Dissent
Citizen Leaders
Dispersed Community
Leading Organizations and the Paradoxes of Organizing
Freedom Within a Framework
Competing Logics
Elastic Hybridity
How to Manage the Paradoxes of Organization?
Solutions Becoming Problems
From Hierarchies to Agile Designs
Supporting Actors
Conclusion
Guide for Further Exploration
Notes
6 Recurring Paradoxes and ten Lines of Action
Wise Leadership – a Complicated and Paradoxical Endeavour
Why Do Some Paradoxes Recur?
Handling the “Ongoing Puzzle”
Four Recurring Paradoxes
Paradox of Excellence – Or the Tension Between Evolving or Getting Stuck
Paradoxes of Power – Or the Tension Between Humility and Hubris
Paradoxes of Proximity and Distance – Or the Tension Between the Parts and the Whole
Paradoxes of Authenticity – Or the Tension Between Integration and Differentiation
On Managing Recurring Paradoxes: Ten Paradoxical Lines of Action
Be Curious About Contradiction
Synthesize Confidence and Caution
Promote Time for Reflection and to Engage Deeply With Context
Develop a Synthetizing Multi-Perspectival Mindset
Embrace Opposition
Use Experience to Support Improvisation
Interrogate the Meaning of Goodness
Assume That the Solution May Be the Problem
Cultivate Jestership and Embrace Criticism
Consider Disruption of the Status Quo – and reflect On black Swan Scenarios
New Normal, New Paradoxes
New Technologies
Climate Change
Grand Challenges
A Final Paradoxical Word
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

PARADOXES OF POWER AND LEADERSHIP

Why do great companies and other organizations fail, sometimes abruptly? Why do admired leaders fall from their organizational pedestals? Why do young and promising managers derail? Why do organizations create and reinforce rules that manifestly damage both them and those that they employ, serve and sustain? Leadership is a much-​discussed but ill-​ defined idea in business and management circles. Analysing and understanding the skills and behaviours exhibited in leadership practice reveal that leaders exhibit paradoxical activities that challenge our understanding of organizations. In this text, the authors identify leadership behaviours that compete towards business equilibrium: selfish versus selfless, distance versus proximity, consistency versus individuality, enforcing professional standards versus flexibility and control versus autonomy. These paradoxical dilemmas require a reflexive and analytical approach to a subject that is tricky to define. The book explores the paradoxes of power and leadership not as a panacea for solving organizational problems but as a lens through which leadership and power are seen as an exercise in dynamic balance. Read this book as an invitation to the paradoxes of power and leadership that frame organizational life today. Be prepared to find surprises –​and some counterintuitive arguments. Providing a thought-​provoking guide to the traits and skills that will help readers to understand and navigate paradoxical leadership behaviour, this reflexive book will be a useful reading for students and scholars of business, management and psychology globally. Miguel Pina e Cunha is the Amélia de Mello Foundation Professor of Leadership at the Nova School of Business and Economics, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal. Stewart R.  Clegg is Professor in Management at the University of Stavanger Business School, Norway, and NOVA School of Business and Economics, Portugal. Arménio Rego is Professor at Católica Porto Business School, Portugal. Marco Berti is Senior Lecturer at UTS Business School, University of Technology Sydney, Australia.

“In this important work the concept of leadership is refracted through the lens of the paradoxes of power. By doing so the authors provide an honest, nuanced account of the dilemmas of leadership, while providing a sophisticated set of conceptual tools to deal with these challenges.This work is a ‘must read’ for leaders and academics that wish to understand the elusive phenomenon of effective leadership”. Professor Mark Haugaard, National University of Ireland, Galway. Editor of the Journal of Political Power, Routledge “The authors of this book have managed to imbue their work with admirable contrarian qualities. They are complexifying leadership as a relational-​paradoxical practice and draw broadly across several fields of social science, while at the same time writing in light-​hearted and accessible prose.The book is at once enlightening and entertaining, providing inroads to the nuances and depths of the research front while also attending to consequences for action. As a result, the book feels like a journey through leadership paradoxes that walks the talks. Recommended!” Arne Carlsen, Professor at BI Norwegian Business School, Norway “While most leadership books distil prescriptive lists of leaders’ dos and don’ts, in their thought-​provoking collaboration, Miguel Pina e Cunha, Stewart R. Clegg, Arménio Rego and Marco Berti turn down this one recipe fits all approach. Rather, they take us on the path to explore leadership’s complex and paradoxical nature. Relying on vivid examples and sound research, their comprehensive work unpacks the many paradoxes that any leader faces. Each chapter opens yet another set of paradoxes that will strike a chord with the readers’ own experience: balancing strengths and vulnerabilities, trusting yet empowering others, advancing both individuals’ and team’s needs or following organization’s competing strategies, to name a few. A must-​read book to those interested in leading through our uncertain and rapidly changing times”. Camille Pradies, EDHEC Business School, France “Every so often, a book comes out that scholars in the field desperately wish they had written. This is a supreme example. It places the study of paradox in the mainstream of leadership studies, a position it so rightly deserves. After this encyclopedic book, there will be no going back. Scholars, practitioners and students will find it invaluable”. Richard Badham, Macquarie Business School, Australia “This book provides a fresh new approach to leadership.The authors explain leadership as a process that is inherently paradoxical.This important view takes us beyond naive and heroic views of leadership as an a-​contextual set of ‘effective’ practices, to show how leadership unfolds in response to paradoxes occurring at multiple levels. Grounded in both the literature on leadership and on paradox, this book extends

knowledge of both areas and provides a welcome contextual understanding of leadership as complex and dynamic. In addition, it is a very enjoyable read that explains these concepts well”. Paula Jarzabkowski, Professor, City, University of London “This ground-​breaking book offers a brilliant analysis of leadership in modern societies. Eschewing simple recipe-​driven explanations, it describes how leadership is an inherently paradoxical practice  –​one requiring the effective management of contradictions. A  wide-​ranging and ambitious inquiry, the book is a required reading for scholars and students of management and organization”. John Hassard, Professor of Organisational Analysis at Alliance MBS, University of Manchester “This is a timely and important book that embraces the complexity of organizational life and the increasing demands upon organizations that make leadership more important than ever, all the more so because it resists distillation to recipes and invocations. By tackling inherent contradictions in leadership head on, the authors show that wise and thoughtful leadership matters more than ever, but that in today’s increasingly complex world –​perhaps in any world worth living in –​its essence should not and cannot be distilled to simple formulae and easy to apply principles”. David Patient, Professor of Leadership,Vlerick Business School

PARADOXES OF POWER AND LEADERSHIP

Miguel Pina e Cunha, Stewart R. Clegg, Arménio Rego and Marco Berti

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Miguel Pina e Cunha, Stewart R. Clegg, Arménio Rego and Marco Berti The right of Miguel Pina e Cunha, Stewart R. Clegg, Arménio Rego and Marco Berti to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Cunha, Miguel Pina e, author. Title: Paradoxes of power and leadership / Miguel Pina e Cunha, Stewart R. Clegg, Arménio Rego, and Marco Berti. Description: Abingdon, Oxon : New York, NY : Routledge, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020053465 (print) | LCCN 2020053466 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138482838 (hardback) | ISBN 9781138482845 (paperback) | ISBN 9781351056663 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Leadership. | Organizational behavior. | Executive ability. | Management. Classification: LCC HD57.7 .C867 2021 (print) | LCC HD57.7 (ebook) | DDC 658.4/092–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020053465 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020053466 ISBN: 978-​1-​138-​48283-​8  (hbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​138-​48284-​5  (pbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​351-​05666-​3  (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Newgen Publishing UK

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements  About the authors  Glossary 

viii ix x

Introduction 

1

1 Leadership and paradox 

14

2 Paradoxes of self-​leadership 

47

3 Paradoxes of dyadic relationships 

81

4 Paradoxes of team dynamics 

108

5 Paradoxes at organizational level 

135

6 Recurring paradoxes and ten lines of action 

166

References  Index 

195 225

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We are grateful to all the people that throughout the years have allowed us to make sense of the paradoxes of organizational life. First, participants in executive courses that we have taught, with whom most of the ideas in this book have been extensively discussed. Also, there are the numerous colleagues that have discussed the themes with us, sometimes in collaboration on projects, other times through their contributions in seminars and academic papers. We are also grateful to those colleagues who contributed generously with review and feedback on this volume, including Cary Cooper, Horia Moasa, Paulo Rosado and Wendy Smith. Hermínia Martins offered generous help, as always, with access to difficult bibliographic sources. Part of Chapter 6 draws on Rodrigues, Cunha, Rego and Clegg (2017). Institutionally, this work was funded by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (UID/​ECO/​00124/​2019, UIDB/​00124/​2020 and Social Sciences DataLab, PINFRA/​22209/​2016), POR Lisboa and POR Norte (Social Sciences DataLab, PINFRA/​ 22209/​ 2016). We also acknowledge the support from the project “Developing a European Forum on Paradox and Pluralism  –​EUFORPP”, a project funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 856688.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Miguel Pina e Cunha is the Fundação Amélia de Mello Professor at Nova SBE, Universidade Nova de Lisboa (Portugal). He studies organization as process and paradox and has co-​authored the Elgar Introduction toTheories of Organizational Resilience (Elgar, 2018) and Positive Organizational Behaviour:  A Reflective Approach (Routledge, 2020) and co-​edited Contemporary Social Theory for Management (Routledge, 2019). His recent articles on paradox appeared in journals such as the Academy of Management Review, Human Relations, Management and Organization Review, Organization Studies, Research in the Sociology of Organizations and Strategic Organization. Stewart R.  Clegg is Professor of Management at the University of Stavanger Business School, Norway, and NOVA School of Business and Economics, Portugal. He is the author of many books including Strategy: Theory and Practice (Sage, 2020) and Project Management: A Value Creation Approach (Sage, 2020). He is a prolific contributor to leading journals in the fields of Organization Studies, Political Power and Management. Arménio Rego is Professor at Católica Porto Business School, Universidade Católica Portuguesa (Portugal). He has published in journals such as Human Relations, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Management and The Leadership Quarterly, among others. He is the lead author of The Virtues of Leadership: Contemporary Challenge for Global Managers (Oxford University Press, 2012) and co-​author of Elgar Introduction to Theories of Organizational Resilience (Elgar, 2018)  and Positive Organizational Behaviour:  A Reflective Approach (Routledge, 2020). His main research focus is on virtuous leadership, organizational virtuousness, team processes and individual performance and well-​being. Marco Berti is Senior Lecturer in the UTS Business School, University of Technology Sydney (Australia). Marco’s research has been published in journals such as the Academy of Management Learning and Education, Academy of Management Review, Management Learning, Journal of Management Inquiry, Organization, and Research in the Sociology of Organizations. He is the author of the Elgar Introduction to Organizational Discourse Analysis (Elgar, 2017).

GLOSSARY

There is a debate as to whether leadership and management refer to different processes. Some authors defend the idea that they do, while others demur; for the latter, the two are different processes and categories. Leading, they say, is more than merely managing. Some authorities exalt the importance of leadership while others tend to stress the relative modesty but critical importance of managing (Mintzberg, Ahlstrand & Lampel, 2013). Some see leadership as linked to position and hierarchy while others represent it as being more informal and emergent. The management literature often posits a distinction between these two terms: •

•

Leaders, those people who inspire, guide and motivate others. In the compact description of Bennis and O’Toole (2000, p. 172), leaders “demonstrate integrity, provide meaning, generate trust, and communicate values. In doing so, they energize their followers, humanely push people to meet challenging business goals, and all the while develop leadership skills in others”. Managers, those who supervise, budget and hire; in classical terms, they plan, organize, direct and control. All these functions have control-​coordination attributes, linking management with supervisory roles. Management is a domain of expertise that creates operational procedures that bring reliability and efficiency (Grint, 2020).

This dualistic distinction seems to have an empirical basis, as suggested by Kniffin, Detert and Leroy (2020), who have observed that, in practice, “leaders” tend to be more appreciated than “managers”. In this book, we depart from the conventional view: we explore leadership/​management as a duality with paradoxical attributes. We defend the idea that leading/​ managing is inseparable; the job of managing is difficult because it implies the capacity to articulate processes that are opposing and that include the dimensions

Glossary  xi

of energizing people and controlling their energy.Yet leaders need to find ways to deal with duality as a normal part of their job (Bednarek, Chalkias & Jarzabkowski, 2019), i.e., leaders need to lead paradoxically. As Petriglieri (2020a, p. 6) pointed out, the two parts of the duality cannot be split because [W]‌ e want evidence and excitement, data and dreams. We want to be equipped to predict the future, and we want to be allowed to imagine it. We want to be reassured and to be freed up. Managers might be the label we use for those who help us do the former. Leader is what we call those who help us do the latter.We invest in each for different reasons –​or wishes. And either loses value without the other. Before you start exploring paradox, consider that paradox and its embrace contains risk:  read the words of James March (2006, p.  70) with care:  “contemplating doubt, paradox, and contradiction  –​features of life, well known to experienced managers, but normally banished, perhaps with reason, from the public language of management”. Throughout this book, which focuses mostly on the paradoxes of leadership and power in the context of formal organizations, we will use the two terms of leadership and management, leading and managing, more or less interchangeably. In the spirit of paradox, we consider that leading an organization implies both ideas and ethics (the leadership side), execution and pragmatism (the management side), ambition and humility (the personal side), therefore an amalgam of management and leadership. As Sadun, Bloom and Van Reenen (2017, p. 127) have pointed out, “one frequent suggestion in this era of flattened organizations is that everyone has to be a strategist. But we’d suggest that everyone also needs to be manager”. When a person is stronger in one dimension, he/​she can collaborate with someone (another person, a team) that has strength in the other (Miles & Watkins, 2007). This idea is sometimes behind the co-​CEO format and the approach adopted by companies such as Netflix (see, e.g., Gerzema & Johnson, 2020) or Staard Industries (Edgecliffe-​Johnson, Neville & Moules, 2020). We do not consider great leadership to be the territory of the Great Leader. Great leadership is represented here as the process of creating and passing on great institutions rather more than leaving a particular personal legacy. In business firms as well as in the public sector, we consider that great leaders create institutions that enable collaborative and compassionate managers to do their best, while also attending to the other Cs of management: managing communication, controlling and coordinating. It is the extent of that compassion and collaboration as well the communication, coordination and control that enriches institutions, that paradoxically exist, among other functions, to limit their own power; hence our emphasis on power in the title. We trust the wisdom of institutions more than that of the great leader. Great leadership is that which projects an institutional shadow that survives and thrives in the absence of the leader and empowers rather than negates others. As Watzlawick, Bavelas and Jackson (1967, p. 262) have pointed out, “reality is very

xii Glossary

largely what we make of it”, great leadership makes great institutions real, great institutions being those that respect both personhood and actorhood, i.e., those institutions that provide place for individuals to contest them in order to make them more humane and progressive. In this context, organizations need both the pragmatism to make things happen as well as the idealism to improve them, relentlessly, into the future. This is a collective, institutionally bounded effort, rather than the task of any Great Leader. It is a job for normal people rather than the work of heroes. “No more heroes”, in the words of The Stranglers (1977). After all, as Mintzberg (1999, p. 24) puts it, “maybe really good management is boring”. Glossary Term Actor

Definition

Treatment in the literature

A human undertaking social actions relating Bitektine, Haack, to other entities, human or not. Actors are Bothello & Mair located in networks with other actors, in (2020);Voronov & an ever-​changing institutional order, with Weber (2020) their consciousness and sense of self being shaped by participation in these networks. Any actor’s identity is in a state of becoming, resulting from an ongoing tension between efforts to differentiate self from others (but also from earlier versions of the self) and attempts to achieve a sense of coherence and social identity. Circles Enduring recursive patterns resulting from Tsoukas & Cunha (2017) feedback loops that over time reinforce their internal logic. Circles may be positive (virtuous) or negative (vicious). In any event, they express a dynamic of their own that escapes organizational steering. Contradictions The dynamic tension between opposed, Hargrave (2020) interdependent elements which presuppose each other and form a unity. Dialectic The continuously unfolding triadic process Farjoun (2019); Hargrave of change through the transformation of (2020) a thesis-​antithesis into a synthesis that will compose the thesis for a further tension. The process is historical and conflictual in nature. Dilemma The need to choose between two equally Putnam, Fairhurst & (un)desirable goals/​requirements that Banghart (2016) cannot be achieved simultaneously. Duality The “twofold character of an object of study Farjoun (2010, p. 203) without separation”, like the two sides of the same coin.

newgenprepdf

Glossary  xiii

Term

Definition

Treatment in the literature

Dualism

Two attributes are incompatible and mutually exclusive, like oil and water. The process of accepting the guidance of a leader and participating in, reinforcing or countering the leader’s orientations. “An adaptive process where one or more individuals emerge as a focal point to influence and coordinate behaviour for solving social challenges posed by dynamic physical and cultural environments”. “Contradictory yet interrelated elements –​ elements that seem logical in isolation but absurd and irrational when appearing simultaneously”. Human being endowed with a sense of self and a capacity to conduct self-​reflection. Denotes multiplicity of perspectives in contexts where power is diffuse. “An umbrella term (…) to describe the fundamentally tension-​r idden character of organizational structures that are constantly merging and becoming”. The simultaneous presence of two forces pushing in different directions, determining “compromise situations when a sacrifice is made in one area to obtain benefits in another”.

Farjoun (2010)

Followership

Leadership

Paradox

Person Plurality Tension

Trade-​off

Carsten, Uhl-​Bien, West, Patera & McGregor (2010) Spisak, O’Brien, Nicholson & van Vugt (2015, p. 292)

Lewis (2000, p. 760)

Voronov & Weber (2020) Denis, Langley & Rouleau (2007) Mease (2019, p. 6)

Byggeth & Hochshorner (2006, p. 1420)

INTRODUCTION

There can be no doubt that the world we live in is far from logical. (Watzlawick et al. 1967, p. 213) To humanize institutions, and research on them, would also mean to highlight the emotional underpinnings of their tensions, contradictions, and paradoxes. (Petriglieri 2020b, p. 12)

Both equal and different It is relatively common to start books on leadership by noting that there are thousands of volumes about the topic. For those with a sense of foreboding, yes, this is (yet) another book on leadership. Can there still be something different to say about leadership? We think so; otherwise we would not have written the book. We do have something different to say. Not totally different, of course, but different enough to deserve going into print. Most existing books strive to make leadership clearer. That is not our aim (see Figure I.1). We want to complexify it, not because we are perverse but because the lessons of many leadership books are perverse in that they present allegedly effective recipes that, in practice, don’t work or even produce any or unintended consequences.There is no algorithm to enact effective leadership; if there was, every leader would apply it and every leader would be effective –​something that, by definition, is impossible. The message that we want to communicate with this book is that leadership is an inherently paradoxical practice, not a simple matter of mastering lessons or gleaning the habits of highly effective people doing things in a minute. Leadership is the process of managing contradictions. For example, it requires empowering people while controlling them; caring for staff members, while treating them as

2 Introduction

“resources” to be exploited and cultivating creativity and innovation whilst generating a cohesive culture. Communication, coordination and control, the hallmarks of classic management of hierarchy and division of labour, all involve trade-​offs. Increasingly, these classic attributes of management need to be supplemented with compassion and collaboration. Each of these involves trade-​offs for effective leadership. To manage inclusive communication and control, coordination and collaboration, control and compassion requires managing paradoxes. To embrace paradox, leaders need to be able to marrying “empirical rigor and creative thinking” (Lafley, Martin, Rivkin & Siggelkow, 2012, p. 57), nourishing collaboration and competition, treating followers both equally and differently (Zhang, Waldman, Han & Li, 2015), fostering control and freedom. The management of some trade-​offs will define the world in which we will live. For example, in future, will managers be expected to privilege profit over concerns with climate change? Will top executives present themselves as corporate saviours or will they empower people to help them manage problems? Will hierarchies be flattened or will elites isolate in the apices of power? All these are issues that the transformational changes of recent times, generated by digitalization and an increasing concern for sustainability, have made critical and they should be given consideration by leaders because their followers, especially those drawn from younger generations, prioritize these concerns. The answers to these questions that tomorrow’s leaders proffer will be highly consequential (e.g., Milanovic, 2020; Tourish,  2019). The notion that leadership refers to paradox handling has been implicitly or explicitly discussed by many others before us. James March, for example, qualified leaders as both poets and plumbers (March & Weil, 2009). Such persons must

FIGURE I.1  Penrose

triangle illusion with Sierpinski triangle fractal.

Author: Tomruen. Source:  https://​commons.wikimedia.org/​wiki/​File:Penrose_​meets_​sierpinski-​level2. svg. Author: Tomruen. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-​ Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Introduction  3

be capable of simultaneously aspiring to transcendental and lyrical visions, seeing the detail in the smallest grain of sand yet be able to fix the plumbing and sewers of everyday life, accomplishing mundane things while performing as visionaries (Clegg, 2005). Leadership is a process that, similarly to clean water and polluted sewers, is a matter of flow. Leadership as plumbing sometimes has to deal with the bad and sometimes the downright dirty. As poetry, leadership demands a lyrical quality, capable of expanding vision and extending horizons.

Paradoxical leadership as a meta-​competence The implications of this point of departure have yet to be fully embraced. The mission of this book is to present (paradoxical) leadership as a meta-​competence. We invite understanding of leadership work as mastering multi-​layered and multiple paradoxes in an integrative way. Doing so is a difficult mission at the best of times (Andriopulos & Lewis, 2009) because contradictions may emerge without being intentional. For example, a flexitime policy that failed to produce flexibility was unexpectedly executed obliquely when a spatial rearrangement, implemented for efficiency reasons, finally unblocked flexitime practice adoption, as explained by Gonsalves (2020). A number of assumptions underlie leadership as a relational-​paradoxical process that we clarify here: •

•

•

•

The essence of leadership is a process (therefore, dynamic, evolving) of dealing with a mess of tensions and contradictions.That leadership is paradoxical is not a revelation of its flaws but is its very essence. Paradoxes occur because to lead is to steer a route through the articulation of opposing demands. The most effective leaders are not necessarily those who “solve” paradoxes  –​rather they are those who feel comfortable confronting uncomfortable paradoxes of organizational life. Leadership is, at heart, a human process. It is people that leaders must relate to, not just to machines, not just to autocues, not just to scripts. These relations constrain leaders and leaders create constraints for others. Leaders cannot but be enmeshed in power relations and their orchestration, manipulation and theatre. Leadership has its Scylla and Charybdis; it necessarily entails navigation of paradoxes, plotting a route between power and accountability, between individual and collective needs, between change and stability. Each poses risk; leaders, especially those prone to fantasies about the romance and heroics of leadership, are especially prone to the currents of countervailing power and general resistance disturbing their course of action.The vortex of paradoxes are a threat that might sink any leadership. Leaders’ hubris must accommodate organizations’ and their institutional constraints. Both leaders and organizations must manage situations as they are institutionally framed and as contingencies and their stakeholders change.

4 Introduction

Leaders act out roles but do so in mise-​en-​scène that requires considerable organization in institutional contexts that promote numerous tensions between being a good actor and an authentic person (Patriotta, 2020). The duality of person and actor is thus a complex source of tensions and contradictions, individually, organizationally and institutionally. Dr Li Wenliang, the ophthalmologist that first identified the coronavirus that became known as Covid-​19, stated shortly before his death from that virus:  “A healthy society should not have just one voice” (in Green, 2020, p. 682).We couldn’t agree more. Leadership must be attuned to multivocalities, multitudes and multifarious possibilities; doing leadership entails deliberation, whether in and through an autocracy of elite privileges or a democracy of hard choices and good reasons. As Anne Mulcahy (2010a, p. 10), former CEO of Xerox, argued: You need internal critics: people who know what impact you’re having and who have the courage to give you that feedback. I learned how to groom those critics early on, and that was really, really useful. This requires a certain comfort with confrontation, though, so it’s a skill that has to be developed. Given this contextualization of the book we can elaborate its learning goals as the following: • • •

• • •

Articulating accounts of leadership that recognize its essence as power relations and that these can be seen through a paradox lens. Illustrating the paradoxical side of leadership and power with examples from organizational life. Moving discussion of leadership beyond the romance of leadership, i.e., beyond representations of leaders as superhuman beings by contextualizing them as all too flawed, all too framed, all too paradoxical. Explaining leadership’s twists and turns, how success becomes failure and (both apparent and real) failures become successes. Discussing how organizations become cannibalistic, feeding on their conceits, becoming stuck in dynamics that they do not and cannot control. Realizing how dualistic leadership aggravates problems that require integrative ways of thinking that paradoxical approaches can stimulate.

A guide to this volume Crossing types and levels of paradox This volume is organized on the assumption that leadership should aim to create more productive and more humane organizations (e.g., Petriglieri, 2020b).We prize compassion and collaboration as well as communication coordination and control. Being productive and humane is often a paradoxical challenge that is a difficult task to accomplish. We address the challenge throughout the book as follows.

Introduction  5

The book starts with an Introduction to our themes before discussing the relationship between leadership and paradoxes (Chapter  1). These paradoxes can be experienced at different levels. In Chapter 2 we focus on the individual level. Of course, no leader is ever a Lone Ranger; there are invariably faithful sidekicks with whom they engage in dyadic, interpersonal level relations that we focus on in Chapter 3. Modern organizations run on teams –​the topic of Chapter 4. All forms of organization are designed; as such they are not organic, not natural; hence in Chapter  5 we address issues of leadership at the organizational level. Finally, Chapter 6 discusses four recurring paradoxes and presents ten ideas for cultivating a form of paradoxical wisdom. Regarding the structure of Chapters 2–​5, i.e., for each level, we explore the four types of paradoxes considered by Smith and Lewis (2011). Per type, we offer three illustrative cases. These illustrations are not meant to be taken as exhaustive. Each chapter ends with a concluding note and a short bibliographic indication with cues on how to continue exploring the theme. The text is interspersed with boxes and exercises to aid thoughtful engagement with the relation of leadership and paradox, which we hope will extend the usefulness of the book for you as a student, a practitioner, a leader. Table I.1 is a representation of the overall cartography of the book. The book does not aim to replace previous theories; there are many of them and much intellectual capital invested in them with varying rates of return. Rather, we invite our readers to look at leadership, including existing leadership approaches, through a paradox lens. Seeing reality as paradoxical might seem whimsical; actually it is not. Seeing reality as paradoxical is the first step to emancipation from all the tired old solutions that urge choosing this rather than that, secure in their convictions about the efficacy of their choices. Embracing paradox, constantly juggling it, is the fate of leading. Those that do not succeed in this, at least for a time, will rapidly join the ranks of failure, where all political careers end up being. Being a leader is undoubtedly a political career, irrespective of the field of practice. We use Smith and Lewis’ (2011) well-​known classification of paradoxes in four types, because this classification provides a parsimonious framing. We cross these four types with four levels of analysis, each discussed in their respective chapter: self, dyad, team and organization. The 16 cells thus obtained are convenient scaffolds for organizing the discussion (see Table I.1). Three illustrations were selected per cell. They are illustrations; thus, they do not exhaust the topic. Our division is necessarily artificial: paradoxes are nested and embedded, which means that any paradox has ramifications for and from other paradoxes. For example, Miller’s Icarus paradox is present in all four types: performing (the paradoxes of how to get things done); belonging (the paradoxes of identity); organizing (the paradoxes of design); learning (the paradoxes of renewal). These four types are connected. In the final chapter we illustrate four meta-​paradoxes (authenticity, excellence, power and zooming-​in and out) and present ten ideas about cultivating a form of paradoxical wisdom.

6 Introduction TABLE I.1  Paradoxes in leadership: an overview

Type of paradox 

Performing Performing paradoxes refers to tensions Level of paradox resulting from accomplishing things 

Learning Refers to tensions resulting from doing the same or different things

Belonging Refers to being similar or being different

Organizing Refers to controlling or freeing agency to a greater or lesser extent

Self

Contradictions in accomplishing things at the individual level: • Goals versus purpose • Intuition versus rationality • Independence versus interdependence

Tensions between individual desire for continuity and change: • Paradox of excellence • “Humbition” • Grit

Tensions between the desire for being unique and the desire to be accepted: • Individuality and identification • Compliance versus flexibility in rule application • Talking to others versus listening to one’s self

Tensions related to loci of control over dimension of selfhood: • Personal style as a behavioural portfolio • Know thyself • Define priorities

Dyad

Contradictions in accomplishing things at the level of a pair: • Equality and difference • Star performers • Tough love

Dyadic tensions between stability and change: • Multiplying versus diminishing • Learning dyads (I): coaching • Learning dyads (II): reverse coaching

Tensions between maintaining identity while being a couple: • Intimacy without intrusion • Empathy • Distant proximity

Tensions between controlling and opening up in a dyad: • Reciprocity • Dis-​ empowering • Contradictory obligations

Team

Contradictions in accomplishing things at the level of the group: • Performance • Cohesiveness • Team versus individual goals

Team tensions between stability and change: • Psychological safety and accountability • Team porosity • Exposition to alternative logics

Team tensions between individuality and belonging: • Hedgehog effect • Consensus and dissent • Winning and losing

Tensions between autonomy and control in a team: • Team fault lines • Less hierarchical designs • X-​teaming

(continued)

Introduction  7 TABLE I.1  Cont.

Type of paradox 

Performing Performing paradoxes refers to tensions Level of paradox resulting from accomplishing things 

Learning Refers to tensions resulting from doing the same or different things

Belonging Refers to being similar or being different

Organizing Refers to controlling or freeing agency to a greater or lesser extent

Organization Contradictions of accomplishing things at the collective level in terms of: • Meritocracy • Planning and improvising • Governance

Organizational tensions between stability and change: • Ambidexterity • Forgetting to learn, learning to forget • Enabling environments

Organizational tensions between coherence and specialization • Constructive dissent • Citizen leaders • Dispersed communities

Organizational tensions between integration and differentiation: • Freedom within framework • Competing logics • Elastic hybridity

A sketch of each chapter Chapter 1 outlines and explores the implications of using a paradox lens to view leadership.We present leadership as “an adaptive process where one or more individuals emerge as a focal point to influence and coordinate behaviour for solving social challenges posed by dynamic physical and cultural environments” (Spisak et al., 2015, p. 292) in a complex and ever-​shifting practice. Leadership entails ongoing change; change is, above all, a process rather than a state of being. A  process perspective puts more emphasis on becoming and less emphasis on being  –​the traits, styles or characteristics of leaders. Leaders might well matter but being a leader is not doing leadership.We discuss why explaining is more important than prescribing: by finding explanations, leaders may find the wise prescriptions that make sense for them and others in their concrete circumstances (Ardelt, Achenbaum & Oh, 2013; Grossmann & Kross, 2014). A process view also means that organizations are seen as living, open-​ ended social systems, which require a responsible and wise paradoxical approach towards the idiosyncrasies of each concrete circumstance from leaders (Rego, Cunha & Clegg, 2021). Organizations are not machines and should not be imagined or managed as if they were. In fact, all organizations are plural systems interacting with other open systems, designs and contrivances subject to infinite pressures and possibilities, stresses and tensions. Organizations might well be composed of individuals and teams, technologies and routines; nonetheless, they are far more than the sum of these parts. These individuals, teams, technologies and routines have histories, stories attached to them; their tellers of tales are themselves embedded in specific interests, have diverse motives imagined and attributed and complex histories. All these will necessarily differ and frequently collide. It is for these reasons that it is mandatory to study leadership as part of larger social processes of becoming.

8 Introduction

In a world of plurality and open-​endedness, surprise is inevitable. In fact, surprising competitors with new products and new business models is a skill much appreciated. Organizations are sometimes surprising because their managers intend them to be so, even though this collides with the importance of routines, of being predictable, being organized. Leaders establish and perturb routines. Leaders confront many experiences in life that are new and singular yet their work of organizing consists in framing all this novelty to create predictability and order that is still sufficiently alert to difference that it does not decay because of its predictability. As artful constructions of a complex and tangled social reality, we have recourse to the fiction that there are several levels of analysis while knowing that, in reality, these levels interact in complex politics, emotions and decisions. In summary, Chapter  1 presents leadership as a challenging process of creating shared understandings between diverse people whose agency is interrelated with many others and many devices that make organization possible: technologies, software, offices, uniforms, materialities of diverse provenance. Managers may strive to use their agency to impose meaning; others, such as whistle-​blowers, use their agency to expose such meaning as unethical, criminal or corrupt (Kenny, 2019). Leadership flows through circuits of power rather than being situated in a laboratorial pristine space. Short circuiting sometimes occurs; connections fail; meaning becomes confounded by “noise” in the system that pollutes the environment; circuits get hacked by outside interests, meanings and agencies. All these processes are framed by place and time, context and history. The upshot is that, from a leadership perspective, nothing and nobody is a tabula rasa as we all engage with situations using implicit theories for making sense of them. Leaders may strive to make their implicit meanings explicit to all concerned but meaning making is notoriously reflexive and can never be controlled because the sense that is made can never be the sense that is sent (Gordon, 2001). We approach leadership from a paradoxical perspective, meaning that we pay attention to both conflicts and coordination within and between organizational actors and their performances.A plurality of motives (economic and non-​economic), goals (convergent and divergent) and experiences of the people concerned make performing as a leader a staging fraught with risk of misadventure from which paradox can frequently ensue. We do not suggest that paradox should substitute for other leadership perspectives; instead, we use it as a meta-​theoretical stance (see Box I.1) that can complement, and help to provoke, refine and expand other efforts in theorizing leadership.

BOX I.1  PARADOX AS META-​THEORY A meta-​theory is a broad framework based on a set of shared underlying assumptions integrating a diversity of phenomena and interpretations, without being confined to specific contexts, variables or methods (Ritzer, 1990; Abrams

Introduction  9

& Hogg, 2004). A paradox perspective can arguably be one such meta-​theory (Lewis & Smith, 2014), one that uses tensions to understand and make sense of reality, without being confined by the prescription of any “one-​best-​way” to deal with them. A  paradox meta-​ theory can include different theories aimed at understanding and predicting different typologies of tensions: trade-​ off compromises, generative paradoxes (tensions that can be harnessed for innovation), pragmatic paradoxes (paralysing pathologies), dialectical transformations etcetera. This implies treating paradox not as a phenomenon that requires explanation but rather as a source of explanations. Instead of asking “why does trying to lead cause contradictions?”, we should consider that leadership concerns contradictions: if we did not have paradoxes, then we would not need leaders to cope with them.

Chapter  2 discusses paradoxes at the intra-​ individual level. Our identities are not monolithic. People play different roles, sometimes as leaders but also as wives, husbands or lovers, as sons or daughters, friends, members of non-​profit organizations, citizens and so forth. These roles sometimes complement each other well, while sometimes they clash. Actorhood and personhood do not always adjust easily or, as Voronov and Weber (2020, p. 7) explain, “there is never a perfect fusion between a person and an actor role”. Being a dedicated parent may leave the impression to one’s colleagues of not being a dedicated team worker or leader. Work and family exist in a state of tension that is not always easy to navigate. At the level of self, leaders confront numerous paradoxes: they need to express self-​ confidence and to cultivate humility; they need to serve yet set direction; they need to be authentic yet be aware that leadership is a role in which are vested performative expectations; they need to excel while knowing that excellence is a process of renewing one’s skills and thus confronting ignorance. Leadership is a process of cultivating wisdom, articulating action and reflection, theory and practice. Leadership requires a capacity for self-​leadership that is inherently paradoxical (Stewart, Courtright & Manz, 2019). Chapter 3 discusses leadership as a relational process, one that takes place at the interface between self and others. Leadership involves relating to practices that are always rich in tension and contradiction. While leading, managers have to perform both toughness and kindness. They need to integrate voices while preserving diversity; they require cohesion while stimulating difference. Leaders need to cultivate organizational polyphony despite polyphony being difficult to harmonize. Decisions taken are often articulated in an acoustically mono mode as “His Masters’ Voice”. Over time, being organized may force some to silence their voice; others may fail to harmonize, in which case the excess of voices becomes organizational Babel. We discuss leader-​member exchanges as critical to the creation of organization cultures that are “thick” (Geertz, 1973), that have many strands and much weave in their warp and weft. Yet these relationships are interpersonal balancing

10 Introduction

acts.We discuss how productive language can be used as an antidote against the creation and crystallization of pragmatic paradoxes (Berti & Simpson, 2019; Tsoukas, 2016). Language can be used to do anything many ways: to impose hierarchy or to stimulate democracy. Chapter  4 discusses paradoxes at the team level. Teams occupy a fundamental place in the life of organizations, with organizations being more and more teams of teams. Many of the most important organizational tasks are conducted in teams. Teams are critical in providing people with a sense of learning and to fuel organizational renewal. They are engines of individual and collective learning and performance. Yet teams can also impede learning and struggle to accept individual difference. When that happens, the team becomes less potent than the sum of its parts. In this chapter we explore the two sides of teams: as sources of renewal or as impediments to change. We also consider tensions between individualism and collectivism, success and failure, similarity and difference, consensus and dissensus, cooperation and competition, harmony and conflict. Chapter 5 discusses paradoxes of organizing. To manage organizations, leaders need to handle paradoxes incessantly (Figure I.2). Organizing implies a measure of disorganizing, for instance. Rules without freedom are as complicated as freedom without constraints. As organizations tend towards convergence, they need to cultivate elements of divergence. In organizations, paradoxes are nested and embedded, meaning that tackling one paradox may trigger other paradoxes (Berti, Cunha, Clegg & Rego, 2021). Hence, leaders must learn to embrace a paradoxical mindset

FIGURE I.2  “A

perpetual vase”, or Boyle’s perpetual motion scheme, in honour of Robert Boyle (1627–​1691). Source:  https://​commons.wikimedia.org/​wiki/​File:Boyle%27sSelfFlowingFlask.png (“Scanned without alteration from Figure 54 in Arthur W. J. G. Ord-​Hume’s Perpetual Motion, the History of an Obsession. Allen & Unwin, 1977, St. Martins Press, 1977”). This work is in the public domain.

Introduction  11

that frames paradox as normal rather than exceptional. Leadership is an exercise in the navigation of tensions and contradictions, a paradoxical practice. Chapter  6 closes with two core themes:  the paradoxes that recur throughout managerial careers and how managers can be more prepared to handle them though self-​education. In the first case, we discuss paradoxes that are likely to appear and reappear as managers respond to the challenges they constitute; in the second, we advance a soupçon of ideas useful to approaching paradox as a form of wisdom in the face of contradiction.

Challenges rather than absurdities The book, in general, offers a journey through leadership paradoxes not as signs of absurdity but as challenges that accommodate and distil the precise complexities of being in organizations and becoming a leader. In 1909 Max Weber (1909), reflecting on the triumph of “rational calculation” in organizations, sounded a note of “despair” at the many little cogs in the machinery of organizations striving to be bigger ones.The biggest of all, of course, are “the leaders”, who will have struggled through organization ranks to arrive at the summit, aware of their individual insecurities of leadership tested on the way up, unless they were born to rule on some hereditary principle. Kaplan and Kaiser (2003, p. 24) describe “the tendency to polarize”, to see choices between either-​or types of scenarios in which leadership can so often be mistaken for the act of choosing. Insecurities can always be resolved by decisive choices but sometimes, perhaps not all the time, choice rather than being versatile in balancing and integrating the paradoxes of everyday organizational life, ends up being the grit in the machine that jams the cogs, the bug that buggers the system. Paradoxical choices do not involve strictly objective elements. There is no calculus for their resolution. Even though we distinguish different competences, we assume that these interact; that they are dynamic and change over time, and their importance for the overall effectiveness of those would be leaders also changes over time. Individual experiences make institutional contradictions (Seo & Creed, 2002) salient and emotional, such as when one is both a priest and gay (Creed, DeJordy & Lok, 2010) or a physician and a military officer (Leavitt et al., 2012). An early draft of the book was written while the authorial team was quarantined half in Portugal, half in Australia, in 2020 during the Covid-​ 19 pandemic. Throughout the book you will find regular references to the case. Given the incredibly transformative capacity of this viral actant on so much of socially constructed reality, not only medically but also economically, socially, digitally, globally, none that lived through it could be untouched. Just as there can be no leadership in a vacuum, it is apposite to note that no leadership book should ever be written as if it were a book for all seasons, good or ill. Context matters. The coronavirus and the variable examples of leadership in the face of it were uppermost in our minds as we wrote. The corona virus thrust the world’s leaders onto a stage not of their choice; their performances and those of the systems that they led were very variable,

12 Introduction

demonstrating that when it comes to the most existential question of all, life itself, leadership really does matter. Think of the paradoxical relations of health and wealth, economy and society, freedom and constraint that the Covid-​19 virus raised, and then consider the responses of world leaders such as President Modi in India or Prime Minister Ardern in New Zealand. Whereas in New Zealand Ardern expressed care (Tomkins, 2020), in India Modi escalated a populist Hindu agenda (Prasad, 2020). Leadership matters most when life itself is threatened –​and there are reasons to believe that female leaders are not just effective navigators of tensions emerging from organizational life (Zheng, Kark & Meister, 2018) but they are also more effective when citizens’ lives are at stake amidst a pandemic (Garikipati & Kambhampati, 2020). Given the context of the virus crisis, the book to some extent reflects paradoxical times in which we ceased to “go” to work, in which we were socially isolated with our families at home, in which we learnt how to do our job of being professors anew, improvising with digital technologies to conjure up work-​arounds that could deal with the isolation. It was a time of social lockouts, cancellations of events and prohibition of face-​to-​face relations, except in mutual isolation. In between Zooming,Teaming, BBBing and other digital substitutes for the classroom, with opportunities for meeting cancelled, we explored new ways of working and teaching, commuting and polluting less, leaving a smaller carbon footprint and reflecting constantly on the processes that had brought about this massive breach of normalcy. In the process, as many, we went from Zoom to Zoom fatigue (Fosslien & Duffy, 2020) but managed to finish the first draft of the book. Writing in isolation mandated by a state of emergency, these times of mutual suspicion and reduced freedoms consequent upon an actant that could not be seen, hardly surprisingly, conjured up fear. The global fear was akin to that of “the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells” (Marx & Engels, 1848/​1969, p. 19). As well as Marx and Engels, Dickens too captures well the sense of foreboding and exhilaration that apocalyptic times can produce of which, in an echo of other revolutionary times, it may be said that: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. (Dickens, 2003, p. 1) For writers, it was, in some respects the best of times; locked down with no necessity to be anywhere, we worked fast but acutely aware of the unfolding contagion, with terrible effects and appalling leadership shown in many quarters.The paradoxical unanticipated consequences of the global world that we have made, one which freely traded among disparate places, was devastated by a virus, an apt punctuation

Introduction  13

of an era of neo-​liberal globalization stalled by the unanticipated consequences of a Chiropteran hosted virus, multiplying in humankind. Who knows what futures await us and what types of leadership will characterize it once this viral actant is cast off, in retreat or defeat? If we dare hope, maybe our modest tome might be a manifesto to help guide future paradoxes of power and leadership organizing and managing fragile human coexistence in the world we will make in the wake of the world we will have lost after the contagion ebbs.

Conclusion The book discusses and explores paradoxes that confront leaders in organizations as well as some motives for their emergence. Paradoxes are a consequence of the pluralistic nature of organizations and this pluralism is tackled by finding dynamic forms of balance. Balancing is impermanent and unstable, meaning that equilibrium is necessarily precarious. In addition, because diverse tensions are perceived differently at multiple levels, paradoxes felt intensely at one level may go unnoticed at another (Gaim, Clegg & Cunha, 2019). Leaders may deny paradoxes or act as if paradoxes are inherently bad for team and organizational functioning and flourishing. We argue that such a stance is not the wisest. Against most other approaches to leadership we suggest that a concern with paradox and thinking about theory of organization as a paradoxical effort (Clegg, Berti & Cunha, 2020) cultivates virtues fostering organizational purpose.

1 LEADERSHIP AND PARADOX

Neither a morality tale nor a Manichean view How are we going to get things done if we start asking people to do stuff rather than telling people to do stuff? (A manager, in Hill, 2020d, p. 12) Leadership has of late been presented as a morality tale (Pfeffer, 2016a). Morality tales often imagine that the best is possible, with their stories aiding its accomplishment. In these morality tales, leaders are described not only as effective in getting things done but also as people who care about their followers’ development and well-​being, who are authentic, build trust, protect the natural environment and promote diversity in the workplace. Given all these requirements, one might be tempted to term it a fairy tale, in comparison to the harsh reality of practice. Few would contest the importance of these claims and the need for positive leadership while many would find that the exigencies of situations make expendable the piety of these tales. Positive leadership, where striven for, is paradoxical in the sense that being positive is not necessarily being personable, agreeable or doing things that will benefit others (Cunha, Rego, Simpson & Clegg, 2020). Positive leadership is difficult because it entails a paradoxical relational competence. The discrepancy between what leaders are supposed to do in positive prescription and what they actually do (or have to do wisely, considering the specific circumstances in which they operate; Ardelt et al. 2013; Grossman, 2017) in harried practice can be a yawning chasm. Pfeffer (2021) explains that the framing of leadership as a moral endeavour constitutes an oversimplification of the dilemmas faced by leaders. An essay on the 500th anniversary of the writing of Machiavelli’s The Prince (Scott & Zaretsky, 2013) reminded us once more that, so long after Machiavelli coined his advice, it remains sometimes

Leadership and paradox  15

necessary to do bad things to achieve good results, that winning and keeping power implies political savoir faire (Pfeffer, 2016a), and that naïve leadership can never be great leadership. Machiavelli did not urge evil for the sake of being evil. As a citizen of Medici Florence, he was well aware of the infinite capacity for intrigue, treachery and deceit that rulers could provide. In modern organizational theory parlance, his view of leadership would be that it was contingency based: leaders do Whatever it takes (Richardson, 1994), depending on the situation. Modern leadership theory reflects this view inasmuch as it imagines that effective leaders display complex combinations of styles, instead of consistently displaying a singular style (Goleman, 2000). The mix of styles includes support as well as command, care as well as a measure of fear. As Kramer (2006) observed, some respected leaders are great intimidators; moreover, some feared leaders are greatly respected for the terror that they can produce. There is a Manichean view of leadership, often transmitted by Hollywood movies, perhaps none better than Patton: Lust for Glory (Schaffner, 1970). But even Patton-​the-​Hero conflicted with Patton-​the-​Administrator (see Spillane & Joullié, 2015). It seems that, as Burns (1978, pp. 38–​39) remarks, “leadership is … grounded in a seedbed of conflict. Conflict is intrinsically compelling; it galvanizes, prods, motivates people … Leaders do not shun conflict; they confront it, exploit it, and ultimately embody it”. In this book we aim to discuss leadership not as a Manichean act in which leaders embody an individualistic good, but as a complex, nuanced and paradoxical relational process. We argue that leaders should strive to be virtuous but neither be moralizers nor tyrants. If the reader wants morality tales, they should go to church or read the gospels of management’s best practice. There are such tales aplenty and tellers hungry for an audience. As for tyranny, it has no place in a decent civil society, albeit there are many leaders for whom that lesson would be timely.Virtue is a balancing act deployed by those leading to persuade others to do what needs to be done; virtuous leading is an exercise in balancing opposing demands (Rego, Cunha & Clegg, 2012). From this perspective, even leading as if one was a servant leader serves to preserve and reinforce one’s power position by posing as a steward of collective interests. The strong can sometimes pose as servant of the weak, while indeed being in control of their lives, as illustrated in the Harold Pinter–​scripted and Joseph Losey–​directed movie classic, The Servant (Losey, 1963). There is thus a paradox to power relations, which derives from a duality that it is intrinsic in the concept of power (Clegg & Haugaard, 2009). Power can be understood as the capacity to enforce one’s will over others, a form of oppression and control exercised through manipulation, coercion, domination, and constraint. At the same time, it can be seen as the ability to achieve something in concert with others (Arendt, 1970), highlighting the positive, generative aspects of enabling, supporting, and facilitating collective action. The former aspect has been labelled as power-​over, the latter power-​to (Gőhler, 2009). In organizational leadership, the relationship between power-​to and power-​over becomes paradoxical. Achieving complex, collective objectives requires individual drive and initiative but also alignment of behaviours. Thus, it both calls for individual empowerment and for

16  Leadership and paradox

control and direction. It is not possible to harness the generative, enabling and transformative potential of power-​over, without invoking the oppressive.

Implications of power-​to If a leader had to exercise power in imperative command backed by the threat of sanction for non-​compliance, this demonstrates not a leader’s strength but their essential weakness –​even though decisive command may be expected in moments of crisis or danger (Grint, 2020; see Chapter 5 on how the US Navy SEALs oscillate between leadership, management and command; see also Box 1.1). Far stronger is the leader that is able to have others do what is desired without any effort in exercising power at all. Hence, the paradox is that the leader that does leadership least explicitly and least overtly through the exercise of power is not demonstrating weakness so much as strength.

BOX 1.1  EXCERPTS FROM “EXTREME OWNERSHIP: HOW U.S. NAVY SEALS LEAD AND WIN”, AUTHORED BY A RETIRED NAVY SEAL OFFICER (WILLINK) AND A FORMER NAVY SEAL OFFICER (BABIN)1 Just as discipline and freedom are opposing forces that must be balanced, leadership requires finding the equilibrium in the dichotomy of many seemingly contradictory qualities, between one extreme and another. The simple recognition of this is one of the most powerful tools a leader has. With this in mind, a leader can more easily balance the opposing forces and lead with maximum effectiveness. A leader must lead but also be ready to follow. (…) A  leader must be aggressive but not overbearing. (…) A leader must be calm but not robotic. (…) Of course, a leader must be confident but never cocky. (…) A leader must be brave but not foolhardy. (…) Leaders must have a competitive spirit but also be gracious losers. (…) A  leader must be attentive to details but not obsessed by them. (…) A  leader must be strong but likewise have endurance, not only physically but mentally. (…) Leaders must be humble but not passive; quiet but not silent. (…) A  leader must be close with subordinates but not too close. (…) A leader must exercise Extreme Ownership. Simultaneously, that leader must employ Decentralized Command by giving control to subordinate leaders. Finally, a leader has nothing to prove but everything to prove.

The paradox approach to leadership and to management, in general, is becoming mainstream.Yet, it was not always so. When, with their bestselling book In Search of Excellence, consultants Peters and Waterman popularized the idea that organizations

Leadership and paradox  17

needed to have “loose-​tight” structures, academics received the idea with scepticism. As Oswick, Keenoy and Grant (2002, p. 300) observed: “How could HRM policy and practice be both hard and soft, and how could an organizational structure be both loose and tight at the same time?” Traditional management expressed a tendency to overemphasize the tight, rational, serious, linear and the sequential rather than the loose, emotional, playful, non-​linear and circular. As Weick and Quinn (1999) put it, change never starts because it never stops, meaning that organizing is a circular process, marked by interdependence and circular causality, rather than by linear progression. Social scientists that suffer from “physics envy” (Flyvbjerg, 2001, p. 1) have, for a long time, searched for unidirectional causality, the case in which an independent variable X causes change in a dependent variable Y. The holy grail of positivism is searched for without success or cessation. The Holy Grail belongs to mythology and so does the methodology of positivism as it strives to arrest time and motion, becoming and its histories, in an elaborate metaphysic of cross-​sectional causality. It is increasingly recognized, however, that the social world, much as the natural world, is based on interaction and inter-​dependence (Capra, 1991), circular causality being abundant (Bateson, 1972). Circular nature is itself paradoxical: if organizing exhibits circular qualities, can an organization, over time, ever be the same thing? Perhaps an organization is similar to Parmenides’ river, never stepped into as the same river in the same way on repeated occasions? Going back to Peters and Waterman (Box 1.2), Oswick et al. (2002) observed that it was not without irony that, being practice-​based, their observations contributed to the diffusion of the idea of organizations as paradoxical. The proximity of these McKinsey consultants to organizational phenomena (Ployhart & Bartunek, 2019) was probably critical in the intuition that when one approaches organizational phenomena for theory-​building purposes, chances are one will struggle with tensions and contradictions. As a corollary, it seems possible to hypothesize that the only place where managing and organizing do not involve a measure of tension and contradiction is in organization theories rather than in organizational phenomena.

BOX 1.2  KEY (AND CONTROVERSIAL) THINKERS: PETERS AND WATERMAN The enfant terrible Tom Peters and Robert Waterman are former consultants and authors of the best-​selling book In Search of Excellence. Published in 1982, the book had a tremendous impact by defending a shared culture as the secret ingredient of excellent companies. Tom Peters subsequently became the enfant terrible of management, which perhaps devalued the contribution of this book. The fact is that on top of urging leaders to pay attention to their organizations’ culture, albeit in a shallow conception of culture as a singular and top-​down driven

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phenomenon, the book noted the importance of what the authors dubbed tight-​loose cultures, drawing attention to paradox before the theme became mainstream in academia. Ployhart and Bartunek (2019) subsequently affirmed the importance of studying management based on real world phenomena rather than only framing that reality through theories determining the structure of that reality. The importance of the tight and loose dimensions of culture is still relevant today, attested in recent work such as Gelfand’s (2019) on the tension between rule making and rule breaking, and the description of Solinger, Jansen and Cornelissen (2020) of great leaders as able to conserve and change their organization’s moral rules.

Suggestion for reading: the enfant terrible’s confessions To get a better understanding of why Tom Peters has been considered the enfant terrible, read his “True confessions” published in Fast Company magazine, when celebrating the 20th anniversary of “In Search of Excellence”.2 Here are some of his “confessions”:  “Of course, there’s an official way that I  tell the story now  –​and it’s total bullshit”. (…) “My second confession is this: I had no idea what I was doing when I wrote Search”. (…) “Confession number three: This is pretty small beer, but for what it’s worth, okay, I confess: We faked the data. A lot of people suggested it at the time”. Reading all “confessions” also allow understanding some motivations behind writing the book and some “frivolities”.

What is leadership? Leadership as competency than can be learned Often viewed as a disposition that some people are born with, a position in a hierarchy or a resource that some people possess, leadership is better viewed as a matter of a competent practice, one that can be learned, “a skill that can be improved like any other, from playing a musical instrument or speaking a foreign language to mastering a sport” (Pfeffer, 2016a, p. 6). What can be learned can also be unlearned, with some people losing credit as leaders. A result of seeing leadership as practical competence is the fact some people may have the competence but not the identity of leadership and vice versa, as illustrated in Figure 1.1. Leadership can be presented as a process of social influence, one that has two building blocks: the capacity (1) to achieve objectives through and (2) with people as well as with other actants, such as machines, laboratories and devices. The relation contains paradoxical potential. The capacity to achieve objectives through imperative command and direction often goes against the preferences of the people being commanded.To achieve objectives, leaders need to establish demanding goals,

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Identity

The person (and hopefully his or her followers) think about him or herself as a leader and has the necessary competences

The person thinks about him or herself as a leader but has not the necessary competences Implication: needs to develop selfawareness

Implication: the most fruitful combination

No competence

Competence

The person does not think about him or herself as a leader and lacks the necessary competences Implication: should not be asked to lead

The person does not think about him or herself as a leader but has the competences, according to others Implication: the social context may challenge the individual to assume leadership position

No identity

FIGURE 1.1  Leadership

emerging from crossing competence and identity.

disrupt established routines and make tough calls. These activities are not necessarily rewarded with favour by those commanded, often making those commanded do what they would prefer not to do. Leadership in this sense does not care to be popular: leaders need to be aware that leadership is not a popularity contest. As Caesar’s former CEO, quoted by Pfeffer (2021, p. 18), put it, “If you want to be liked, get a dog”. Yet the same was said by Al “Chainsaw” Dunlap, a man who believed in insurance: “You’re not in business to be liked… We’re here to succeed” so “If you want a friend, get a dog. I’m not taking any chances; I’ve got two dogs” (Dunlap & Andelman, 1996, p. xii).

Results and ethics There is another layer of paradoxicality: sometimes leaders who do evil are followed with enthusiasm by a multitude of avid groups. That, of course, was the case with Hitler, Stalin, Mao Tse-​tung, Pol Pot, Bin Laden and many other historical figures. Most historical leaders evoke ambivalence; in certain contexts, they will be admired for the very things for which, in other contexts, they will be condemned. Leadership, its ethics and other social manifestations, does not happen in empty milieu (Lacerda, Meira & Brulon, 2020). History passes moral judgement, with the immediate judgements being invariably those of the victors. Such views may be expected to have a positive bias, with ideological and other commitments. The context and the contradictions tend to fade away over time until received wisdom is contested.

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Leadership as the exercise of achieving objectives is a pragmatic activity, a practice that involves the capacity to mobilize systems, rather than some charismatic trait. Throughout the book we make no assumptions about the goodness of leadership: leadership can be good or bad (Kellerman, 2004) and the same leader may be seen to be both simultaneously in different contexts. Some (considered as) good leaders become evil ones, often as the consequence of hubris (Sadler-​ Smith, Akstinaite, Robinson & Wray, 2017). The rhetorician Churchill who rallied a beleaguered island nation against adversity was the same man whose disastrous Gallipoli campaign squandered the lives of the British Empire’s youth; the same man who had earlier orchestrated the siege and deaths of innocent men in Sydney Street; the same man that unleashed raw racism in his campaigns in the Swat valley and the Sudan; the same man that introduced concentration camps to the modern lexicon during the Boer War (Toye, 2010). Effective leadership involves both results and ethics, not always in balance. Great results by unethical means is destructive but good morals with no effectiveness is ineffective. On the occasion of the Second World War, Churchill the rhetorician achieved a balance between ethics and effects. On many other occasions, the effects may have been decisive but the ethics, in retrospect, were desultory, however concordant they might have been with the dominant sentiments of the day. Effective leadership will always be subject to the revisions of changing contexts. Leadership entails precarious balance rather more than special attributes. Of course, part of the balance consists in not trying to lead what resists leading. As Spisak, Nicholson and van Vugt (2011, p. 186) recommended, “managers should recognize and avoid the tendency towards excessive leadership”, a disposition to interfere also called micromanagement. Instead of centring leadership in the leader it should be centred in the processes that articulate actors and actants in shifting environments and the processes of their evaluation. Above all, leadership is a “process that is co-​created in social and relational interactions between people” and “leadership can only occur if there is followership –​without followers and following behaviors there is no leadership” (Uhl-​Bien, Riggio, Lowe & Carsten, 2014, p. 83). It is the interplay between leaders and followers in specific contexts (i.e., not just leaders) that give rise to autocratic (Harms, Wood, Landay, Lester & Lester, 2018) and destructive leadership (Thoroughgood, Hunter & Sawyer, 2011; Thoroughgood, Padilla, Hunter & Tate, 2012).

From a leader-​centric to a follower-​centric approach Historically, leadership can be summarized as having evolved through three moments: leader focused, situation focused and follower focused. Leader focused: leadership in this perspective is equated with the leader. In this view, leaders play the crucial role in changing systems. Carlyle’s great man thesis of leadership epitomizes this approach. The perspective of leaders as shapers of history has value. As defended by Byman and Pollack (2019, p. 160),

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one man or woman in the wrong place at the wrong time can set a country in a dangerous course. In bad times, however, faith in the power of individuals can serve as a source of hope. For although leaders can make the world more dangerous, they can also make the world safer and more prosperous. The leader-​centred perspective, even when focused on traits and dispositions, needs to embrace a paradoxical stance:  the same trait can be bright or dark, depending on how it is used (Judge, Piccolo & Kosalka, 2009).According to Zeitoun, Nordberg and Homberg (2019), even hubris may have a bright side. Symmetrically, optimism is good –​but it might be bad; witness Trump’s shifting expressions with respect to the corona virus and the effects of these. A virtuous approach to leadership insists that excess of a good thing is bad, or, in Aristotelian terms, virtue inheres in the middle (Rego et al., 2012). Situation focused. The situational or contingency view of organizations implies that there is no such thing as a best style.The best style would necessarily depend on the nature of the situation as different situations imply different styles, as Machiavelli well recognized. Leaders need to develop a form of situational or contextual intelligence that involves a sophisticated understanding of timing. Leadership cannot be understood out of time and space; the image of great leaders (historically, usually great men) as those endowed with special traits is challenged by the contingency  view. The contingency view also incorporates a paradoxical orientation, in the sense that leaders are expected to do different, sometimes contradictory, things while maintaining their behavioural integrity. Paradoxically, good leaders are aware of the fact that what worked as leadership in one context may not work in other contexts. Therefore, they are competent because they can do this or do that, depending on the circumstances. Note that even, or mainly, the virtue of practical wisdom involves a situational approach in which there is “the right way to do the right thing in a particular circumstance, with a particular person, at a particular time” (Schwartz & Sharpe, 2010, pp. 3–​4). Follower focused. Dialectically, leaders cannot lead if no one follows. Probably apocryphally, the quote “There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader” was attributed to a leader whose authority was failing in the short-​lived revolutionary spirit of 1848, Alexandre Auguste Ledru-​Rollin. Nonetheless, more recent leadership approaches have moved from command-​and-​control to a coaching orientation with a focus on followers. Leaders are expected to provide support and guidance rather than issue orders and instructions. Think about servant leadership (Sousa & van Dierendonck, 2017) and coaching (Ibarra & Scoular, 2019):  these approaches present leaders as having a responsibility for the development of their followers. Their leadership is based on personal authority (see Box 1.3) more than on positional power, substituting informal influence and self-​development assisted by the leader-​as-​coach rather than issuing commands and controls. As Andrew Hill (2020d, p. 12) wrote: “You can be a coach rather than a commander in any business”.

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BOX 1.3  LEADERS AS AUTHORS OF THEIR AUTHORITY Authority and power are sometimes viewed as overlapping concepts, with authority sometimes being seen as a source of power rather than a consequence of the (power) relations that position that authority. Yet it is important to distinguish authoritativeness and authoritarianism. As Spillane and Joullié (2015, p. 36) have observed, “authority has not to be equated with power, even if power often accompanies authority”. Power as the capacity to accomplish things, to obtain and grant access to valuable resources (Guinote, 2007a) via the transmission of orders on the basis of positional standing, that grants power over others, in an organization invariably makes those others feel that they are “simple receptors of orders” (Melé, 2013, p.  53), a dehumanizing feeling. Authority, from the Latin auctor and auctoritas refers to something that others author through the bestowal of legitimacy; without legitimacy authority is domination (Weber, 1978). If someone is seen to embody legitimacy (Tost, 2011), whether bestowed through the grace of tradition, charisma, formal rationality or a combination of these, then followership is made easier. Where that is the case, leaderly action becomes “authoritative” (Spillane & Joullié, 2015, p. 36). In other words, each leader’s claim to author their own authority depends on the way that those over whom it is claimed acknowledge it or not. People can gain positional power but still not achieve authority in the roles and relations entailed if those whom they lead do not consent to their authority. When invested with great amounts of authority, some professionals embody their professions’ ideals, their ethos –​understood as fundamental institutional ideals (Voronov & Weber, 2016). Credibility is assessed by others not through some form of cognitive deliberation but via emotional resonance. These leaders become role models, as explained by Pratt, Rockmann and Kaufmann (2006) or, as described by Fotaki (2013), “authentic” materializations of a professional or organizational ethos.

Capacity to articulate tensions Leadership is an evolving idea, ideal and practice over time, yet, regardless of its focus, leadership involves distinctly paradoxical elements. The tensions between the three moments identified (leader, situation, the led) are the focus of paradox. The ways in which the capacity to articulate these tensions plays out defines the meaning of leadership and changing historical judgement of its success.These levels are connected. As the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson suggested, in certain, clearly patriarchal, situations, “an institution is the lengthened shadow of one man” (in Byman & Pollack, 2019, p. 159).

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Adopting a systems psychodynamics perspective, leadership may be understood as “the power to define the experience of others and the structure of institutions in a way that affirms desired identities” (Petriglieri, 2020b, p. 11). Desire and destination differ. Leadership occurs in “a world of imperfect people and ambiguous choices” (Pfeffer, 2016a, p. 5) and invariably refers to the introduction of change in a system. Such changes may well be desired yet desire is insufficient to determine destiny. As Burns (1978, p. 249) observed, “the ultimate success of leaders is tested not by people’s delight in a performance or personality but by actual social change measured by ideologists’ purposes, programs and values” (italics in the original). Leaders are thus primary agents of change, a characteristic that distinguishes the leader from the managers that strive to deliver what change entails, often against resistance. Leaders strive to change an overall status quo, change that managers are charged to manage and lead locally.

Leadership as process A relational process Leadership is often approached from the perspective of persons and events: great speeches, explosions of charisma, inspiring gestures, critical moments. The rhetoric of leadership is often reified, as Watzlawick and his colleagues (1967, p. 27) have explained: Concepts such as leadership, dependency, extroversion and introversion, nurturance, and many others became the object of detailed study. The danger, of course, is that all these terms, if only thought and repeated long enough, assume a pseudoreality of their own, and eventually “leadership”, the construct, becomes Leadership, a measurable quantity in the human mind which is itself conceived as a phenomenon in isolation. Once this reification has taken place, it is no longer recognized that the term is but a shorthand expression for a particular form of ongoing relationship. Living and being is a process, unfolding incessantly, always becoming. Leadership is a relational process, rather than an attribute of a person or an activity conducted in splendid isolation (Bolden & Gosling, 2006; Uhl-​Bien et al., 2014). Thinking about leadership as a personal characteristic leads to attribution errors such as the romance of leadership (Meindl, Ehrlich & Dukerich, 1985; Spisak, 2020) or the investment of leaders with heroic or superhuman qualities, even of fictional characteristics, to leaders. Real persons can become fictionalized as discussed in Box 1.4 in the case of Dracula, prepared by our Romanian colleague, Horia Moasa (see also Box 1.5). It should be noted here that even romanticized leaders depend on followers to operationalize their visions. It is noteworthy that followers that romanticize their leaders have a stronger propensity to obey unethical requests (Carsten & Uhl-​Bien, 2013) and to operationalize their visions at any cost, rendering their vision and the visionary seemingly even more charismatic as the process unfolds for good or ill.

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Indeed, for many leaders the ultimate triumph would be their fictionalization in the terms that they work to promote; history, however, is rarely as kind as the ghost writers and PR consultants of the immediate present. Of course, leaders change with time, and the heroic warrior leaders of the past may give way to “new heroes” (Yammarino, 2013) that are authentic, green, ethical, socially responsible, emotionally intelligent. New heroes, however, can be as exaggerated as their older version and no more realistic; great moral challenges of our times can be expediently dropped as situations demand (Gurney, 2017). Attribution of significance in terms of the issues of the day often exploits and positions the situation as one in which the person steps up as one imbued with the “sexy, heroic nature of leadership” (see Box 1.5), often affording “exaggerated” images of leaders and their power to influence organizations (Blom & Alvesson, 2015, pp. 482 and 483, respectively). These events are dynamized and dramatized by leaders enchanted with the power of their self-​belief and overcome with the exuberance of its expression in rhetoric: if leadership makes things happen anything can be justified in the urge for action and movement.

BOX 1.4  DRACULA –​BETWEEN FICTION AND FACTS By Horia Moasa, Transylvania University of Brasov Who doesn’t know about Dracula, the blood thirsty vampire from Transylvania? Ever since the 1897 gothic horror novel by Bram Stoker, Dracula has been a famous fictional character, made more significant for modern audiences by numerous theatrical, film and television interpretations. Some interpretations of Dracula may see the character as representing the quest for eternal life or the never-​ending struggle for love; other interpretations see the character as a response to the public’s thirst for adventurous horror and the super-​ natural, while others interpret Dracula as an “invasion” of the heart of the British Empire, its Church, its Science, by the irrational, the exotic, the morally corrupt, the dangerous and deadly from the furthest extremes of Eastern Europe, Dracula as a foreshadowing of the fears that gave rise to Brexit. Aside from these literary interpretations, for Romanians, Dracula is modelled after the historic figure of Vlad Basarab III, also called Dracul and The Impaler. He is perceived as a liberator, the providential fighter who was capable of challenging and defeating the oppressive and infidel Ottomans. His cruel sentences (death by impalement) were directed towards Turks, a common enemy at that time. Such sentences, in Dracula’s time, were not considered gratuitous, sick and nonsensical acts of cruelty but strategic acts of power directed at restoring the balance of justice. His hero quality is supported by his defence of traditional values: honesty, justice, vim and vigour. Justified through this filter, his punishments were deemed appropriate.

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PICTURE 1.1 Vlad

Dracula.

Source:  Nicolae Iorga, Domni români după portrete şi fresce contemporane. Sibiu, 1930 (https://​commons.wikimedia.org/​wiki/​Category:Vlad_​III_​the_​Impaler_​ in_​paintings#/​media/​File:024_​-​_​Vlad_​Tepes.jpg). This work is in the public domain. The reputation of being unrelenting but just was maintained in Romanian tradition up to the present day. History books, including novels and poems, are a testament to this. His love of justice embedded itself in Romanian consciousness in a way that supersedes the fights against the Ottoman Empire as well as that which today ranks as his cruelties. In the Romanian context there is a pattern for dealing with worthy leaders: the most important thing in a leader is their defence of the people’s interests and the prestige of the nation. Other mistakes, sins or flaws can be forgiven or not considered to be important. The more powerful the opponents (e.g., the Ottoman Empire), the greater the leader’s heroism. It is a pattern that is not uncommon for people whose history unfolded in the shadows of great empires’ imperial tendencies, threatening their very existence.

A different view assumes that leading and organizing entail changing and becoming. In this perspective, leaders are as much producers of events as they are a

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product of events and the processes that encapsulate those events. Here events that “define” leadership are emanations of larger processes that never cease to unfold and to bring about change. Some of these processes are anchored in deep structural roots that are difficult to eradicate. When seen from the outside, they produce organizations that look inane, contradictory, ridiculous, even stupid (McCabe, 2016). When leaders try to make their mark in an organization with deep roots, the organization can respond to some extent by going “underground” (see, e.g., Heracleous & Bartunek, 2020), diving into the institutional palimpsest, whose layers of meaning sediment over the course of time, impeding the present from getting rid of the past (Cunha, Rego, Silva & Clegg, 2015). Leaders may not even be able to see this organization; it is often a challenge to do so for CEOs hired from other organizations on the strength of their ability to tell a good story about change. Deep, slow, embedded resistance is often the other side of leadership: media darlings such as former HP CEO Carly Fiorina become paragons of stubbornness and incompetence in the face of such phenomena. Even “hidden gems” such as Xerox’s Anne Mulcahy (Box 2.3) have to work extremely hard to maintain their reputation. Reputation concerns process, not the self-​delusions of personality (Ketchen, Adams & Shook, 2008) as often exhibited in the “I did it my way” brand of literature (Anka, 1969; see, e.g., Iacocca & Novak, 1986).

BOX 1.5  SUGGESTION FOR READING: WHY “FALL GUYS” ARE STILL SEEN AS “HEROES”? “CEOs should have been the fall guys; why are they still heroes?”  –​this is the title of an article authored by Carl Rhodes and Peter Bloom about why we continue to consider as heroes those who could/​ should be named as villains considering their role in the Global Financial Crisis. Rhodes and Bloom (2018) wrote: The retention of the CEO myth was an assertion of the power of individuals to shape events and control their destiny. To achieve this meant holding on to the heroic character of the CEO such that people might regain a sense of control over their own lives too. Maintaining faith in the CEO was less a matter of empirical fact and more a symptom of a human need to find something to believe in at the end of a hard-​earned day; with the reality too hard to bear, the fantasy had to return. Held out was the promise that everyone could receive grace if only he accepted the modern CEO gospel. (…) Let’s hope that with the next crisis we learn that we need to let go of the fantasy of the CEO. Read this article and try to answer the following question: which needs do the individuals try to satisfy when fantasying about leaders as heroes?

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Leadership attaches to the processes that participate in and shape the unfolding of events in their accounting and recounting. In a process perspective, leadership is a flow of activities that happens, contextually, in time and in space (Langley, Smallman, Tsoukas & Van de Ven, 2013). Context is more than a mere background against which things take place. It is an active part of the process, affecting and being affected by the interplay between leaders and followers. The “context” is composed by actions, agents, actants, institutions and materialities that produce change relentlessly. As such, leadership can be considered, in a process perspective, as articulating organizing within an ever-​changing context.The leader’s job consists of countering the possibility that the organization that they lead does not succumb to inertia in organizing, reproducing the same routines, rules and rhetoric despite the processes of their contextual dislocation. Seeing leadership from the perspective of process thus means that we need to avoid the trap of events. The difference between processes and events has been captured by Daniel Pinker (2019, p. 1) in the following way: Journalism by its very nature conceals progress, because it presents sudden events rather than gradual trends. Most things that happen suddenly are bad: a war, a shooting, an epidemic, a scandal, a financial collapse. Most things that are good consist either of nothing happening –​like a nation that is free of war or famine –​or things that happen gradually but compound over the years, such as declines in poverty, illiteracy and disease. Staged leadership events are often prioritized:  Steve Jobs’ presentations of new Apple products; the “I have a dream” speech by Dr Martin Luther King; Donald Trump’s order to kill General Soleimani. Yet these moments are mere episodes in the process of leadership, small dramas of much moment. Leadership unfolds incessantly; most of the times it is uneventful, a succession of variations in routines, rules and rhetoric. As Tsoukas (2016) explained, most of the time leaders lead within the context of these routines but routines are rarely mere repetitions as events inexorably change contexts: think of Covid-​19, the mutation of the virus from bats to humans and its worldwide organizational effects and challenges to leadership. The life of leaders involves striving to improve familiar processes in the face of events that are unanticipated and often intractable.

Implications of the processual nature of leadership The processual nature of leadership has important implications. First and perhaps most importantly, leaders are embedded in organizations. They do not manage organizations as external realities but rather as insiders. They have motives and agendas that collide with other people’s motives and agendas, both within and outside the organization. Because of such plurality, agendas necessarily clash and collide as one person’s interests diverge from others. In the music business, for example, some organizational members may be interested in art for art’s sake whereas others

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need to consider the economics of the firm and have their eye on the money (Cunha, Giustiniano, Rego & Clegg, 2017b). These preferences are managed not from the outside but within the organization’s functioning. A leader’s influence is shaped by influences from others and the functioning of routines over time. Not only is leadership embedded in organization: it is also relational (Brower, Schoorman & Tan, 2000; Uhl-​Bien et al., 2014). Making a correspondence between leader and leadership implies taking leadership “out of the realm of everyday experience” (Cunliffe & Eriksen, 2011), devitalizing it but also creating space for the fictionalization of leaders. Leaders are only part of the leadership process. Leadership is relational, meaning that it happens in and through social interaction, organizing being an endeavour that entails at least 5Cs: communication, coordination, control, collaboration and compassion. In the past there were only 3Cs: collaboration and compassion are recent additions from the increasing saliency of servant leadership approaches. Social interactions are dynamic and emotional. They inevitably imply tensions and some of these tensions tend to persist; these tensions are dynamic and do change rather than constituting an eternity. Thus, the leader’s embeddedness in organizational settings is continuously shifting because organizational settings shift continuously. From this assumption a number of implications can be derived. Leadership is embedded. Leadership does not occur in a vacuum, an in vitro environment where leaders and followers engage in interactions irrespective of the rest. Leadership is an embedded activity. It is embedded in time and place. Leaders lead people who have experiences of leaders and leadership. These experiences shape action. Embeddedness helps to explain, for example, the fact that founder-​CEOs who succeed in creating fast-​g rowing companies are more vulnerable to power struggles that may end up with their demise (remember that Steve Jobs was “ousted” by the company he created, Apple). Paradoxically, in other words, more successful founders are also the more vulnerable, for obvious reasons (Wasserman, 2008). The action of founders is thus embedded in the organization’s play for resources as part of a market for capital, attracting attention from people with a plethora of interests, such as gaining control of the firm or even acquiring the firm in order to kill a competitor. None of these moves can be explained without paying attention to the leader’s embeddedness in a number of other systems. These systems in turn are so intricately connected and dynamic that no leader can make sense of the full implications of this embeddedness. Leadership is a temporal process. Leadership, as any human process, happens over time. From a process perspective (see Box 1.6) it is not possible to understand leadership without considering the role of time and of history (Markham, 2012). The passage of time has an impact on leadership in important ways. For example, over time, people gain experience with leadership. As they accumulate experiences with leaders and leadership, they develop implicit theories of leadership (Detert & Burris, 2007). Implicit theories, as the name indicates, are not articulate theories but rather ideas resulting from experience and retrospection; they are what we may refer to as “lay theories”. The passage of time also impacts the environment and other circumstances, and the successful formulas of the past may become a path to

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disaster. Ed Catmull, co-​founder of Pixar and president of Walt Disney Animation Studios, stated in an interview: Spectacular success doesn’t lead to deep introspection, which in turn leads to wrong conclusions. You see this all the time, right? Successful companies draw conclusions about how smart and good they are, and then a significant number of them fall off the cliff because they drew the wrong conclusions. (Rao, Sutton and Webb, 2016, p. 87)

BOX 1.6  STRONG AND WEAK PROCESS VIEWS OF ORGANIZATION (BASED ON CLOUTIER & LANGLEY, 2020) The process view of organizations puts its emphasis on the process rather than the outcome. Organization is never the stable noun denoted but always in the state of organizing, as rendered explicit in Weick’s (1979) famous use of the gerund. In a process view, organizations are seen as being in a constant process of becoming as change is the natural order. Two main views of process have been identified: weak and strong. In the weak version, processes, such as change, happen to organizations. This perspective is alert to the role of time and change yet it assumes that the things retain their unique identities over time. For example, the Catholic Church may change over time so that its officers no longer torture and kill heretics with the legitimation of authority; contemporaneously, however, several segments of the institution have covered up priestly abuse of children. Nonetheless, it can still be recognized as the same organization, enveloped in its complex codes of communication and legitimation that slowly evolve over time. In a strong process view, the emphasis is different: ontologically, things are represented as temporary instantiations of processes. Change is not something that happens to things but the very building block of reality. The process view is important to a paradox theory of organizations because over time change inevitably raises tensions between what there is and what may be, between existing logics and new logics, between exploring and exploiting. The process view thus renders the need for a paradox view especially salient.

Leadership theories may often be implicit in lay views; as such, they are not inconsequential because they inform responses to leaders as well as leaders’ self-​ definitions. Theories create realities (Ghoshal, 2005). In other words, these theories have performative potentiality, meaning that they have self-​ fulfilling potential (Marti & Gond, 2018). The performative potential of leadership theories results from reflections distilled over time, embedding and embraining lay theorizing as ways of making sense of what leaders do and what being a leader may entail. The

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implications of time are clear: for an organizational member, a new leader is not only a specific identity but also the memory, the shadow, of leaders’ past as well as the focus for projection of accumulated experience, anxieties and tensions. In some cases, such as family firms, the shadow of the leader, such as the founder, casts more shade than do other “shadows” (Davis & Harveston, 1999). Leaders gain and lose credit.Time is critical to understand why and how leaders gain and lose credit. As a dynamic process, leadership is not inscribed in a leader’s genes or personality dispositions. According to Hollander (1958), when leaders garner follower support, they gain idiosyncrasy credits. These credits are gained when the leader succeeds in helping the group to achieve its goals. When leaders consistently succeed (or the organization succeeds and such a success is attributed to them; Rosenzweig, 2007), their credit expands. Defeats may make them lose some credits. Note also that, although overall some defeats are inevitable which does not make them problematic for the leader’s credit, it is not rare that organizational failures that have nothing to do with leadership are attributed to the leader and makes him/​her to lose credits (Rosenzweig, 2007). Therefore, leadership is dynamic and results related rather than static and inscribed in personality or some charismatic disposition.

Leadership as pluralistic Leadership takes place in “complex, interdependent systems in which people pursue multiple, often conflicting agendas” (Pfeffer, 2016a, p.  3). Leadership happens in pluralistic settings, in which the pursuit of a goal that is unitary and shared with others is usually a pious intention with no relation to a far more contested and pluralist reality of interests. Others will see things differently; they will have different interests and pursue different strategies. Pluralistic settings are “characterized by diffuse power and divergent objectives” (Denis, Lamothe & Langley, 2001, p. 809) and in which it has been recommended that a paradoxical leadership stance be adopted (Rego, Cunha & Clegg, 2021).

Diffuse power Seen as an organizational circuit (Clegg, 1989), power is a vital organizational force. Power helps to shape organization because its relations influence access to resources and the functioning of organizations. Power relations also define organizational communication because communication involves content and relations of meaning (Watzlawick et al., 1967). Power influences communication processes; that which is communicated and that which is not is always a matter of power, as is the way that the communication is received; communication is always ultimately receiver based. Communicating may thus originate pragmatic paradoxes in the spaces between meanings (Berti & Simpson, 2019), in which case, people may get stuck in paradoxical dynamics that crystalize the system (see also Box 1.7).

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BOX 1.7  DAMNED IF YOU DO… (MARTINS, 2020) The Covid-​ 19 virus was initially discovered in the city of Wuhan, Hubei province, China. The evolution of its global impact created political conflict between Chinese authorities and foreign governments regarding the number of victims. As the virus spread in the West, suspicion that the Chinese numbers were fake were raised by Presidents Trump and Macron. The accusation gained veracity when, in April 2020, weeks after having declared the spread of the virus controlled, the Chinese authorities added 1290 dead to the toll. The Chinese government declared that the procedure was due to an update of information, resulting from the fact that some local systems failed to provide the information in a timely manner. A  different, less benign, interpretation involves a pragmatic paradox. On February 11, 2020 the news agency Reuters announced that political cadres in the province of Hubei had been dismissed because they have hidden the actual number of deaths. The battle over numbers was thus explained by Liu Xiaoming, ambassador to London: “It was not the Chinese authorities, it was the local authorities”. But an expert in Chinese politics, Willy Lam, from the University of Hong Kong, told Reuters that the local authorities end up being accused either way, whatever their reaction is:  if they had been fully transparent, they would have been fired, and the Party communication machine would direct popular rage against them. In case they hid the gravity of the situation they would have been accused of not telling the truth and held accountable anyway. Power is what matters.

Divergent objectives Organizations have been presented as symphony orchestras (Drucker, 1993). The image portrays a single objective and its harmonious pursuit under the direction of a conductor as musical director. Everybody understands that this image, no matter how inspiring, constitutes a highly idealized metaphor with no correspondence with the actual functioning of organizations. Moreover, not all orchestras are designed in this way (Banai, Nirenberg & Menachem, 2000; Leonhardt, 1999). Sometimes the orchestra manages itself or hires the conductor:  the equivalent of employees hiring the boss. Other times, the orchestra manages the conductor (Gabarro & Kotter, 1993). Organizations generate paradoxes as people with different motives make their moves. Because different people have different motives, there are inevitable conflicts such as when, for example, gay priests try to gain legitimacy in their respective religious organizations (Creed, DeJordy & Lok, 2010) or when people with religious beliefs try to accommodate their faith and organizational practices (Gümüsay, Smets & Morris, 2020).These cases show that paradoxes are the product of people’s

48  Paradoxes of self-leadership

inflating accounting revenues through fraud. To the extent that the values of the CEO frame the dominant values of the organization (Schein 2010), he may well have cultivated a “mobilization of bias” (Schattschneider, 1960) towards presenting data in the best light as the normalcy of the organization, a normalcy that drove others to fraud. The Ebbers case illustrates the paradoxical challenges confronting leaders, especially as they rise to the top: they need to be able to zoom in on detail and zoom out to the bigger picture (see also Chapter 6). An excess of zooming in will create micromanagement as described earlier, whereas an excess of zooming out can lead to an obsession with a grand strategy while the assumptions on which that strategy is founded shift, unnoticed and unacknowledged. Either way, a mobilization of bias is organizationally initiated. Being one’s self involves paradox. Being one’s self indexes the identity that one presumes one has, defining who one is. Identity is an idea necessarily related to power relations as it is an emergent property of social relations from birth onwards. One performs various identities for various audiences; various members of various audiences may acknowledge approval or cast a wry smile and wonder about the performativity and authenticity of these performances. Identities fused in socialization that initially shape us in the family are a way of learning who we are as we try out various forms of the self being socially constructed. These social constructions are tested and tried out in ever increasing circles of relationships with others and projected through materialities such as social media, peer groups, jobs, careers even, with maturation and ageing. Identity is always performative and always in flux as its edges are smoothed here and then negated on another occasion. Identity never stays the same and its malleability or plasticity has implications for leadership. The projected “best self ” (Roberts, Dutton, Spreitzer, Heaphy & Quinn, 2005) that one has as a leader is always temporally contingent on past performances. As Ibarra (2015b, p. 59) argued: Countless books and advisers tell you to start your leadership journey with a clear sense of who you are. But that can be a recipe for staying stuck in the past.Your leadership identity can and should change each time you move on to bigger and better things. The only way we grow as leaders is by stretching the limits of who we are –​doing new things that make us uncomfortable but that teach us through direct experience who we want to become. One’s sense of self is shaped in and by social relations that always involve communication and power.We see ourselves in the looking glass self of others as we perceive what we perceive others seeing in us. In each new experience, our identities (plural because we never stay the same) shift –​sometimes dramatically, other times, imperceptibly especially for ourselves, secure in our performances yet unaware of how a touch of bathos or pathos, vaudeville or tragedy, is creeping in to the tired old routines. That there might be a degree of concordance between what you presume to be your identity and what those in whose interactions and gaze this identity

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was part of that vision. The channel broadcasts opinions suppressed in the Middle East. Yet, the Emir seems to be less tolerant of criticism directed at him (The Economist, 2020a), having approved laws that punish those who might disturb the social order. Al Jazeera is free to criticize others as long as they are not powerful elites in Qatar. As Roula Khalaf (2011, p. 8) wrote, Qatar “manages to act as the promoter of the democracy it lacks at home”. In Kazakhstan, President Kassym-​Jomart Tokayev appears to identify himself as a defender of the need for political reform. The country, he says, needs an opposition, and the citizens need greater freedom to create political parties. Zhanbolat Mamay, a documentary-​maker, took the words of the president literally and formed a new political force, the Democratic Party, only to find himself behind bars (The Economist, 2020b). He was released after a two days’ detention, long enough to make the message of arbitrary arrest clear. It is possible that both Tokayev and “Tamim the Glorious” believe what they say, despite their notions of opposition, citizenship and freedom being biased in favour of what it is convenient for maintaining their power relations in place as well as the status quo that supports them. These contradictions arise not from attempting to match words and deeds, changing the status quo, so much as maintaining elite privileges. From the point of view of a follower’s development, such contradictions are debilitating (see the section “Paradox dont’s”, on Chapter 1).

One does not have to live under an authoritarian regime to experience contradictions: “Google once encouraged its workers to ‘bring your whole selves to work’, rather than create a narrow workplace persona” (Waters, 2020). Predictably, this radical message of empowerment led people to express themselves beyond narrow work-​related issues. Some of these expressions became contagious and led to protest movements initiated by workers against some of the company’s practices, a form of employee-​led prosocial activism. Such activism, for example, targeted the launch of a censored search engine in China, leading to a change in policy, with Google now inviting people to focus more on work and less on politics or non-​work issues. Employees could bring their whole self to work as long as it has been self-​censored in anticipated reaction of what its uncensored identity might entail; the self-​censored elements should be parked outside the official domain.The case illustrates the tensions raised at the level of the self. Leadership is the process by which leaders strive to guide and influence others in order to reach what the leaders desire to be adopted as common goals. As will be discussed in Chapter 3, it is an inherently relational process. Leadership can be deeply democratic, premised on deliberations and assemblies in which all may contribute; while it can be, it rarely is the case. When leaders improvise around formal bases of authority, leading themselves in order to lead others, leadership becomes deeply personal. There are risks in this; strictly speaking, authority in a modern organization run on rational-​legal lines,

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PICTURE 2.1  Janus

(the Roman god of time) –​a fresco in Aula Gotica in Santi Quattro

Coronati, Rome. Author: Fresko N.N., Foto Maurizio Fabre. Source:  Hattler, Klaus, Imperium der Götter, Badisches Landesmuseum Karlsruhe 2013. Author: Fresko N. N., Foto Maurizio Fabre. (https://​commons.wikimedia.org/​ wiki/​File:40.7_​Janus.png). This work is in the public domain.

Mouton’s (1964) representation of integrative leaders as those that express a dual orientation to tasks and to followers. When leaders are one-​sided in their orientation, they are incomplete. They can be pleasant but ineffective or effective but not developmental, which will harm the sustainability of their performance. This dual orientation also resonates with Lewin, Lippitt and White’s (1939) classic framing of democratic leaders as those that manage to be both task and people oriented. The Janus-​like quality of leaders can be more complex than a clash between two poles, such as past and future actions. Even within the same polarity, tensions are possible. For example, the Grand Duchess of Luxembourg Maria Teresa expressed a paradoxical inclination when she allegedly mistreated her employees in the royal house, acting as a “tyrant”, while supporting the Stand Speak Rise Up! association fighting sexual violence in less favoured areas, as well as the Red Cross (Bento,

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About herself, she pointed out: I’m not perfect at it myself. My team will tell you that when my pen starts tapping in a meeting, it’s time to run for the hills. But CEOs have to manage those unintended displays, because of how much impact they have on other people. She also adds: “You can destroy someone by showing your emotions, particularly negative ones. CEOs have to manage those unintended displays, because of the impact they have on others” (Mulcahy, 2010b, p. 50).

Questions • What does the case of Mulcahy tell you about “heroic leadership”? And about humility in leaders? • Why do leaders fail to listen if listening is so importantly necessary? • Were Anne’s weaknesses a strength? Here is an excerpt from a teaching note (Mastering Strategic Management, by University of Minnesota2): Hidden gems are CEOs who lack fame but possess positive reputations. These CEOs toil in relative obscurity while leading their firms to success. Their skill as executives is known mainly by those in their own firm and by their competitors. In many cases, the firm has some renown due to its success, but the CEO stays unknown. For example, consider the case of Anne Mulcahy. Mulcahy, CEO of Xerox, started her career at Xerox as a copier salesperson. Despite building an excellent reputation by rescuing Xerox from near bankruptcy, Mulcahy eschews fame and publicity. While being known for successfully leading Xerox by example and being willing to fly anywhere to meet a customer, she avoids stock analysts and reporters. Question: why might Mulcahy have behaved like a “hidden gem” while many leaders brag about their (real or pretended) successes?

Intuition versus rationality Leaders need to analyse their decision premises and preferences. To perform effectively it is important to deploy facts and evidence (Pfeffer & Sutton, 2006). Being aware of the limitations of numerical data and measurements, of their nature as social constructs, should not imply dismissing the opportunity provided by statistics and mathematics to compare cases and to establish orders of magnitude of phenomena

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moi, le deluge (Kodish, 2006). These leaders are more interested in themselves than in their organizations. Other leaders (e.g., Steve Jobs, years after having been “humiliated” by being “chased” from “his” Apple) develop a paradoxical stance, by being both narcissistic and humble (Owens, Wallace & Waldman, 2015). In this regard, Grant (2018) wrote: Who would you rather work for: a narcissistic leader or a humble leader? The answer is more complicated than you think. In a Fortune 100 company, researchers studied whether customer service employees were more productive under narcissistic or humble leaders. The least effective bosses were narcissists –​their employees were more likely to spend time surfing the Internet and taking long breaks. Employees with humble bosses were a bit more productive: they fielded more customer service calls and took fewer breaks. But the best leaders weren’t humble or narcissistic. They were humble narcissists. Grant explained the paradox as follows: The two qualities sound like opposites, but they can go hand in hand. Narcissists believe they’re special and superior; humble leaders know they’re fallible and flawed. Humble narcissists bring the best of both worlds: they have bold visions, but they’re also willing to acknowledge their weaknesses and learn from their mistakes.

Questions for reflection • Read about grandiose and vulnerable narcissism (e.g., Besser & Priel, 2010; Derry, Ohan & Bayliss, 2019; Miller, Price, Gentile, Lynam & Campbell, 2012; Miller, Lynam, Hyatt & Campbell, 2017). Which is more problematic for leaders’ effectiveness and ethics? • Think of recent world leaders –​which of them display what sorts of narcissistic tendencies? • Why do people follow narcissistic leaders  –​even those that are more “dangerous”? • Do you know humble narcissistic leaders? Have they got good results? Why?

The word humility comes from the Latin Humus, for ground. A humble leader is grounded, down to earth and realistic (see Box 2.6). One of the most common frameworks used to understand leader-​expressed humility was proposed by Owens, Johnson and Mitchell (2013, p. 1518). They defined humility “as an interpersonal characteristic that emerges in social contexts that connotes (a) a manifested willingness to view oneself accurately, (b) a displayed appreciation of others’ strengths and contributions, and (c) teachability”. Sample items for measuring each component are, respectively, (a) “This person acknowledges when others have more knowledge

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strength. It was the CEO of Lloyd Banking Group, António Horta Osório, who demonstrated this important characteristic in admitting that he had mental health problems and was taking time off work to deal with them. In the financial sector, this opened up a floodgate of senior people admitting they had problems as well, such that the finance sector moved rapidly to decrease the stigma of mental ill-​health by creating the City Alliance on Mental Health as well as taking on board the training of managers to recognize the symptoms and create a supportive infrastructure to support high risk people. Senhor Osório not only returned to work after his sick leave but also successfully helped to transform his bank in difficult times. So being able to admit your weaknesses (in the context of the stigma of mental health) is not really a weakness at all but a sign of an authentic leader, someone who is honest and open about strengths and weaknesses. By leaders being themselves, they invite others to do the same, enabling a more open workplace culture. As Confucius wrote: “Our greatest honour is not in never failing but rising every time we fall”.

Further suggestion from the book authors Read the article of Horta-​Osório (2018) about why “It’s time to end the workplace taboo around mental health”. Do you agree with him that neglecting mental health at work is perverse for productivity? Or do you (also) consider that an extreme focus on productivity may give rise to mental illness at work? How do you interpret the following advice?: When an employee breaks a leg or suffers an infection, we know how to respond. Mental health should be dealt with in the same way. With a culture of adequate support and sufficient time off, an employee can return to work with confidence and without embarrassment.

Self-​leadership is a balancing act, an art, it is sometimes said (Box 2.9). The exercise is made more complex because leaders have multiple roles and their legacies are distributed not only as bosses as they were but also what kind of spouses, parents, neighbours and so on. They face an obvious truth: “no matter hard leaders may try, they cannot expand the number of hours in the day” (Hill, 2020b, p. 12). As a simple fact of life this means that trade-​offs are inevitable. For instance, the time one devotes to work cannot be dedicated to family and vice versa. Managing tensions therefore is something that we all do, all the time. Yet, because of the temporary comfort afforded by investment in one problem, namely achieving the apparent resolution of a paradox, leaders may feel tempted to ignore paradoxes.Yet they know that it will necessarily confront some trade-​offs. Pfeffer (2021) identified a number of leadership trade-​offs:

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•

Visibility: more power comes with more curiosity on the part of others. The lives of the powerful are more salient and attract more attention than the lives of the multitude. Therefore, as one gains power, one will be affected by being more visible and reportable a situation that affects not only the powerful person but also, potentially, their family; of course, the more powerful one is, the more easily one can keep all the inconvenient others at arms’ length, far from one’s yacht, chateau, estate and so on. Mark Knopfler explained the process: I detest [being famous]. It has no redeeming features at all. Once you’re on television and on the cover of all these magazines, it comes as shock to the system that suddenly instead of watching the world, the world’s watching you. (McNair, 2020, p. 63)

•

•

•

Autonomy: one can enjoy positional power in relation to others or autonomy but not both. Powerful people’s networks come attached to obligations and responsibilities that cannot be ignored. Paradoxically, therefore, the powerful do not control their agendas (see Porter & Nohria, 2018). When BP’s CEO claimed that “he wanted his life back” after the Deepwater Horizon tragedy, he was expressing this wish, albeit in a highly inappropriate formulation, one that obliged the CEO, Tony Hayward, to apologize (Lubin, 2010). When the Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison was forced to return from holiday because the country was facing catastrophic bushfires in 2019 (Murphy, 2019), he was experiencing the same reality. Time: building a power base and investing in leadership takes time and effort. This time is taken from other activities which means that the more one invests in leadership the less time is left to invest in other spheres of life including the family. As such, it is not uncommon to find people with very successful professional lives, experiencing strained marital and family lives. The question asked by Luke Johnson (2014, p. 10) in the Financial Times, “Can you be a good father if you are running a business?”, is one that makes sense. Paradoxically, again, as life at home gets complicated, individuals may further invest in their highly satisfactory professional lives, deepening the circle even more (Hewlett & Luce, 2006). As Johnson (2014, p. 10) observed, “Every entrepreneur knows about trade-​offs, and consciously or not, many decide that personal glory is more important than domestic bliss”. Rivalry and enmity: the higher one’s position, the more appealing it is for others.Therefore, even if one tries to avoid rivals, rivals will rise. Power struggles are pervasive and become more intense at the top as the prize is higher, as predicted by tournament theory (Connelly,Tihanyi, Crook & Gangloff, 2014). If one expects to have more freedom at the top, it is better to anticipate that such freedom will be accompanied by closer vigilance from rivals and other interested parties.

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Abraham Lincoln is the most revered president. This is especially striking in light of the fact that Lincoln presided over a period more challenging and economically destructive than any other in America’s history. (…) [W]‌hy does Lincoln instead elicit such high esteem? Many factors have been advanced –​his rise from lowly origins, humility, compassion, integrity, self-​made character, ability to overcome adversity, and humor. (Zupan, 2012) Lincoln’s virtuousness led him to get the epithet of “Honest Abe” and “all through his life, the honor and weight of his word had been ballast to his character” (Goodwin, 2018, p. 133). His personality and political profile, however, was much more complex and paradoxical than this epithet would imply: Possessed of a powerful emotional intelligence, Lincoln was both merciful and merciless, confident and humble, patient and persistent –​able to mediate among factions and sustain the spirits of his countrymen. He displayed an extraordinary ability to absorb the conflicting wills of a divided people and reflect back to them an unbending faith in a unified future. (Goodwin, 2018, pp. 126–​127) Paradoxically, as Adam Grant noted, Lincoln also had the “virtue of contradicting himself” (Grant, 2015, SR5): When historians and political scientists rate the presidents throughout history, the most effective ones turn out to be the most open-​minded. This is true of both conservative and liberal presidents. Abraham Lincoln was a flip-​flopper: He started out pro-​slavery before abolishing it. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a flip-​flopper, too: Elected on a platform of balancing the budget, he substantially increased spending with his New Deal. One person’s flip-​flopping is another’s enlightenment. Just as we would fear voting for candidates who changed their minds constantly, we should be wary of electing anyone who fails to evolve. The paradoxical nature of Lincoln was also pointed out by Goodwin (2018, pp. 126–​127), regarding his honesty, as follows: Even Honest Abe (…) was a skilful liar, says Meg Mott, a professor of political theory at Marlboro College in Vermont. Lincoln lied about whether he was negotiating with the South to end the war. That deception was given extended treatment in Steven Spielberg recent film “Lincoln”. He also lied about where he stood on slavery. He told the American public

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and control shows their true mettle. Leaders that emerge from crises enhanced are usually those displaying critical traits of honesty, courage, compassion and decency. When New Zealand’s leader, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, responded to the mass shooting of worshipers in two Canterbury mosques by a terrorist, she embraced the community and the nation; her raw honest emotion and decency in solidarity with the grieving community was apparent; in embracing that community as an integral part of New Zealand, she symbolized the embrace of the nation. A symbolic collective embrace was communicated by an ability to demonstrate compassion, closeness and care for individual members of the community. One-​to-​one (dyadic) relationships are an essential aspect of the exercise of leadership, whether with associates or the community at large. Robert Sutton, from Stanford, pointed out that “the higher the people move up the organization, the less likely they will be told the truth” and he adds that “senior executives will tell you ‘how much funnier they’ve got and how much better looking’, he quips” (as reported by Jacobs, 2020, p. 15). How can one get things done if people are not telling the truth? A  classic example is the Trump Presidency. A  narcissist surrounded by only those that toady, otherwise they are dismissed, Trump was acutely unfit to handle the Covid-​19 crisis. Indeed, his initial response was one of questioning the crisis, asking “what crisis”, dismissing the reports as “fake news”, a conspiracy to discredit him and America by his political opponents. By mid-​March 2020, reality broke through the cocoon of nonsense obscuring the reality: the initial response was to bail out business while resisting any suggestions that executive compensation should be limited, employees retained, paid federally, if necessary, to maintain not only the health and vitality of the market but, more importantly, the people, as the New  York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin (2020) argued. It is now clear that Trump lied. He was very well aware, from the very beginning, of the dangerous nature of the coronavirus. He told Bob Woodward, on February 7, 2020, that the virus was “more deadly than even your strenuous flus” (in Goldberg, 2020, SR3). He told Woodward that “I wanted to always play it down. I  still like playing it down, because I  don’t want to create a panic”. In reality, rather than in the world of deceit that he constantly spins, his behaviour “sabotaged efforts to contain the coronavirus, almost certainly leading to many more deaths than it would have caused under a minimally competent and non-​ sociopathic leader” (Goldberg, 2020, SR3). Indeed, what Trump’s statements and spin demonstrate is deceit practiced as an art form for which the technical term is “bullshitting” (Frankfurt, 2005). The important difference between a bullshitter and a liar is that the latter has a clear concern for the truth (actively working to hide it); conversely bullshitters are interested only in deceiving their audiences. Indeed Trump “doesn’t seem to care much whether such statements are actually true” (Christensen, Kärreman & Rasche, 2019, p. 3). Bullshitting is a very widespread practice in organizations (Spicer, 2013, 2017), as leaders often articulate statements whose contents are either composed of wilful misrepresentations or unclarifiable vagueness (Christensen et al., 2019).

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Truth about the state of reality is more difficult to occlude when deceit is communicated in a genuine two-​ way conversation, especially between equals that are equally well-​informed. It is for this reason that dyadic relationships are important. It becomes much more difficult to bullshit when in an intense and face-​to-​face relationship with one to whom one is close, either personally or professionally.Yet, a dyadic relationship is intrinsically unstable: it only takes one not to tango. President Trump is a past master in telling people that might have imagined they were in a dyadic relationship with their leader that they were “fired”, often for showing independence of judgement in the face of an onslaught of deceit and bullshit. Healthy dyadic relationships need balance to avoid entering vicious circles, either escalating in symmetrical conflicts (in which one tries to match or outdo the other’s aggression) or becoming locked into rigid complementarity (wherein a pair’s member submissiveness becomes regarded as an invite to become more overbearing) (Watzlawick et al., 1967). The organizational importance of dyadic relationships resides in the fact that they are vital to “mentoring, negotiation, workplace friendship, coworker  –​exchange relationships, employee–​organization relationships, and employee –​customer service relationships” (Tse & Ashkanasy, 2015, p. 1176).These one-​to-​one relationships, “ongoing interaction systems”, as Watzlawick et al. (1967, p. 148) called them, in various ways are of the utmost importance in the aforesaid cases. Direction, compassion and motivation are conveyed through close personal relationships, often in dyads. Of particular importance are those of leader to follower and follower to leader but other dyadic relations can include those of leader to leader or peer to peer in general, customer to employee, instructor to student and so on. In some cases, dyads constitute dynamic duos that combine competences that do not exist at the individual level alone.These duos, because they are dynamic, entrain their activities, creating relational rhythms and cycles that evolve through process (Bluedorn & Jaussi, 2008). The paradox of the dyadic relationship of leaders to followers is that to the extent that the followers depend on the grace and favour of the leader and the less bound by rules, conventions and protocols that leader is, the more followers have to fear truth telling. Hans Christian Anderson’s (2008) tale of the Emperor’s new clothes comes to mind. Organizations can do many different things to try and see that even vainglorious leaders, intoxicated by their very stable genius (even if others are sceptical), can be made to see the truth of a reality they do not wish to comprehend. They can, for example, hire executive coaches that will then walk a “knife edge”, between “telling the truth and being fired” (Jacobs, 2020, p. 15). This is especially important for senior executives because “when people get very senior you might be the only person to tell the truth” (Jacobs, 2020, p. 15). In other cases, organizations may hire professionals to play a role equivalent to the medieval jester, the sage-​fool who was supposed to convey the messages that others could not, such as Madame Zazou, the clown hired to counter the corporatist tendencies at the Cirque du Soleil (Gregersen, 2017). Another possibility consists in hiring a chief of staff that, among other roles, acts as a truth teller and confidant, helping the

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Earned respect recognizes individual employees who display valued qualities or behaviors. It distinguishes employees who have exceeded expectations and, particularly in knowledge work settings, affirms that each employee has unique strengths and talents.

Questions for reflection • What would happen with you, how would you react, if you worked for a leader who conveyed high earned respect to you but showed low owed respect? • And how would you react if your leader showed low earned respect to you but high owed respect? • What are the consequences for the whole team when (1)  both types of respect are low; (2) both types are high and (3) owed respect is low and earned respect is high and (4) vice versa?

The quality of relationships defines the qualities of a system. A great team is more than a sum of competent individuals. If the relationships are poor, competent individuals will not make a competent team. In this sense, becoming an excellent organization is not something that resides in the excellence of the individuals that are the sum of its parts but rather in the interactions among them. If it were simply about excellent individual players, Brazil would have beaten Germany in the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Rio. As it was, it was not the most gifted individuals that won but the team that collaborated best. It is not only in football that high quality relationships make high quality organizations (Dutton, 2003). Good relationships or connections energize people and organizations; low quality connections are toxic and create political rather than open communication (Heynoski & Quinn, 2012). Relational interactions, be they regular or merely episodic, are rich in tension and contradiction, as illustrated by current attention to microaggressions. Microaggressions may be defined as those everyday acts of thoughtlessness and lack of consideration that, perhaps inadvertently, communicate offence (Agarwal, 2019). Leaders, in particular, have to guard against such semiotics in words and deeds. Collinson (2005, p. 1435) points out that even though prevailing views of leadership present leadership relationships as inherently consensual and uncontested, “in leader-​follower relations there is always the potential for conflict and dissent”. Organizational leaders, for instance, may ask people to do different, even opposite things, such as when they ask them to raise service quality and cut costs. As Berti and Simpson (2019) suggest, this type of requests may easily create pragmatic paradoxes, because people have to disobey one or other injunction in order to obey: service quality is not free and reduced cost are not free of service implications. These paradoxes do not just emerge in dyadic relationship because someone makes contradictory requests (such as “be spontaneous”), but also because the receiver of the command is not able to step out of a rigid, oppressive relationship, to question

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power”: “rather than reducing exposure to sexual harassment, power in the workplace seems to put women at greater risk” (Folke, Rickne & Tateshi, 2020, p. 180). High rates of harassment have been discovered in a major US study of women in their 30s that have reached supervisory positions (McLaughlin, Uggen & Blackstone, 2012). Various reasons have been advanced. One reason is that as women advance in their careers and find themselves in settings with more men, they are likely to be engaged in more dyadic relations with them than in the past, becoming more distanced from a still subordinate female cohort. Supervisors are often the focal point of subordinates’ opinions and actions, exposing them to whatever accounts of supervisor actions are current, some of which may draw on familiar prejudicial gendered tropes. In addition, females that gain authority positions over men may be subjected to the mobilization of masculinist biases and resentments embedded in being in an inferior role to a woman. Comparative research in the United States, Japan, and Sweden by Fiolke et al. (2020) supported the paradox of power hypothesis. Empirically, female supervisors were the women most likely to report being harassed in widespread survey research conducted in three waves in Sweden, culminating in 2007, as well as in research conducted in 2019 in Japan and the United States. In Japan and Sweden, the rate of harassment of female supervisors was reported as being 30% higher than for women in general; in the United States it was 50% higher. In all three countries, women who supervised “mostly male” subordinates faced about 30% more sexual harassment than those with “mostly female” subordinates. The levels of harassment were greatest in industries such as construction, seen as typical masculine preserves. Harassment diminished with the seniority of the supervisory position. Norms of leadership may clash with stereotypical perceptions from male subordinates of what women are or should be. Pragmatic paradoxes are frequently experienced by women in the workplace (Berti & Simpson, 2019). In some working roles (think of flight attendants, for instance) female bodies are expected to be simultaneously sexualized and de-​sexualized objects (Wendt, 1995). When performing professional roles that are traditionally “masculine” (e.g., being an engineer), women may be implicitly expected to renounce aspects of their femininity if they are to be accepted as a peer by male colleagues. Female leaders are particularly exposed to contradictory expectations: they have to be authoritative to be taken seriously, “but they will be perceived as ‘bitches’ if they act too aggressively” (Oakley, 2000, p. 324). Taking charge and delegating work motivates higher rates of harassment as women are exposed to higher status than men but if they stay the course and succeed to higher level positions, the harassment is likely to diminish. Not only is it the case that subordinates are a problem; promotion produces greater interactions with leaders, exposing supervisors to higher status men who can take advantage of their relatively junior position (MacKinnon, 1979). Only elevation to senior leadership positions lessens exposure to harassment in dyadic relations. Typically, in many contexts women become scarcer on the higher rungs of organizational hierarchy, in which the experience of prior harassment plays a part. Where organizations are characterized by a lack of normative regulation of identity-​based forms of

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PICTURE 3.2  New

Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern visiting the Muslim community the day after the Christchurch mosque shootings, March 16, 2019. Source:  Christchurch City Council (https://​commons.wikimedia.org/​wiki/​ File:NZ_​PM_​Jacinda_​Ardern_​-​_​Kirk_​HargreavesCCC.jpg). This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. • Empathy is also a curse because highly empathic CEOs “may be more predisposed to false alarms, more biased in processing crisis-​related information, over inclined towards apologetic sensegiving, and less committed to repairing the organization’s operational system”.

Questions for reflection • Considering these arguments, should, or should not, a company select a highly empathic CEO? • Is there any way of benefiting from the blessing while avoiding the curse? How? What kind of leader profile is more consistent with such a paradoxical endeavour? • Do you identify any leader, in the political or corporate arena, with such a paradoxical profile? In case you don’t, read about Jacinda Ardern and try to understand how she reacted towards the Covid-​19 pandemic. Do you consider that she corresponds to such a paradoxical profile?

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roles while others are more comfortable in just one. They have what in theatre is called a narrow range. In addition, when someone specializes in one role (e.g., the bad cop), people may simply not accept them as good cops. That was the case of Douglas Ivester as CEO of Coca-​Cola. Ivester acted as COO for Roberto Goizueta. As a team, they performed extremely well: the urban diplomatic Goizueta and the “hard edge disciplinarian” Ivester (Miles & Watkins, 2007, p. 98). When Ivester took the CEO role, after the unexpected death of Goizueta, he was not able to swap roles. He failed as a CEO. Even if he tried to assume a softer role, it is not clear whether people would have accepted the change.

3 On August 27, 2011, Deutsche Welle (Schneibel, 2011) published the following: Deutsche Bank on Monday appointed Anshu Jain and Jürgen Fitschen to jointly succeed Josef Ackermann as CEO in 2012. It will be the first time the bank has had a dual leadership structure since the 1980s. Jain and Fitschen will be expected to share responsibilities in leading Germany’s most established international bank (…). Deutsche Bank was last under dual leadership in the 1980s. News that it would revert to the power-​sharing model and has been met with mixed responses by analysts and experts. Rick Vogel, a professor of Business Organization and Management at the University of Hamburg, says Deutsche Bank currently has good reasons to introduce a dual leadership structure. In the best-​case scenario, co-​CEOs complement each other; in the worst case they block each other. Four years later, Henning, Enrich and Strasburg (2015) wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the co-​CEOs had resigned: The joint resignations follow a series of financial missteps and regulatory penalties at the giant Frankfurt-​headquartered bank. In recent weeks, the pressure has intensified, with an increasing number of shareholders and employees losing confidence in the bank’s performance and the management team’s turnaround plans.

Questions for reflection • Why the worst case scenario materialized? • Explore also the conditions that make the co-​ leadership more likely to flourish and those that jeopardize the partnership success.

Paradoxes of team dynamics  109

random processes invest time and resources in managing their similarities and differences, especially as they are composed into teams. In these teams, individuals are expected to act in concert with other “interdependent individuals who share identities and have common interests” (Spisak et al., 2015, p. 292). Restrictions and refinements find organizational expression in ingrained dispositions (cf. Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990) to act, think and feel in ways emotionally controlled, curbed and refined, according to organizational formal rules and informal team norms. People strive to be similar but also different, to be unique, in their individuality. In an organizational context, groups of people, especially as they form or are formed into teams, can learn to express deep needs for belongingness while also establishing difference from other members (Rego & Cunha, 2012). Teams within the same organization need to cooperate with other teams –​but they also need to compete with them for resources, members, prestige and so on. Teams can not only be paradoxical internally as members strive to both emphasize collective and individual identity, but also create organizational paradoxes: they are created to add value but often reduce it by erecting barriers that define a collective as a team differentiating it from other teams. To make matters worse, when they don’t function well, perhaps because of insufficient collectivity in identity and too much individuality, teams require significant effort to run (the Brazil side in the 2014 FIFA match against Germany is the classic case in point). That being the case, all the advantages of teamwork become disadvantages: • • •

Diversity becomes a barrier and a source of disagreement rather than a source of richness and complementarity. Relational ecosystems become individual egosystems. Time is wasted in power struggles (within and between teams) rather than invested in elevating complementarities.

A single example may illustrate the paradox. A team composed by individuals with very high individual self-​efficacy may develop lower team self-​efficacy if they are not able to cooperate and to share knowledge effectively. This occurrence may be not frequent –​but one can observe the phenomenon, for example, in soccer teams where narcissistic and self-​centred stars may contaminate team spirit (see Box 4.3). The late Tony Hsieh, the former CEO of Zappos, epitomized this idea in an interview (in De Smet & Gagnon, 2017, p. 8): It’s also important to understand that the best-​performing teams are not created by simply putting together the best-​performing individuals. Have you heard of the “super chicken” research? With chickens, you can measure productivity through how many eggs they lay. And so, in this study, Strategy One was to breed, say, ten chickens in a cage, find the best-​producing ones, breed them for the next generation, and then see what happens six or seven generations down the line. And what they found was that at the end of the six or seven generations, Strategy One had these super, alpha chickens, and

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very high. PSG’s president, Nasser Al-​Khelaifi, showed delight at getting the star:  “Today, with the arrival of Neymar, I  am convinced that we will come even closer, with the support of our faithful fans, to realising our greatest dreams” (Lowe & Aarons, 2017). However, shortly after, Neymar’s stardom started generating damages in the team. On September 17, 2017, during a match between PSG and Lyon, when Cavani (the penalty taker in the 2016/​ 2017 season) was carefully placing the ball on the spot, Neymar suddenly blocked his way and harsh words were exchanged. The Guardian explained (Lowe & Aarons, 2017): Within hours of the final whistle, the rumours were already swirling as newspaper reports suggested that the pair had to be separated by team-​ mates in the dressing room after the match, with Cavani then eschewing his press duties in the mixed zone and sneaking out of a back entrance less than 20 minutes after the match had ended. (…) As the days passed, more rumours began to emerge of the incident’s destabilising effect on the PSG squad. The Catalonia-​based newspaper Sport even went as far to suggest that Neymar informed Khelaifi “that his coexistence with Cavani is totally impossible and he has asked for the transfer of the Uruguayan striker”. Dani Alves, another PSG player, by trying to throw some water in the boil, organized a dinner for the whole squad at an exclusive restaurant. However, it was claimed that the dinner “had been ‘as animated as a funeral wake’, with the majority of the squad said to have sided firmly with Cavani since Neymar’s arrival in Paris”. Despite efforts carried out by other players and the PSG’s president that have been aimed at placating Neymar’s expression of ego, a new tantrum by the star on January 17, 2018 led the crowd to boo Neymar. Reason:  he had impeded Cavani from scoring a penalty that would have allowed him to break a personal record (White & Devin, 2018). PSG fans chanted “Cavani, Cavani” as the Brazilian superstar took the penalty. As the consequence of the big “I” of Neymar, the Spanish magazine Marca wrote on March 14, 2020 that PSG expected Neymar to leave, valuing him at 150 million euros.1 Two weeks earlier, the same magazine had considered Neymar as “the king of kindergarten” (Hurtado, 2020) and wrote: “He’s the king-​to-​be of the nursery and has been angry since the beginning of classes. One day he hits an opponent, the next day he gets angry about a change, the next day he threatens to leave for Barcelona or promises to stop breathing”. The risks of individual stardom are not exclusive to sports. In business, performance is a collective and systemic endeavour. This explains why some stars “lose their shine” after moving to another team and why it is risky to hire them (Groysberg et al., 2004). Is a big “I” and the rivalry between team members

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have to deal, one way or another, with competing goals. For instance, how sensible and sustainable will it be to continue leading businesses into further supply chain entanglements or even maintaining those that they have beyond the short term in a post-​virus economy and society? To put things in perspective, the authors of this book all work in universities, some of which are extremely exposed in their supply chains, because they rely heavily on the fees that their Business Schools can raise from international full-​ fee students, something that seemed an unending supply chain of value. No more. When borders are closed, airlines grounded, face-​to-​face interaction minimized, not only does this value fail to materialize in many cases but, where it does, it occurs through a series of online interactions that are hardly going to satisfy the more serious customers. Such scenarios were largely unforeseen by most universities (that in many countries today are hybrid public/​private organizations in terms of their funding).Those institutions that in the past might have seemed global losers by servicing only a local and domestic market, such as Swedish universities, in which full-​fee international students are unknown, may well be reappraised as winners in terms of value shrinkage. Universities, much as any businesses, have to do opposite things, such as innovating and cultivating efficiency in the present and the foreseeable future, investing in the possibility of futures seemingly unimaginable in business as usual scenarios while competing in the present, offering customers good value at an adequate price and remaining solvent. Managing can be portrayed as an exercise in paradox: managers have to integrate a plurality of interests; they need to make decisions which are sometimes characterized by “worse-​before-​better” types of trade-​offs (Rahmandad & Ton, 2020), meaning that the positive effects of some decisions are visible only in the long run. As Keynes once remarked, in the long run we are all dead, hence the temptation to focus on the short run. The way multiple interests and objectives become articulated is critical as it is these that define leadership in the long run of specific histories. Even processes that tend to be described as exhilarating, such as creativity and innovation, are difficult and often frustrating (Van de Ven, Poole, Garud & Venkataraman, 1999; see Boxes 5.1 and 5.6). In some organizations the pervasiveness of paradox is more explicit than others. One reason international students were so attractive to university leaders was that they fuelled massive expenditures on real estate that was emblematic of the finest modern architecture, creating contexts designed to attract more students, especially international ones, to keep the cycle of growth spiralling upwards and onwards. After the lockdown of Corona virus Covid-​ 19, where almost all classes everywhere shifted online, in many cases with little preparation, the beautiful real estate of seminar rooms, collaborative spaces, lecture theatres became deserted. Will the future remain much more online than the past in the wake of the crisis? If so, what value attaches to the real estate of yesterday? Universities undoubtedly face paradoxes in present times. They are hardly the only institution to do so. In family firms, for instance, tensions between individual

Paradoxes at organizational level  139

be mutually exclusive, offering choice situations where one has to pick one pole or the other. When leaders and their delegates are confronted with dilemmatic choices such as to make or buy, this is the case. They must opt for one or the other, pondering the pros and cons of alternatives and choose the best alternative according to their criteria of choice. When the same type of decisions previously perceived as a trade-​off is reinterpreted as a paradox, new opportunities for action are presented. In other words, what was previously considered to be an opposition between contrasting elements can instead be considered a paradox, in which interdependent relationships between the poles exist, making the tension persistent and unsolvable. The work of Ton (2014) with retail companies, for example, shows that high salaries and rich jobs can be a source of competitive advantage, rather than disadvantage (see also Pfeffer, 2018). For example, an engaged workforce that is not overworked may have more space to think about operations and develop ideas that impact the business and the customer positively. Such a connection is not obvious and is difficult to imitate: a similar choice happened at Southwest Airlines where, instead of choosing between cost or quality, the company decided to compete on the basis of choice and quality. This type of balance, when obtained, is very powerful because it is difficult for competitors focused on one pole or the other to interpret and to imitate. Instead of seeing choice from an either-​or lens, some organizations managed to develop a both-​and approach to the world. Toyota is a case in point:  “Stable and paranoid, systematic and experimental, formal and frank: The success of Toyota, a pathbreaking six-​year study reveals, is due as much to its ability to embrace contradictions like these as to its manufacturing prowess” (Takeuchi, Osono & Shimizu, 2008, p.  96). The company developed a management philosophy, kaizen, normally translated as continuous improvement, that constitutes a paradoxical approach to organizing (Aoki, 2020). Toyota is a company that emphasizes the importance of learning and doing, acquiring new knowledge and performing, using what is already known (Aoki, 2020). These are obviously two contradictory organizational orientations as the search for the new may undercut the usefulness of the known. In Toyota’s culture, they are contradictory and interrelated. Employees are expected to engage simultaneously in efficient production while also searching for new ideas for improving the system. Taiichi Ohno, the chronicler of the Toyota Production System, presents this as a never-​ending process. In other words, it persists. The Toyota way, thus, presents the three defining attributes of paradox. And in this case, paradox is part of the everyday practice of management, not something exceptional (Clegg, Cunha & Cunha, 2002). The case of Toyota is indicative of how some organizations appropriate paradox and its management as part of their “way of doing things”, their formally organized culture. What types of approaches can leaders adopt to help their organizations embrace paradox? The literature has identified several possibilities.They can embrace philosophies that are inherently paradoxical, as in the case of kaizen (Takeuchi et al., 2008) or the good job strategies identified above (Ton, 2014). In this case, organizations managed to integrate opposites on an ongoing basis.

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In other cases, organizations separate different functions in space such that the two functions can continuously specialize without having to be compromised by the other function. For example, a company can conduct innovation activities in one location and regular manufacturing operations in another site. In other cases, it may use temporal separation: doing one thing now and another thing later. The organization can explore and then exploit, in cycles that allow it to take advantage of both processes without exhausting itself by doing both simultaneously. These strategies allow the organization to become ambidextrous (more about this in the next section). Ambidexterity thus offers an opportunity for balance (see Box 5.2). To balance a system dynamically, leaders need to cultivate the “both-​ anding” of oppositions. Consider how organizations learn how to articulate hierarchy and autonomy with the case of the US Navy SEALs: Good leaders know how to flex –​to use hierarchy to get things done but also to flatten the organization when they want workers to be creative. The Navy SEALs have an excellent approach: when they’re on the ground, there’s a clear chain of command. If their commander says “Get out now”, there’s no playing devil’s advocate –​no one argues.You listen and fall into rank. But once they go back to the base to debrief, Navy SEALs literally take their stripes off at the door. When they sit down, everybody’s equal and has a voice. This is important because one person on the team might have noticed something really critical that nobody else saw, which could inform their plans for the next assignment. So they flatten out; they share ideas. Then they go back outside, put on their stripes and uniforms, and literally fall into rank again. (Lindred Greer, in Klotz, 2019, p. 16)

BOX 5.2  GETTING THE BALANCE RIGHT: WHY BALANCE NEEDS TO BE UNBALANCED Balance means something terrifying to a small child learning to ride a two-​ wheel bicycle for the first time when a parent or guardian’s hand lets go of the cycle and the seemingly miraculous feat of moving whilst staying balanced on two slim wheels is achieved. Sometimes we take balance as synonym of a stable almost unchanging systems. That is not the case. Balance is about movement, flow, instability, as every cyclist knows. A  balancing system is always on the move (see Pictures 5.1 and 5.2). The lack of movement, tension and opposition means that the system is in some problematic space: a stalemate in which no part is strong enough to move the system forward, which leads to erosion or that is under totalitarian control, which causes implosion.

Paradoxes at organizational level  149

nuances from corruption to vigilantism. A corrupted leadership/​followership is as dangerous as a vigilante leader, self-​appointed judge, jury and deliverer of justice, as a Philippines’ Duterte. Corrupted leaders tend to stimulate corrupted organizations in the same way that vigilante leaders tend to create a squad of minion vigilantes who take the law into their hands (DeCelles & Aquino, 2020). The construct of “discretion”, as it is known in the organizational literature, is, to some extent, necessary, but an excess of discretion results in potentially dangerous unilateral control by executives (Padilla, Hogan & Kaiser, 2007). The governance lens sees power, politics and ethics as inextricably linked, a system in which various forces dynamically are held accountable rather than having free reign (Brenkert, 2019). In this perspective, boards, some authors argue, can even worry about executives’ off-​the-​job behaviour (e.g., traffic tickets, millions of dollar parties), as some of these behaviours are signals of derailment that expose the organization to risk (Davidson, Dey & Smith, 2015). Leaders, it is suggested, have a tendency to create organizations consistent with their personalities and worldviews (Kets de Vries & Miller, 1986). Organization scholars (Marquis & Tilcsik, 2013; Stinchcombe, 1965), refer to this process as “imprinting”, borrowing the term from the work of Konrad Lorenz (1935). But they should protect themselves from allowing a powerful CEO to construct one organization in his (normally a male) image. For example, Jack Welch’s GE was a reflection of the “testosteronic personality” of its “capitalist carnivore” CEO (Thornhill, 2020, p. 9), a company oriented to winning, controlling its own destiny and implacable to low performers via the famous “rank and yank” management system. The highly competitive organization was shaped according to the vision of this man, with great performance results. Nonetheless, the focus impeded the organization in anticipating transformations that the digital revolution was introducing –​and Welch’s legacy is now interpreted as being not so bright as previously said (Financial Times, 2020b; Thornhill, 2020). Looking backwards rather than forwards, other organizations sought to employ the manager archetype that Welch created through the recruitment of former top GE executives, normally with negative results: the times they were a-​changing. Twitter’s co-​founder and boss Jack Dorsey, a “managerial herbivore” (Thornhill, 2020, p. 9), defended a different type of capitalism, with digital smarts and entrepreneurial approach. He also runs a fintech, Square, and was planning to spend some time in Africa scouting for opportunities in digital currencies and blockchain. Investors were not happy. He was described by Scott Galloway, a professor at the New York University Stern School and a Twitter investor, as expressing “lack of self-​ awareness, indifference, and yogababble that have hamstrung stakeholder value” (in Thornhill, 2020, p. 9). John Thornhill reflected on the two cases in the following ways: Whatever their differences in age, temperament, philosophy and style, the two Jacks do have one striking trait in common: a dangerous habit of conflating

Paradoxes at organizational level  153

Organizations, especially those that have been successful and that develop strong procedural memory, may find unlearning especially difficult. As Weick (1996) observed, sometimes organizations need to drop their tools. Dropping one’s tools is never easy but it can be facilitated if the organization gains some affection for new organizational tools, such as tools in the past that were peripheral to organizational attention. The same happens with leaders. At least, it is important that they learn that, if they want to learn, they have to unlearn –​including unlearning the lessons taught by past successes. There are organizational erasers of several types, some of them already discussed. For example, cultivating a culture of psychological safety (see Chapter 4), accepting “why?” as a normal interrogation, appreciating “slow learners”, or people who do not learn the organization’s culture too fast (Sutton, 2002), doing project reviews, analysing cases of success or failure. There is one eraser that may be used to allow new learning so that the organization forgets previous lessons: cultivate peripheral vision, by stimulating people’s curiosity and sense of observation of details. The dispersed attention of organizational members may lead to discoveries that make the crucial difference, not only for detecting opportunities but also reading signs of environmental erosion (Schmitt, Barker, Raisch & Whetten, 2016). Consider the following description of how an organization unlearned the attributes of a product to learn about its new attributes (Day & Shoemaker, 2008, p. 43): When Dutch drugmaker Organon International Inc. was conducting clinical trials for a new antihistamine, the secretary in charge of registering the trial volunteers for their medical checkups noticed something: Some volunteers were unusually cheerful. An extraneous observation, perhaps, but one she felt was worth sharing with the managers running the trial. They dug deeper, only to discover that all of the giddy participants were in the group taking the drug. Ultimately, the drug proved unsuccessful as an allergy-​fighter. But by then the managers knew what they had on their hands: a highly effective treatment for depression. Marketed as Tolvon, the drug turned out to be very successful. As the authors discuss, this product never would have come into existence if this employee, a secretary not trained to pay attention, believed that her non-​expert observations would be well received. Managers, on their part, were receptive to inputs and took them as relevant. The example illustrates that learning can trigger unlearning, which may happen with small rather than big observations by people at the base (not the top) of the organization. Learning is potentially more effective if the organization mobilizes the attention of its members in general, and not only the experts in a given area. What these processes have in common is the fact that they interrupt habitual ways of thinking and mindless behaviours and promote active reflection on

Paradoxes at organizational level  155

• What is the purpose of this type of documents? • What are the advantages of “few rules rather than many”? • Explore the concept of semi-​structuring (Brown & Eisenhardt, 1997). What are the advantages of semi-​structuring work?

Kafkaesque organizations can be considered a mistake, a negative side effect of attempts at ordering an inherently paradoxical reality according to unambiguous categories, combined with a rigid system of domination that leaves insufficient agency to actors (Berti & Simpson, 2019). However, often organizations purposefully discourage their members’ capacity for critical reflection, cultivating “functional stupidity” (Alvesson & Spicer, 2012, 2016). This form of learnt stupidity manifests in the inability or unwillingness to question claims and commonly accepted wisdom (lack of reflexivity), focusing on means and efficiency without questioning the objectives (lack of substantial reasoning) and failing to inquire the reasons driving directives or actions (lack of justification). While focusing on the task and obedience to directives increases efficiency and reduces uncertainty in the short term, it exposes an organization to long-​term risks, leaving strategies and practices unquestioned, curbing radical innovation and failing to question authority (Alvesson & Spicer, 2012). The creation of enabling environments, one that keeps functional stupidity at bay, is a concerted effort. The top must enact the right values and offer an example; however, these explicit values will be insufficient if middle managers do not embrace them, as we observed in an empirical study in the pharma industry (Cunha et al., 2019). The creation of enabling organizational environments is nested with corresponding team environments, namely through the provision of psychological safety (see Chapter 4).

BOX 5.6  EXERCISE: LOSING BALANCE BY KEEPING BALANCE Companies such as Kodak, Nokia and Research in Motion became famous for their incapacity to innovate appropriately as around them change was occurring. Seeing change coming is a difficult if not impossible exercise, mainly if one is being successful. A most impressive example is the case of J. F. C. Fuller. In 1917, at the age of 39 as an Officer of the British Army in World War I, he defended a plan that would revolutionize the path of the war: a combined attack of air force and tanks. Instead of embracing the plan, in the 1920s, Field Marshall Sir Archibald Montgomery-​Massingberd responded to the mechanization of Germany’s army with a number of strategic measures, including a tenfold increase in horse food. Among other measures, tank officers would also have the right for a horse.

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trade-​offs, yet as organizations broaden their core constituencies, they create more opportunities for colliding goals that cannot be simply ignored. Nonetheless, as different stakeholders bring different interests, gaining skill at articulating trade-​ offs will be more important than has been the case historically. Initiatives such as PepsiCo’s Performance with Purpose exemplify the case. Purpose is a political process as much as a lofty goal. If used without genuine commitment it will not receive the energy necessary for the “long and arduous process” that it constitutes (Nooyi & Govindarjan, 2020, p.  103). Purpose can be no more than a form of window-​dressing –​or, worse, a way of “governing the soul” (Bailey, Madden, Alfes, Shantz & Soane, 2017).

BOX 5.7  THE BUSINESS ROUNDTABLE MANIFESTO AND ITS TRADE-​OFFS 1 Read the Business Roundtable’s Statement on the Purpose of the Corporation.5 The BRT manifesto, prepared by a group of 181 influential US CEOs, proposes the following: While each of our individual companies serves its own corporate purpose, we share a fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders. We commit to: Delivering value to our customers. We will further the tradition of American companies leading the way in meeting or exceeding customer expectations. Investing in our employees. This starts with compensating them fairly and providing important benefits. It also includes supporting them through training and education that help develop new skills for a rapidly changing world. We foster diversity and inclusion, dignity and respect. Dealing fairly and ethically with our suppliers. We are dedicated to serving as good partners to the other companies, large and small, that help us meet our mission. Supporting the communities in which we work. We respect the people in our communities and protect the environment by embracing sustainable practices across our businesses. Generating long-​term value for shareholders, who provide the capital that allows companies to invest, grow and innovate. We are committed to transparency and effective engagement with shareholders. The document adopts a strategic stance that is known as one of stakeholder capitalism.

Paradoxes at organizational level  165

3 https://​www.outsystems.com/​-​/​media/​A49C3F1FB3BC4280904093BB45B151DC. ashx 4 http://​timharford.com/​2019/​12/​cautionary-​tales-​ep-​6-​how-​britain-​invented-​then-​ ignored-​blitzkrieg/​ 5 https:// ​ o pportunity.businessroundtable.org/​ w p-​ c ontent/ ​ u ploads/ ​ 2 019/ ​ 0 8/ ​ B RT-​ Statement-​on-​the-​Purpose-​of-​a-​Corporation-​with-​Signatures.pdf

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figure in Critical Management Studies. The key contribution that he made was to bring dialectical thinking in the analysis of organizations. In his words, Dialectical theory, because it is essentially a processual perspective, focuses on the dimension currently missing in much organizational thought. It offers an explanation of the processes involved in the production, the reproduction, and the destruction of particular organizational forms. It opens analysis to the processes through which actors carve out and stabilize a sphere of rationality and those through which such rationalized spheres dissolve. Thus, dialectical theory can explain the empirical grounding of conventional organization theories because it deals with the social processes which conventional theories ignore. (Benson, 1977, p. 2) For Benson, any dialectical process entails four principles. These are social construction, totality, contradiction and praxis. People are engaged in constructing and reproducing a social world that then stands over them as a material facticity. Any part of this social world needs to be seen in the context of a totality of social arrangements as complex, interrelated wholes composed of partially autonomous parts unsusceptible to orderly organization and control. Hence, contradictions, ruptures, inconsistencies and incompatibilities comprise the fabric for the social construction of organizations. Contradictions emerge where coordination between component elements breaks down. Consequent attempts at control often have paradoxical effects, escalating disorder further, creating crises, mobilizing consciousness and originating change. Dialectical analysis de-​reifies the solidity of established patterns and structures; it deconstructs it, opening up other possibilities. Hence organizations are neither stable social systems, nor do they equilibrate; they are fluid, always in processes of becoming, ripe with power relations, changing patterns of authority and interests, mobilizations of bias systemically embedded and constantly subject to potential challenge and negotiation as contradictions throw up opportunities for change. Powerful as these ideas were, they were largely ignored by the organization and management theory that followed, secure in the established tracks of stable assumptions about systems, their variables and the pursuit of efficiency.

Leading, more than being a technical task, involves embodied competences of various sorts, some very practical, others very transcendental. Some competence is embodied in the performance of the body exerting that leadership, which Žižek (1991) refers to as the empirical human body; however, he also refers to what he terms the “sublime body”. The sublime body is a body “made of a special, immaterial stuff ” (Žižek, 1991, p. 255), the body that “radiates” leadership. As Spoelstra

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and ten Bos have pointed out (2011, p. 193), only followers see this body intuitively:  it cannot be apprehended through language. While the empirical body necessarily signifies the real biological human being playing the role of leader, this body in itself is insufficient to lead: the sublime body is also necessary. Philosopher José Gil (2020, p. 4) explained that, with regard to the Covid-​19 crisis, “the energy of fear is absorbed by the leader and transformed into adherence”.This may help to explain why (often charismatic, although not necessarily wise or virtuous) leaders often emerge in moments of severe crisis. In exceptional moments, leaders have more space to make tough decisions without contestation or opposition. They are the sparks that ignite susceptible followers in times of uncertainty and fear (Klein & House, 1995).When analysed in retrospect, with the “energy of fear” gone, the process, when successful, is reinterpreted as great leadership of the type that does not exist in normal times, rich in contestation, opposition and plurality. Gil specifically referred to the Portuguese case, where a political truce was established in parliamentary life during the pandemic; however, the case may possibly be generalizable to other contexts as well. The distinction between the two bodies helps to explain what Pfeffer (1977) called the symbolic effects of leaders, which explains, for example, their sacrifice as organizational scapegoats (see also Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978). One instance of this in practice would be the decision to award Nobel Peace prize to Barack Obama before he had the opportunity to exercise much in the way of leadership in his Presidential role. Obama mentioned his surprise at the honour; however, the award was based on attribution of the “sublime body” to the leader as is clear from the citation:1 Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play. Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts. The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations. Thanks to Obama’s initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened. Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future. His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population. The distinction between the sublime and the empirical body explains why the British Queen is not supposed to be touched by her subjects and why some leaders try to prevent others from learning too much about the health of their bodies. Perhaps the best example of this was US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who

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The process of learning also forces people to evolve with experience and to discover facets of themselves of which they were not aware. The crisis associated with the epidemiology of the spread of Covid-​19 in the United Kingdom is a case in point. Prior to the recognition that a disastrous epidemic was rife, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s behaviour in public was largely performatively cued to buffoonery and playing to the gallery of right-​wing populism fuelled by Brexit. In December 2019, he was still being routinely referred to as a political buffoon, a clown, in The Guardian (Chakraborrty, 2019). By March 2020 his daily press briefings were flanked by two scientific experts to whom he deferred all questions of detail in a reversal of the populist, anti-​expert rhetoric of the 2016 referendum that propelled Johnson to Downing Street … utterly at odds with the “Boris” he meticulously constructed over three decades. He used to rely on gags and bluster; now he depends on Sir Patrick Vallance and Prof Chris Whitty. (Freedland, 2020) The empirical body remained the same; the sublime body was undergoing a transformation as dramatic as that of Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde before the television cameras’ focus and the millions of watchful gazes that saw these images reproduced. As with many leaders before him and similar to other leaders at the time of crisis, the Prime Minister was striving to deal with performatively unlearning almost everything that had stood him in good stead previously. Subsequently, stricken by the virus, the response to which he was fronting, he disappeared from sight as the government’s response became ever more criticized. Perhaps inadvertently, absence from the scenes of political embarrassment as the human carnage mounted meant that responsibility for its unfolding could be temporarily, at least, avoided as a paradox was unfolding before the watchful audience’s eyes. Sometimes, being a leader means being indisposed is a useful contingency: the paradoxes between promise and performance can be elided and the responsibilities directed elsewhere. Leadership in the Prime Minister’s absence seemed, haplessly, to be exposing more people to danger as a result of strategies boldly proclaimed and promises that could not be met. In the Prime Minister’s absence, a series of Cabinet Ministers fronted the daily press conferences on the management of the virus, flanked by medical experts, outlining policy developments that were critically judged to be too little, too late, too optimistic and also veering into the fictional with regard to some of the truth claims. In the interim, when the Prime Minister returned to the locked down and largely virtual Parliament, he faced a new leader of the opposition, a learned barrister, Sir Kier Starmer, who was able to pierce Prime Ministerial humbug and polly waffle with laser like forensic skills. He was attacked on the one hand for not containing the pandemic in the face of a mounting death toll that became the highest in Europe; on the other hand, the libertarians in his party and without, many of whom were the most ardent Brexiteer fantasists, increasingly railed against the restrictions in place on the freedom of people to infect themselves and others.

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5-​year-​old daughter that the beetle in her hands was not napping but dead. He told his in-​laws that their conversation was boring. You can imagine how his experiment worked out. Ironically, Grant gave the following advice:  “If I  can be authentic for a moment:  Nobody wants to see your true self. We all have thoughts and feelings that we believe are fundamental to our lives, but that are better left unspoken”. He illustrated his arguments with sharing his own experience: As an introvert, I  started my career terrified of public speaking so my authentic self wouldn’t have been giving a TED talk in the first place. But being passionate about sharing knowledge, I spent the next decade learning to do what Dr. Little, the psychologist, calls acting out of character. I decided to be the person I claimed to be, one who is comfortable in the spotlight. It worked. Next time people say, “just be yourself”, stop them in their tracks. No one wants to hear everything that’s in your head. They just want you to live up to what comes out of your mouth.

2 In a later article, Grant (2020) argued that being authentic (i.e., expressing our inner thoughts and feelings on the outside) may work for those who are perceived as competent and haven’t to prove themselves –​but not for individuals who haven’t proven themselves, for whom divulging their flaws make them seem incompetent and insecure. He concluded: Authenticity without boundaries is careless. When we broadcast our limitations, we need to be careful to avoid casting doubt on our strengths. This appears to be especially important for nondominant groups. Sadly, experiments show that when leaders make self-​ deprecating jokes, they’re judged as more capable if they’re men and less capable if they’re women. Men’s competence is typically taken more for granted, while –​ unfairly –​women have to work harder to prove themselves at work.

3 Grant (2020) also argued that, for leaders, one reason why conveying authenticity may be problematic is that authenticity may represent narcissism and self-​absorption. The leader is more focused on conveying his/​her true self than on empathizing with others. As he argued (p. B6), “authenticity without empathy is selfish” and “authenticity is not just about expressing our own thoughts and feelings –​it’s about conveying our respect for others”. This is consistent with an empirical research carried out by Rego, Cunha and Giustiniano

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I am constantly hitting Peter moments. The idea is that as the organization grows, his skills are put to test. And every time the company reaches a new stage, new competences are needed which creates new feelings of incompetence. Of course, one does not get more incompetent as one makes progress. The problem is that new competences must be acquired and new levels of proficiency in new activities are necessary. Therefore, successive Peter moments may be an indicator of progress rather than one of incompetence. On the contrary, feeling competent for long periods of time may mean that one is not progressing.

… and in practice Having heard him speak about “successive Peter moments” we have invited Paulo Rosado, founder and CEO of OutSystems, a tech company, to explain what he meant. Here is his explanation (obtained in March 23, 2020): In the case of fast-​growing companies, we frequently have to do a job that we have never done before and in which we feel incompetent. What you have to ask yourself at this point is not if you are at the Peter level –​because you normally are. The question is if you are learning fast enough, so that you never become disastrously incompetent.

Questions for reflection • How you would recommend facilitating fast learning in a person newly appointed to a leadership position, without prior experience of the job in question? • What happens to leaders who, being afraid to be promoted to the next level of incompetence, prefer to stay where they are now? Is this the best way to learn? Aren’t there risks of becoming incompetent in the position where one occupies now?

Scientific and technical knowledge refers to the knowledge of theory. Knowledge of theory matters as an antidote against false explanations of phenomena that attribute them to the grace or ill favour of deities, or the movements of celestial bodies at the moment of birth. Yet knowledge of theory can be misleading when applied in the absence of other forms. The late Clayton Christensen, who coined the notion of “disruptive innovation”, told the Financial Times’ Andrew Hill that his theory had been used “largely for good, but sometimes for idiocy” (Hill, 2020). With his idea of disruption, Christensen sought to find an answer to the question “why do great firms fail?”. As The Economist (2020, p. 60) observed, Mr Christensen’s insight was that it is not stupidity that prevents great firms from foreseeing disruption but rather their supreme rationality. They do “the right thing”, focusing on better products for their best and most profitable

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The implication is that leaders need to cultivate their competences to see problems as close and distant (Carlsen, Clegg & Gjersvik, 2012; Nicolini, 2009). Zooming out allows them to gain a critical distance, to see movement and patterns of change, to scrutinize the organizational periphery (Cunha & Chia, 2007). It affords time for reflection.Yvon Chouinard, the celebrated founder of Patagonia, practices what he calls a “MBA theory of management” which stands for “managing by absence” (in Hill, 2020b, p. 12), meaning that he sometimes disappears from the organization. Zooming in gives leaders a first-​hand experience of the organization not as a distant entity but as a concrete and unfolding reality. Both forms of knowledge are critical. Leaders, in other words, need to cultivate representational and imaginative functions. A hands-​on attitude helps them to form a better representation of their organizations, which is crucial for managing the business, and the imaginative function is important to lead change. The recognition of the importance of the imaginative function is not new. Consider the advice of Juan Alfonso de Polanco (1517–​1576), secretary to the First Three Leaders of the Jesuit Order (also known in English as the Society of Jesus), to missionaries on how to prepare the reports to be sent to Rome. Here is Quattrone’s description (2015, p. 431): He asked them to reflect on the mission as a whole “as though from a very high place” so to observe how “the entire enterprise unfolds, how ground is being gained or lost … which things should be adopted, continued, abandoned, or changed”. The aim was to help each person to understand the why, the ultimate goal, rather than only proximal goals. The competence of zooming in and out is not an exclusive quality of top executives. As Garvin (2013) pointed out, managers need to communicate a vision for their teams and this vision will help them to situate their teams in the organization. In the case of the Toyota-​devised “Five Whys” technique (see, e.g., Staats & Upton, 2011), the method helps managers to make sense of purpose and to think deeply about why they do the things they do, to discover opportunities for change and to nurture psychological safety, among other factors. These competences are critical for managers because if they do not manage them, nobody else will do it for them. Some managers have an acute understanding of this reality. Nuno Teles, CEO of the Diageo Beer Company, explained in an interview that, every year he serves as a bartender once or twice, in order to be as close as possible to customers: You learn a lot. There is no market research as efficient as being close to customers, interact with them, a real feel of what they want. (In Santos, 2020, p. 53) Some leaders are so close to reality that they act as micromanagers. Others are so distant from reality that they act as aloof macro-​leaders. Both approaches are

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authenticity: he does not follow the rules of politically correct language in the age of political correctness; he does not necessarily follow established rules, he is unashamedly rich (at least, he argues so, evidence showing a different version of “reality”; see Buettner, Craig & McIntire, 2020). Referring to the case of Trump, Kennedy and Kolb (2016) suggest that authenticity is not in the leader him/​herself but in the alchemy between leader and followers. The case also indicates that what some may interpret as genuineness and authenticity is, for others, just arrogance.

Questions for reflection • What are the indicators you look at to evaluate a person’s authenticity? • Is authenticity good in and of himself? • Can authenticity be trained? Can a leader learn to be authentic?

2 An authentic “lying demagogue”? Read Hahl, Kim and Sivan (2018) about the “The authentic appeal of the lying demagogue”. One author (Sivan) of that paper commented the findings of that research as follows (in Eastwood, 2018): The key to our theory is that when a candidate asserts an obvious untruth especially as part of a general attack on establishment norms, his anti-​establishment listeners will pick up on his underlying message that the establishment is illegitimate and, therefore, that candidate will have an ‘authentic’ appeal despite the falsehoods and norm-​breaking.

Questions for reflection • How can a “lying demagogue” be considered as being authentic? • Where authenticity is located: in the leader, the followers, or the relationship between leader and followers?

Being authentic is not the same as being transparent. Transparency in leadership is not a positive prospect for several reasons. On the one hand, transparent leaders may lack texture and gravitas. They lack the element of mystery, of the sacredly symbolic, that is often associated with leadership. On the other hand, social life implies knowing and respecting rules and roles as explained by Goffman (1959): we constantly perform our selves to others. If people took the idea of authenticity at face value, the rules of civilization would vanish. As Pfeffer (2016a) explained, leadership may even imply the capacity to use falsehoods to reach for the greater good, as the case of Abraham Lincoln so aptly describes (see Box 2.9).

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Most recently, other unnatural disasters resulting from human interaction with nature, such as the Covid-​19 pandemic, have provoked major turmoil. The virus crossed over from an animal host, bats, into human circulation through the consumption of animal foodstuffs distributed in relatively unregulated “wet” markets in China. One implication for leaders and paradox scholars lies in the need to articulate preparation and improvisation in the face of such events. These two processes will need to be developed in tandem. Improvisation is still a recent field of organizational research (see Hadida, Tarvainen & Rose, 2015; Cunha, Miner & Antonacopolou, 2016, for summaries), but organizations will need to learn more about how to deploy improvisational competencies in the face of floods, fires, pandemics, cyber-​ attacks and other phenomena with important implications. The response of Taiwan to the coronavirus that produced the Covid-​19 in 2019–​2020 illustrates a paradoxical response: a combination of planning and continued control, contingency plans and real time improvisations. Given the potential incidence of these crises in globalized risk societies, crisis management should become a normal competence, a paradoxical synthesis of the normal and the extraordinary.

Grand challenges UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 16)2 refer to peace, justice and strong institutions.While we focused mainly on business organizations, the logic of paradox is also critical to defend the institutions of democracy.The rise of populism and the polarization of politics are threats to the quality of institutions. As we were writing these pages, leaders throughout the world were polarizing politics in the pursuit of partisan advantage. Polarization and the creation of rival or enemy groups makes messages clear and stirs emotions, but is a major handicap to serious and deliberative democracy. If institutions are the shadow of an individual, individuals make them or break these institutions. Populist leaders have an interest in weakening institutions, not in making them stronger. They divide to conquer. For this division to be countered, leaders can benefit from thinking paradoxically: in democratic systems, leaders must be both against and for their rivals, as the system thrives on pluralism and polyphony. The lack of pluralism and the rise of intolerance indicate that the notion of paradox needs to be protected for democracy to be preserved. Events can help, even tragic ones such as Covid-​19: in its wake, the abandonment of austerity regimes and the acceptance of the need for the state to act as a Keynesian interventionist state has become apparent event to those politicians least inclined to think that the state can do anything better than the fetish they call the market. These examples are merely illustrations. The new world of the fourth industrial revolution may be a world of opportunity but for the opportunities to materialize it is important to cultivate a paradoxical view of the world, one in which competition coexists with collaboration and difference with harmony.

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INDEX

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate figures, bold numbers indicate tables, on the corresponding pages. accountability 120, 121 actors: defined xii; leaders as 4; see also authenticity Adler, P.S. 154 agile leadership 161–​163 Aguirre (Herzog) (movie) 68 alazôn 185 Alvesson, M. 56 ambidexterity 140, 151–​152 American Presidents, paradoxes of 170, 170; see also Trump, D. Ardern, J, 82, 100 Aristotle 33–​34, 166, 185–​186 Armstrong-​Hough, M. 146 Art of Japanese Management,The (Pascale and Athos) 33 Athos, A.G. 33 augmentation-​automation paradox 192 authentic dissenters 132 authenticity 51–​52; communication of 90; recurring paradox of 174, 175–​177, 183–​186 authoritarian control 93 authority: legitimacy and 22; personalization of leadership 51–​52; power and 22 autism-​friendly workplaces 116 automation-​augmentation paradox 192 autonomy 74

Babin, L. 16 balance 32–​33; intellectual virtues 167; losing by keeping 155–​156; as unbalanced 140–​141, 141 Banalieva, E.R. 38 Barra, M. 36 Bartunek, J.M. 18 Bateson, G. 152 Bavelas, J.B. xi–​xii BBC 143 Beatles, The 117–​118, 118 Bell, D. 38 belonging paradoxes: dyadic relationships, paradoxes of 96–​100; organizing paradox(es) 156–​158; overview 6–​7; self and 68–​70; team level paradoxes 122–​126; as type of paradox 38–​39 Ben & Jerry’s 105 Bennis, W. x Benson, J.K. 167–​168 Berg, D. 110, 111 Berti, M. 85 big picture, failing to see 182–​183 Blake, R. 52–​53 Blanchard, K.H. 54 Blom, M. 56 Blomberg, A. 179 Bloom, N. xi Bloom, P. 26 Boeing 137

226 Index

Borys, B. 154 bribery paradox 38 Bundy, J. 99 Burns, J.M. 15, 23 Business Roundtable manifesto 162–​163 Butler, J. 96 Byman, D. 20–​21 Cambridge University Boat Club 113 Cameron, K. 137–​138 Canute, King 66–​67 capacity to articulate tensions 22–​23 Carlyle, T. 20–​21, 147 Cascario, T. 92 Castaner, X. 179 Catmull, E. 29 causality 17 caution and confidence, synthesizing 187, 187–​188 chameleonic leadership 54–​55 change: leaders as agents of 23; paradox(es) and 43; resistance to 26 *Chen, C. 188 Chia, R. 180, 190, 195 children, care of as national priority 71–​72 Chouinard,Y. 181 Christensen, C. 178–​179 Churchill, W. 20 circles, defined xii citizen leaders 156–​157 Clegg, A. 120 Clegg, S. 138 climate change 192–​193 Cloutier, C. 29 coaching/​coaches 69–​70; dyadic relationships, paradoxes of 95; reverse 95–​96 cohesiveness in teams 115–​116 co-​leadership 103–​105 collaboration 81–​82, 88 collective versus individual goals 116–​118 Collins, J. 55 Collinson, D. 85 communication: of authenticity 90; leadership and 81; one’s self, being 48–​49; power and 30–​31; relationships involved in 89, 89–​90 community, dispersed 157–​158 compassion and collaboration 81–​82 competency: learning new as leaders 177; meta-​competence, paradoxical leadership as 3–​4; that can be learned, leadership as 18–​19 competing logics 32–​33, 159

confidence and caution, synthesizing 187, 187–​188 Conlon, D.E. 114 consensus and dissent in teams 115–​116, 123–​124 consistency, seeing as sacred cow 43–​44 constructive dissent 156 context: deep engagement with 187, 188; importance of 54–​55; leadership as process and 27 contingency view of organizations 21 contradictions 37; creation of by leaders 49–​50; curiosity about 186, 187; defined xii Cornelissen, J. 18 court jesters 124, 187, 190–​191, 191 Covid-​19: businesses, impact on 135–​136; communication of number of Chinese victims 31; impact of 11; Johnson, B. 173–​174; leadership and 11–​12; paradoxes related to 146; paradoxical thinking and 193–​194; planning and improvising 145, 145–​146; response of businesses 163; Trump as driver of misinformation 185; Trump Presidency and 82–​83; virtual teams 132 creativity 179 credits, gaining and losing 30 crises, leadership in 169 critical reflection, discouragement of 155 criticism, embracing 187, 190–​191, 191 Cronin, T. 170 culture, strong/​loose 157–​158 Cunha, M.P. 105, 177 Dalal, F. 108, 129 Day, G.S. 153 Daymond, J. 32 Delong, S. 63 Delong, T.J. 63 democracy, paradoxical thinking as defending 194 dependence versus independence 59–​61 de Rond, M. 45, 113, 122 Detert, J.R. x Deutsche Bank 104 devil’s advocates 131–​132 dialectical theory 168; dialectic, defined xii Dickens, C. 12 difference: and equality 90–​91; and similarity 68–​69 differentiation and integration 183–​186 diffuse power 30–​31 dilemmas defined xii

Index  227

disempowerment 105–​106 dispersed community 157–​158 disruption of the status quo 187, 191–​192 disruptive innovation 178–​179 dissent: and consensus in teams 115–​116, 123–​124; constructive 156 dissenters 131–​132 distance and proximity 122–​123; recurring paradox of 174, 175, 180–​183 divergent objectives in organizations 31–​32 diversity: cognitive 120–​121; faultlines in teams as resistance to 126 Dorsey, J. 149 Dracula,Vlad 24–​25 dualism xiii, 34 duality xii, 34; of leadership and management x–​xii Dweck, C. 79, 171 dyadic relationships, paradoxes of: belonging paradoxes 96–​100; coaching 95; co-​leadership 103–​105; compassion and collaboration 81–​82; contradictory obligations 102–​103, 105; dis/​ empowering 105–​106; empathy 98–​100; equality and difference 90–​91; gender relations 96–​98; helping behaviours 101–​102; high quality connections 86; interactions, importance of 84–​85, 87; of leaders to followers 83–​84; learning paradoxes 93–​96; management of 106–​107; multiplying versus diminishing talent 93–​95, 94; organizational importance 83, 89; organizing paradox(es) 102–​106; overview 6, 90; performing, paradoxes of 90–​93; power, paradox of 96–​98; reasons for paradoxes 84–​87; reciprocity 102; reverse coaching 95–​96; star performers 91–​92; tensions and conflict 85–​88; tough love 92–​93; truth and lies 82–​83 earned respect 84–​85 Ebbers, B. 47–​48 Eddleston, K.A. 38 Edmondson, A. 111, 119, 133 eirôn 185 elastic hybridity 159–​160 Elias, N. 108 Ely, R. 160–​161, 182, 190 embeddedness of leaders 28 embodied competences 168–​169 Emerson, R.W. 22 empathy 98–​100 employee handbooks 154–​155

empowerment 105–​106 enabling environments 154–​156 Engels, F. 12 enmity as trade-​off 74 Enrich, D. 104 environments, enabling 154–​156 equality and difference 90–​91 equilibrium 32–​33 erasers, organizational 153 ethics, leadership and 19–​20 Evanega, S. 185 events, leadership 27 excellence: paradox of 63; recurring paradox of excellence 174, 174, 177–​179 Extreme Ownership: how the U.S. Navy SEALS lead and win (Willink and Babin) 16 failure, learning from 119–​120 family firms, crisis and 136–​137 faultlines in teams 126–​127 “Fisherman, The” (Yeats) 68 “Five Whys” technique 181 Fleming, P. 157 Folke, O. 97, 98 Follett, M.P. 36, 186 followship: defined xiii; ethics, leadership and 20 founders, vulnerability of 28 Four Pests Campaign (China) 182 Franklin, B. 167 Freedland, J. 173 freedom within a framework 158–​159 Fuller, J.F.C. 155–​156 Gelfand, M. 18 gender relations 96–​98, 160–​161 Genovese, M. 170 Ghosn, C. 32, 56 Gil, J. 169 Giustiniano, L. 177 goals: diverse and (in)compatible 135–​138; self-​ 58–​59; setting 38; team versus individual 116–​118 Goffman, E. 184 Goldsmith, M. 51 Goleman, D. 70 Gomes, P.J. 58–​59 Gonsalves, L. 3 Goodman, P.S. 163 goodness, interrogating the meaning of 187, 189–​190 Goodwin, D.K. 76–​77 Google 50

228 Index

governance mechanisms 147–​150 Graf-​Vlachy L. 99 Grant, A. 65, 76, 175–​177 Grant, D. 17 great leaders xi–​xii Great Men Theory 147 Greer, L. 140 Grint, K. 147 grit 67–​68 groupthink 115, 118–​119, 121, 131–​132 growth mindset 79 Gu, Q. 93 Gulati, R. 158 Hahl, O. 184 Hahn, T. 39 Hamblin, J. 146 handbooks, employee 154–​155 Harari,Y.N. 166 harassment, sexual 96–​98 Harvey, M. 189 hedgehog effect 122–​123 helping behaviours 101–​102 Henning, E. 104 heroes, leaders as 26, 147–​150, 148 Hersey, P. 54 Hill, A. 178–​179, 180 Hill, L. 171 Hollander, E.P. 30 Holmes, E. 68, 115 Homberg, F. 21 Horta-​Osório, A. 72–​73 Hsieh, T. 109–​110 hubris and humility 179–​180 humbition 67 humility 63–​67, 179–​180 hybridity, elastic 159–​160 Ibarra, H. 48, 70, 71 identity 38–​39; development of competences 49; multiple identities, conflicts between 49; one’s self, being 48–​49; team 130 implicit theories of leadership 28–​30 improvisation: climate change related events 193; experience, using to support 187, 189; planning and 144–​146, 145, 146 inconsistency, consistent 44 independence versus interdependence 59–​61 individual versus team goals 116–​118 In Search of Excellence (Peters and Waterman) 16–​18 integration and differentiation 183–​186 intellectual virtues 166–​167

intelligence, forms of 179 interdependence versus independence 59–​61 intuition versus rationality 61–​63 Ivester, D. 104 Jackson, D.D. xi–​xii Jansen, P.G. 18 Janus-​like leadership 52–​54, 53 jesters 124, 187, 190–​191, 191 Johnson, B. 173–​174 Johnson, D.E. 54 Johnson, L. 74 Johnson, M.D. 65 Josefsson, I. 179 Joullié, J.E. 22 Kaiser, R.B. 11, 77, 78 Kaplan, R.E. 11, 77, 78 Kauffman, C. 84 Keaveny, P. 146 Keenoy, T. 17 Kennedy, F. 184 Kets de Vries, M.F.R. 51, 57, 71, 92, 110, 123 Kim, M. 184 Kim,Y.H. 88 Klee, P. 194 Kniffin, K.M. x Knight, E. 32, 39 Knopfler, M. 74 Kodish, S. 166 Koestler, A. 84 Kolb, D.G. 184 König, A. 99 Krakowski, S.* 192 Kramer, R.M. 15 Krastev, I. 146 Kuper, S. 38 Langley, A. 29 leadership: actors, leaders as 4; authority and 22; capacity to articulate tensions 22–​23; change, leaders as agents of 23; as competency that can be learned 18–​19, 19; as complex and paradoxical 166–​171; as contingency based 15; contradictions 37; Covid-​19 11–​12; credits, gaining and losing 30; in crises 169; defined xiii; duality with management x–​xii; as embedded 28; follower focused 21; great leaders xi–​xii; heroes, leaders as 26; as human process 3; implicit theories of 28–​30; leader-​focused 20–​21; learning 70–​71; and management, distinction

Index  229

between x; Manichean view of 15; meta-​ competence, paradoxical leadership as 3–​4; as morality tale 14; multivocalities, attunement to 4; as ongoing puzzle 171–​174; oppositional fields, excelling in 33, 33–​34; overview of paradoxes in 6–​7; and paradox 33, 33–​34; paradoxical 42–​43; as paradoxical practice 1–​3; as pluralistic 30–​33; positive, as paradoxical 14–​15; as process 7, 23–​30; as relational-​ paradoxical process 3; as relational process 15, 28; results and ethics 19–​20; situation focused 21; as temporal process 28–​30; wise 166–​171, 170 learning paradoxes: dyadic relationships, paradoxes of 93–​96; excellence, paradox of 63; organizing paradox(es) 150–​151, 151; overview 6–​7; self and 63–​68, 64, 66; team level paradoxes 118–​122, 121; as type of paradox 39; unlearning 150, 152–​154, 171–​174 legitimacy, authority and 22 Leigh, D. 110 Leroy, H.L. x level 5 leadership 55–​56 Lewin, K. 53 Lewis, M.W. 33, 38, 172 Lilly 119–​120 Lincoln, A. 75–​77 Lippitt, R. 53 listening and talking 69–​70 Little, L.M. 99 Li Wenliang 4 LMX (leader-​member exchange) theory 87, 91 Lobo, M.S. 92 logics: competing 32–​33, 159; exposure of teams to different 122; multiple, combination of 159–​160 Lok, J. 45 loose-​tight tension 69 losing and winning 124–​126 love/​care and direction/​control 92–​93 Ma, J. 180 Machiavelli, N. 14–​15 Maitlis, S. 101 Majchrzak, A. 132–​133 Malhotra, A. 132–​133 management: duality with leadership x–​xii; and leadership, distinction between x; of paradoxes 72–​77, 106–​107, 131–​133, 160–​164; of recurring paradoxes 186–​192, 187, 188, 191

Manichean view of leadership 15 March, J. xi, 2, 150–​151 Martin de Holan, P. 152 Marx, K. 12 maternity leave 71–​72 McAdams, D. 49 McCabe, D. 40–​41 McNair, J. 74 mentoring 95 meritocracy 143–​144 meta-​competence, paradoxical leadership as 3–​4 meta-​theory, paradox as 8–​9 Microsoft 157 mindsets 79; paradoxical 41–​42, 186; synthesizing multi-​perspectival 187, 188–​189 Mintzberg, H. xii Mirvis, P. 105 mistakes, learning from 119–​120 Mitchell, T.R. 65 Monteiro, M. 98–​99 moral organizations, creation of 142 Mouton, J. 52–​53 Muilenburg, D. 32 Mulcahy, A. 4, 60–​61, 92 multi-​perspectival mindset 187, 188–​189 multiplying versus diminishing talent 93–​95, 94 multivocalities, attunement to 4 Murnighan, J.K. 114 Murton, T. 119–​120 Musk, E. 180 Nadella, S. 79, 98 naïve paradoxicality 35 narcissism 64, 64–​65 Nayak, A. 180, 190, 195 negative political leadership 185–​186 neurodiversity-​friendly workplaces 116 New Normal, paradoxes of 192–​194 Neymar 111–​112 Nicholson, N. 20 Nissan 56 Nordberg, D. 21 North Star 128–​129 Obama, B. 169 objectives, divergent, in organizations 31–​32 ongoing puzzle, leadership as 171–​174 opening up of teams 121 opposition, embracing 187, 189 oppositional fields, leadership and 33, 33–​34 orchestras, organizations as 31

230 Index

organizations: competing logics in 32–​33; contradictions 37; divergent objectives in 31–​32; less hierarchical design of 127–​129; as orchestras 31; as paradoxical 17; as plural systems 7; renewal, tensions in 39; resistance to change 26; situational view of 21; strong and weak process views of 29; surprise and 8; tensions of design 39; as wonderland 40–​41, 41 organizing paradox(es): ambidexterity 151–​152; balance as unbalanced 140–​141, 141; belonging paradoxes 156–​158; citizen leaders 156–​157; competing logics 159; constructive dissent 156; culture, strong/​loose 157–​158; dispersed community 157–​158; diverse and (in)compatible goals 135–​138; dyadic relationships, paradoxes of 102–​106; elastic hybridity 159–​160; enabling environments 154–​156; erasers, organizational 153; freedom within a framework 158–​159; governance mechanisms 147–​150; from hierarchies to agile design 161–​163; learning paradoxes 150–​151, 151; management of 160–​164; meritocracy 143–​144; overview 6–​7, 142; performing, paradoxes of 143–​150, 145, 146, 148; planning and improvising 144–​146, 145, 146; reasons for paradoxes 138–​142; self and 70–​72; solutions becoming problems 160–​161; supporting actors 163–​164; team level paradoxes 126–​131; as type of paradox 39; unlearning 152–​154 Oswick, C. 17 O’Toole, J. x owed respect 84–​85 Owens, B.P. 65 Padavic, I. 160–​161, 182, 190 pandemics, paradoxical thinking and 193–​194; see also Covid-​19 paradox(es): authenticity, recurring paradox of 174, 175–​177, 183–​186; belonging 38–​39; bribery paradox 38; as challenges 11–​13; change and 43; classification of 37, 38–​39; as condition to be lived with 33, 44; confidence and caution, synthesizing 187, 187–​188; consistency, seeing as sacred cow 43–​44; context, deep engagement with 187, 188; contradictions 37; creation of y leaders 49–​50; criticism, embracing 187, 190–​191, 191; curiosity about

contradiction 186, 187; defined xiii; detection of as difficult 40–​41, 41; different ways of handling 43; disruption of the status quo 187, 191–​192; dualities rather dualisms 34–​36; duality of leadership and management xi–​xii; excellence, recurring paradox of 174, 174, 177–​179; goodness, interrogating the meaning of 187, 189–​190; humility and hubris 179–​180; improvisation, using experience to support 187, 189; integration and differentiation 183–​ 186; jestership, cultivation of 190–​191; leadership, paradoxical 42–​43; leadership and 33, 33–​34; leadership as paradoxical practice 1–​3; learning 39; as lens 45–​46; levels of 6–​7; management of recurring paradoxes 186–​192, 187, 188, 191; meta-​ competence, paradoxical leadership as 3–​4; meta-​theory, paradox as 8–​9; as meta-​theory 36; mindset, paradoxical 41–​42; navigation of, difficulties with 39–​41; as nested 39; New Normal 192–​194; as normal 43; opposite but mutually defining forces 34–​36; opposition, embracing 187, 189; organizing 39; overview 6–​7; performing 38, 57–​63; persistence 37–​38; positive, representing as 44–​45; power, recurring paradox of 174, 174–​175, 179–​180; power relations 15–​16; pragmatic 85–​86, 88; precautions when handling 43–​45; proximity, recurring paradox of 174, 175, 180–​183; reality as paradox 5; recipe, representing as 45; recurring paradoxes, reasons for 171–​177; reflection, promoting time for 187, 188, 188; relational-​paradoxical process, leadership as 3; risk and xi; solution, assumption of as problem 187, 190; strange, representing as 44; synthesizing multi-​perspectival mindset 187, 188–​189; types of 6–​7; women, paradoxical thinking and 36 Parasite (Bong Jon Ho) (movie) 110 Paroutis, S. 32 parrhesiastes 186 Pascale, R. 33 passion and perseverance 67–​68 paternity leave 71–​72 Penrose triangle illusion 2 Pentland, A.S. 130 performance in teams 114–​115 performing, paradoxes of: dyadic relationships, paradoxes of 90–​93;

Index  231

organizing paradox(es) 143–​150, 145, 146, 148; overview 6–​7; self-​leadership, paradoxes of 57–​63; team level paradoxes 114–​118, 118; as type of paradox 38 perpetual vase 10 perseverance and passion 67–​68 persons defined xiii Peter Principle 174, 177–​178 Peters, T.J. 16–​18 Petridis, A. 110 Petriglieri, G. xi, 1, 23, 101 Pfeffer, J. 14, 19, 23, 36, 73–​75, 91, 169, 184 Phillips, K. 121 Phillips, N. 152 Pinker, D. 27 planning and improvising 144–​146, 145, 146 Ployhart, R.E. 18 pluralistic, leadership as 30–​33 plurality defined xiii Polanco, J. A. de 181 Polaris 128–​129 political polarization 38–​39, 194 Pollack, K.M. 20–​21 Poole, M.S. 137 populism 194 porosity of the team 120–​121 power: authority and 22; communications and 30–​31; diffuse 30–​31; one’s self, being 48–​49; paradox of 96–​98; paradox to power relations 15–​16; power-​over 15–​16; power-​to 15–​18; recurring paradox of 174, 174–​175, 179–​180 pragmatic paradoxes 85–​86, 88 premortems 124 priorities, defining 71–​72 process, leadership as 7, 23–​30 project leadership 70–​71 proximate goals 58 proximity and distance 122–​123; recurring paradox of 174, 175, 180–​183 psychological safety 119–​120, 121 Putnam, L. 35 Quattrone, P. 181 Quinn, R.E. 17, 137–​138 Rackin, D. 40 Raisch, S. 192 rationality versus intuition 61–​63 Ready, D.A. 161 reality as paradox 5 reciprocity 102, 174

recurring paradoxes: authenticity, paradox of 175–​177, 183–​186; confidence and caution, synthesizing 187, 187–​188; context, deep engagement with 187, 188; criticism, embracing 187, 190–​191, 191; curiosity about contradiction 186, 187; disruption of the status quo 187, 191–​192; excellence, paradox of 174, 174, 177–​179; goodness, interrogating the meaning of 187, 189–​190; humility and hubris 179–​180; improvisation, using experience to support 187, 189; integration and differentiation 183–​186; jestership, cultivation of 190–​191; management of 186–​192, 187, 188, 191; opposition, embracing 187, 189; power, paradox of 174, 174–​175, 179–​180; proximity, paradox of 174, 175, 180–​183; reasons for 171–​177, 174; reflection, promoting time for 187, 188, 188; solution, assumption of as problem 187, 190; stages of managerial career and 177; synthesizing multi-​perspectival mindset 187, 188–​189 red teams 124 reflection, promoting time for 187, 188, 188 reflexivity 78–​79 reformist boundary work 142 Rego, A. 177 Reid, E.M. 182 relational process, leadership as 15, 23–​27, 28 resoluteness 64 respect: mutual 102; owed and earned 84–​85 reverse coaching 95–​96 Rhodes, C. 26 rivalry as trade-​off 74 Robson, B. 93–​94, 94 Rogers, K. 84 romanticized leaders 23 Roosevelt, F.D. 169–​170 Rosado, Paulo 178 Rosen, B. 132–​133 rules: enabling and coercive 154–​155; formal/​informal 157–​158; freedom within a framework 158–​159 Sadun, R. xi Schoemaker, P.J. 153 self-​contradictions 49–​50 self-​goals 58–​59

232 Index

self-​leadership, paradoxes of: authenticity 51–​52; belonging paradoxes 68–​70; challenges confronting leaders 47–​48; chameleonic leadership 54–​55; creation of paradoxes 49–​50; defining priorities 71–​72; diverging expectations 47; grit 67–​68; humility 63–​67; independence versus interdependence 59–​61; intuition versus rationality 61–​63; Janus-​like leadership 52–​54, 53; leading oneself as paradoxical 56–​57; learning paradoxes 63–​68, 64, 66; level 5; leadership 55–​56; listening and talking 69–​70; management of 72–​77; mindsets 79; motives, clarity over 51; narcissism 64, 64–​65; natural propensities 77–​79; one’s self, being 48–​49; organizing paradoxes 70–​72; overview 6, 57; performing, paradoxes of 57, 57–​63; personalization of leadership 51–​52; project leadership 70–​71; reflexivity 78–​79; self-​awareness, lack of 78; self-​goals 58–​59; similarity and difference 68–​69; strengths, development of 77; tight-​loose tension 69; trade-​offs 73; weakness as strength 72–​73; work in progress, view of self as 78, 171 sexual harassment 96–​98 Silva, T. 117, 125 similarity and difference 68–​69 Simpson, A.V. 85 situational leadership model 54–​55 situation focused leadership 21 Sivan, E.W.Z. 184 Smith, K. 110, 111 Smith, W.K. 33, 38, 44, 172 Snow, S. 167 social competence 92 Solinger, O.N. 18, 69, 142 Solomon, R.C. 106 solutions: assumption of as problems 187, 190; becoming problems 160–​161 Southwest Airlines 139 Spillane, R. 22 Spisak, B.R. 7, 20, 130 Spoelstra, S. 168–​169 star performers 91–​92, 111–​113 Stewart, G.L. 60 Strasburg, J. 104 strengths, development of 77 strong process views of organizations 29 stupidity 167, 179 styles of leadership, learning 70–​71 sublime bodies 169

supporting actors 163–​164 surprise 8 Sutton, R. 82 symbolic effects of leaders 169 synthesizing multi-​perspectival mindset 187, 188–​189 Sytech, M. 88 talking and listening 69–​70 team level paradoxes: accountability 120, 121; advantages as disadvantages 109–​110; autism-​friendly workplaces 116; belonging paradoxes 122–​126; cognitive diversity 120–​121; cohesiveness 115–​116; consensus and dissent 123–​124; definition of team 108; dissenters 131–​132; exposure to different logics 122; faultlines in teams 126–​127; goals, team versus individual 116–​118; groupthink 115, 118–​119, 121, 131–​132; hedgehog effect 122–​123; identity, team 130; learning paradoxes 118–​122, 121; less hierarchical organizations 127–​129; management of 131–​133; opening up teams 121; organizational paradoxes 109; organizing paradox(es) 126–​131; overview 6; performance 114–​115; performing, paradoxes of 114–​118, 118; porosity of the team 120–​121; proximity and distance 122–​123; psychological safety 119–​120, 121; reasons for paradoxes 110–​114; similarities and differences in teams 108–​109; star members, problems due to 111–​113; teaming rather than teams 133; team spirit 117;Vegas rule for teams 130–​131; virtual teams 132–​133; winning and losing 124–​126; X-​teams 129–​130 technologies, new 192 Teles, N. 181 temporal process, leadership as 28–​30 ten Bos, R. 167, 168–​169, 179 tension(s): capacity to articulate 22–​23; defined xiii; different ways of handling 43; dyadic relationships, paradoxes of 85–​86; of organizational design 39; organizational renewal, tensions in 39; rules, use of to reduce tensions 87–​88; tight-​loose tension 69 tight-​loose tension 69 time: leadership and 28–​30; as trade-​off 74 Ton, Z. 139 tough love 92–​93 Toyota 138, 139

Index  233

trade-​offs: anticipation of 75; autonomy 74; defined xiii; rivalry and enmity 74; self-​ leadership, paradoxes of 73–​74; time 74; visibility 74 transparency in leadership 184 Trump, D. 82–​83, 183–​184, 185 Tsoukas, H. 27 Uchida, M. 56 ultimate goals 58 Ulysses and the sirens 147–​148, 148 universities, impact of Covid-​19 on 136 unlearning 150, 152–​154, 171–​174 Uribe, J. 88 US Navy Seals 140 Van de Ven, A. 137 Van Reenen, J. xi van Vugt, M. 20 Vegas rule for teams 130–​131 Verbeke, A. 38 virtual teams 132–​133 virtues, intellectual 166–​167 visibility 74 Von Bergen, J.M. 92 Voronov, M. 9

Waterman, R.H. 16–​18 Watzlawick, P. xi–​xii, 1, 23, 81, 83, 88, 106 Waytz, A. 99 weakness as strength 72–​73 weak process views of organizations 29 Weber, K. 9 Weber, M. 11, 186 Weick, K.E. 17, 29, 84, 120, 153, 171, 187 Welch, J. 78–​79, 124, 143–​144, 149 White, R.K. 53 Wilkinson, N. 113 Willink, T.D. 16 winning and losing 124–​126 wisdom 179 wise leadership 166–​171, 170 women: long work hours, expectation of 160–​161; paradoxical thinking and 36; sexual harassment of 96–​98 wonderland, organizations as 40–​41, 41 work in progress, view of self as 78, 171 X-​teams 129–​130 Zeitoun, H. 21 Žižek, S. 168 Zuckerberg, M. 32 Zupan, M. 75–​77