ArticlePDF Available

A Leadership Development Kōan: Vulnerability as Change Capacity

Authors:

Abstract

How are organizations embracing the emotional complexity of the emerging organizational landscape? More specifically, how do leaders develop the capacity necessary to infuse the organization's emotional circuitry with renewed energy at a time of transformation? In this essay, I posit that vulnerability can be the threshold for change capacity in institutional work, fortifying leaders' developmental trajectories and transforming organizing and organizations. While paradoxical, the regenerative nature of vulnerability yields change capacity requisite of navigating the emotional complexity leaders encounter on their developmental journeys.
A Leadership Development
Ko
̄an: Vulnerability as
Change Capacity
Ekaterina Elgayeva
1
Abstract
How are organizations embracing the emotional complexity of the emerging organi-
zational landscape? More specically, how do leaders develop the capacity necessary
to infuse the organizations emotional circuitry with renewed energy at a time of
transformation? In this essay, I posit that vulnerability can be the threshold for change
capacity in institutional work, fortifying leadersdevelopmental trajectories and trans-
forming organizing and organizations. While paradoxical, the regenerative nature of
vulnerability yields change capacity requisite of navigating the emotional complexity
leaders encounter on their developmental journeys.
Keywords
leadership, social exchanges, emotions, sensemaking/sensegiving, change management,
knowledge management, social networks, network analysis, qualitative research,
management education
Meeting the Paradoxical Moment
Transformation through regeneration is a foundational facet of navigating organiza-
tional crises. And yet transformation itself is paradoxical, with pervasive tensions tex-
turing the scope of regenerative aims (Cameron, 2008; Hahn & Knight, 2021; Pradies
et al., 2021). Emotions accompanying the process of transformation are also paradox-
ical, lending tensions captured within whats been predominantly viewed as a bidirec-
tionalpositive and negativespectrum of valence (Rothman & Melwani, 2016). The
growing body of research on paradox theory has yet to fully examine how emotional
1
University of Minnesota Duluth, Duluth, Minnesota, US
Corresponding Author:
Ekaterina Elgayeva, Management Studies, University of Minnesota Duluth, 1318 Kirby Drive, Illinois, Duluth,
Minnesota, US.
Email: eelgayev@d.umn.edu
Essays and Dialogues
The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science
2021, Vol. 57(4) 484489
© The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/00218863211046271
journals.sagepub.com/home/jab
tensions unfold and how they can inform capacity development for crisis management
and remediation (Farny et al., 2019; Sharma et al., 2021).
Change, organizations, and emotions are all paradoxical in that they create tensions
of complementary nature (Smith & Besharov, 2019). As a substrate of emotional
expression and experience, vulnerability can reveal the multivalent dynamism of
how paradoxical tensions unfold. The uncertainties and complexities accompanying
individual and organizational transformation can rarely be captured bidirectionally
or unidimensionally. A multivalent developmental journey more closely resembles
the emotional complexity leaders engage with in their work. By embracing vulnerabil-
ity, leaders step into a dynamic range of conicting complementarities quantifying and
qualifying the tensions that vulnerability offers.
On Vulnerability
The construct of vulnerability, dened as the capability of being physically or emo-
tionally wounded,can be traced to 1616 (Merriam-Webster, 2021). Etymologically
stemming from vulnusor woundin Latinvulnerability conveys an undesirable
human condition associated with defenselessness,”“criticism,and failure
(Merriam-Webster, 2021). Normalized as such, vulnerability is largely construed as
something to be actively repressed and avoided (Ashforth et al., 2014; Corlett et al.,
2021). Research on heroicleadership, identity and learning, crisis mediation, and
organizational change corroborates this socially and culturally ingrained predisposition
(Collinson, 2014; Corlett et al., 2019; Raelin, 2016). Interdisciplinarily, philosopher
Judith Butler explores the ingrained understanding of vulnerability as something to
be repressed and avoided through a crisis mediation lens. And yet in her theorizing,
Butler (2004) aptly observes that recognition wields the power to reconstitute vulner-
ability(p. 43, emphasis added). Reconstitution can take shape via a reframing that
normalizes vulnerability as an innate part of the human experiencean a priori con-
dition of being and becoming (Butler, 2004). Such a reframing sits at the precipice of
individual and collective development and transformation.
Adopting this reframed conceptualization, I contend that vulnerability is a genera-
tive substrate that infuses leadersemotional circuitry with multivalent emotional
expression and experience. Circuits of emotionality envelop intersubjective and inter-
dependent interactions, processes, and structures. As such, these circuits are continu-
ously fortied with capacity for change that can be enacted by organizational actors.
Vulnerability is uncertain (Corlett et al., 2021) and yet that uncertainty is generative
in the sense that it unveils the pathways to developmental potential via multivalent
complementarities (Hahn & Knight, 2021; Smith & Besharov, 2019).
Multivalence and Emotional Granularity
Vulnerability remediationvia repression and avoidance of negative affect feeds into
tenets of positive organizational scholarship (POS), which advances the impact of pos-
itive affect on well-being, resilience, and developmental potential (Stephens et al., 2013;
Elgayeva 485
Waters et al., in press). To explicate emotional granularitythe capacity to describe
emotional states with precision and specicity,emphasis is placed on positive emo-
tional granularity(Tugade et al., 2004, p. 1162). Drawing on POS scholarship, positive
organizational change research leans into the eudaemonicand heliotropicfrom a
stance of collective strength and capability-building(Cameron & McNaughtan,
2014,p.449,457).
The siren song of POS lures many. After all, well-being, resilience, and develop-
mental potentialunlike vulnerabilityare all highly desirable states. Yet how is a
duality of extremes intended to quantify and qualify the relative complexity of institu-
tional work? When captured via focal emphasis on extremes within a bidirectional
spectrum, emotional complexity appears to bewellnot exactly complex
(Stephens et al., 2013). While the domain of POS is beginning to raise the value of
engaging the full rangeof emotional expression and experience, empirical emphasis
on bidirectional valence maintains a stronghold (Waters et al., in press).
This emphasis has recently been contested via research on ambivalent emotions
(Ashforth et al., 2014; Rothman & Melwani, 2017) and relationships at individual
and interpersonal levels of analysis (Methot et al., 2017). Ambivalence advances the
bothandparadigm (Ashforth et al., 2014; Rothman et al., 2017) that is also consis-
tent with research on paradox theory (Pradies et al., 2021). While this increasingly rel-
evant body of research examines agentic enactment of the dynamic range of emotional
expression and experience (Rothman et al., 2017), it tends to view vulnerability periph-
erally, if at all. And when vulnerability is integrated into this context, it is yet again
aligned with unidimensional constructs within the bidirectional spectrum of valence
—“joy and sorrow,”“congratulation and condolence,for example (Creed et al., in
press, p. 10). And so in both, POS and ambivalence research streams, vulnerability
is peculiarly absent from theoretical and empirical discourses framing emotional
complexity.
Adopting a quantum physics theoretical frame, a recent contribution to paradox
theory explicates the sources of entanglement and the specic sociomaterial context
that together coconstitute the probabilities of different sets of interwoven paradoxes
being enacted(Hahn & Knight, 2021, p. 380). This level of granularity to examine
emotional complexity is foundational to a broadened understanding of how the multi-
valent complementarities vulnerability offers develop leaderschange capacity.
Forging meaning through emotive journeying in this process infuses individual and
collective emotional circuitry with renewed energy to manifest change. Normalizing
vulnerability as the threshold that allows the multivalent complexity to unfold and
getting granular with meaning and signicance of emotional expression and experience
are thus critical avenues for theoretical and empirical work for scholars across organi-
zational science domains.
A Developmental Ko
̄an
So how can the capacity to engage vulnerability in leadership development open up the
channels of affective transmissions supporting change and transformation?
486 The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 57(4)
Vulnerability underpins the dynamism of emotive journeying that can allow leaders to
clarify, contest, and decipher courses of action within a range of alternatives, thereby
enabling their developmental potential in context. As an extension of the quantum
approach to paradox theory, consider this analogy. Just as subatomic particles carry a
range of possible [physical] statesthat can be simultaneously enacted, so leadersas
humans made of fundamental particlesconcurrently encounter multivalenced comple-
mentarities within emotional states on the path to transformation (Hahn & Knight, 2021,
p. 369). Akin to subatomic particles constituting our being and becoming, vulnerability
innately, a prioriis a form of energy that envelops our emotional circuits.
As the substrate constituting emotional complexity vulnerability is paradoxical in
that it is positive, ambivalent, negative, and everything in-between. It carries subplots
of how both turmoil, indifference, anxiety, resignation, and melancholy, reliefalong-
side both inspiration, excitement, fear, joy, disdain, preoccupation, detachment and
disappointmentrecursively interact and counteract. Complexity in situ. And so the
both-and spectrum of emotional expression and experience is interleaved with that
which the positive or negative might not so readily explain.
Its time to get granular. Elevating paradoxical sublots by letting the emotional com-
plexity unfold in our theoretical and empirical pursuits can support practitioners
working with leaders on the front lines of crisis management and remediation. In insti-
tutional workand within leadership development and organizational change research
in particularthe developmental ko
̄an of vulnerability lends an opportunity to reveal
the transformative nature of the paradoxical interstice.
Declaration of Conicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no nancial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this
article.
ORCID iD
Ekaterina Elgayeva https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7658-0908
References
Ashforth, B., Rogers, K., Pratt, M., & Pradies, C. (2014). Ambivalence in organizations: A mul-
tilevel approach. Organization Science,25(5), 1453-1478. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.
2014.0909
Butler, J. (2004). Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence. Verso.
Cameron, K., & McNaughtan, J. (2014). Positive organizational change. The Journal of Applied
Behavioral Science,50(4), 445-462. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021886314549922
Cameron, K. S. (2008). Paradox in positive organizational change. The Journal of Applied
Behavioral Science,44(1), 7-24. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021886308314703
Elgayeva 487
Collinson, D. (2014). Dichotomies, dialectics and dilemmas: New directions for critical leader-
ship studies? Leadership,10(1), 36-55. https://doi.org/10.1177/1742715013510807
Corlett, S., Mavin, S., & Beech, N. (2019). Reconceptualising vulnerability and its value for
managerial identity and learning. Management Learning,50(5), 556-575. https://doi.org/
10.1177/1350507619865650
Corlett, S., Ruane, M., & Mavin, S. (2021). Learning (not) to be different: The value of vulner-
ability in trusted and safe identity work spaces. Management Learning 52(4), 424-441.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1350507621995816
Creed, D., Hudson, A., Okhuysen, G., & Smith-Crowe, K. (In press). A place in the world:
Vulnerability, wellbeing, and the ubiquitous evaluation that animates participation in insti-
tutional processes. Academy of Management Review. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2018.
0367
Farny, S., Kibler, E., & Down, S. (2019). Collective emotions in institutional creation work. The
Academy of Management Journal,62(3), 765-799. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2016.0711
Hahn, T., & Knight, E. (2021). The ontology of organizational paradox: A quantum approach.
The Academy of Management Review,46(2), 362-384. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2018.
0408
Merriam-Webster. (2021). Vulnerable. In Merriam-Webster.com dictionary. Retrieved August 4,
2021, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vulnerable
Methot, J. R., Melwani, S., & Rothman, N. B. (2017). The space between us: A social-functional
emotions view of ambivalent and indifferent workplace relationships. Journal of
Management,43(6), 1789-1819. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206316685853
Pradies, C., Tunarosa, A., Lewis, M. W., & Courtois, J. (2021). From vicious to virtuous paradox
dynamics: The social-symbolic work of supporting actors. Organization Studies,42(8),
1241-1263. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840620907200
Raelin, J. A. (2016). Imagine there are no leaders: Reframing leadership as collaborative agency.
Leadership,12(2), 131-158. https://doi.org/10.1177/1742715014558076
Rothman, N., & Melwani, S. (2017). Feeling mixed, ambivalent, and in ux: The social func-
tions of emotional complexity for leaders. Academy of Management Review,42(2),
259-282. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2014.0355
Rothman, N., Pratt, M., Rees, L., & Vogus, T. (2017). Understanding the dual nature of ambiv-
alence: Why and when ambivalence leads to good and bad outcomes. Academy of
Management Annals,11(1), 33-72. https://doi.org/10.5465/annals.2014.0066
Sharma, G., Bartunek, J., Buzzanell, P. M., Carmine, S., Endres, C., Etter, M., Fairhurst, G.,
Hahn, T., Lê, P., Li, X., Pamphile, V., Pradies, C., Putnam, L. L., Rocheville, K.,
Schad, J., Sheep, M., & Keller, J.. (2021). A paradox approach to societal tensions
during the pandemic crisis. Journal of Management Inquiry,30(2), 121-137. https://doi.
org/10.1177/1056492620986604
Smith, W. K., & Besharov, M. L. (2019). Bowing before dual gods: How structured exibility
sustains organizational hybridity. Administrative Science Quarterly,64(1), 1-44. https://doi.
org/10.1177/0001839217750826
Stephens, J. P., Heaphy, E. D., Carmeli, A., Spreitzer, G. M., & Dutton, J. E. (2013).
Relationship quality and virtuousness: Emotional carrying capacity as a source of individual
and team resilience. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science,49(1), 13-41. https://doi.
org/10.1177/0021886312471193
Tugade, M. M., Fredrickson, B. L., & Barrett, L. F. (2004). Psychological resilience and
positive emotional granularity: Examining the benets of positive emotions on coping
488 The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 57(4)
and health. Journal of Personality,72(6), 1161-1190. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6494.
2004.00294.x
Waters, L., Algoe, S., Dutton, J., Emmons, R., Fredrickson, B., Heaphy, E., Moskowitz, J., Neff, K.,
Niemiec, R., Pury, C., & Steger, M. (In press). Positive psychology in a pandemic: Buffering,
bolstering, and building mental health. The Journal of Positive Psychology. https://doi.org/10.
1080/17439760.2021.1871945
Elgayeva 489
... However, due to information asymmetry, external stakeholders find it challenging to quickly assess the quality of green innovation within a short period, leading them to rely on observable indicators (such as the number of patents) to determine their investment level in the enterprise [69]. Consequently, improving green innovation quality not only fails to help private enterprises obtain excess returns from external stakeholders but also increases research and development costs [48,71], contradicting the profit-driven motivation of private enterprises. This results in opportunistic behavior during the green innovation process, where private enterprises engage in low-quality, high-quantity green innovation to extract more external resources. ...
Article
Full-text available
Green innovation is pivotal for global sustainability, with state-owned capital playing a significant role, especially in the Chinese corporate landscape. This study, spanning 2008 to 2020 and leveraging a comprehensive dataset of listed companies, explores the intricate relationship between state-owned capital and the quality of green innovation in Chinese private enterprises. Motivated by the imperative to address crucial issues in green innovation quality in China, this research utilizes empirical data to uncover the mechanisms through which state-owned capital fosters green innovation. The study reveals how state-owned capital optimizes internal governance structures and reinforces environmental consciousness within private firms. Findings underscore the crucial role of state-owned capital in enhancing the quality of green innovation in private enterprises, operating through two primary mechanisms. Firstly, state-owned capital cultivates a heightened inclination towards green innovation within these firms. Secondly, it facilitates the adoption of enhanced internal governance practices, catalyzing the development of high-quality green innovation projects. A battery of mechanism tests provides robust evidence that state-owned capital enhances environmental awareness, restrains self-serving behaviors among major shareholders, mitigates financing constraints, and amplifies the motivation and capability of private enterprises for green innovation. This multifaceted approach ultimately fosters high-quality green innovation within companies. The study reveals the subtle interplay between state capital and private sector green innovation, highlighting its relevance to policymaking and practical considerations. It provides valuable insights into the ongoing pursuit of sustainability and the integration of green practices into the corporate world.
Chapter
As the population of the United States workforce changes, both in generations and ethnicity, professionalism must evolve to become more accepting of cultures, abilities, and backgrounds. Professionalism has been a construct that has evolved since the times of colonialism, rooted in white supremacist behaviors and hierarchical structures that inherently go against the cultural being of people of color. Interwoven among the expectations of professionalism in the workplace are facets of polite behavior. Politeness is a tool that was created by the bourgeoisie and implemented through power structures within organizations and businesses. Throughout history, politeness has been used as a weapon against people of color, solidifying hierarchical expectations and erasing cultural and ethnic identities in the name of profit. This chapter reviews the history of polite professionalism, its inherent oppressive nature, and how one can use embodied authenticity to combat polite professionalism.
Article
Full-text available
This paper explores how senior executives learn (not) to be different in Action Learning Set spaces (ALSS) as part of a business school Executive Education programme. We take a relational social constructionist approach in an empirical study and analyse senior executives’ narratives. This illuminates how executives co-construct action learning set spaces of openness, honesty, confidentiality and challenge and engage in relational processes of learning, vulnerability and identity work. In doing so executives learn to be different in relation to dominant discourses and norms of what it means to be a leader or manager which is personified through claims of vulnerability in the education context. Executives make sense of and work through learning to be comfortable with being uncomfortable, practising learning over time in a ‘safe enough’ space. We offer insights into identity work spaces, as leaders reconceptualise vulnerability as positive and as strength and how claiming vulnerability can defuse the power of fear and negative connotations often associated with vulnerability. With agency, executives express feeling better equipped to decide how and when to be different (vulnerability) or not be different (invulnerability) in their organisations. Practically we extend consciousness to the value of vulnerability for leader and manager identity and learning.
Article
Full-text available
As the COVID-19 global health disaster continues to unfold across the world, calls have been made to address the associated mental illness public crisis. The current paper seeks to broaden these calls by considering the role that positive psychology factors can play in buffering against mental illness, bolstering mental health during COVID-19 and building positive processes and capacities that may help to strengthen future mental health. The paper explores evidence and applications from nine topics in positive psychology that support people through a pandemic: meaning, coping, self-compassion, courage, gratitude, character strengths, positive emotions, positive interpersonal processes and high-quality connections. In times of intense crisis, such as COVID-19, it is understandable that research is heavily directed towards addressing the ways in which people are wounded and weakened. However, this need not come at the expense of also investigating the ways in which people are sustained and strengthened.
Article
Full-text available
Dominant, masculinised constructions of managerial identities are associated with expectations of being in control and strong, and not with vulnerability. Managers may conceal vulnerability and protect themselves through defensive identity work, and such responses may close down learning opportunities. We reconceptualise vulnerability and recognise its value for managerial identity and learning by drawing upon Butler’s theory of vulnerability. Analysing interviews with middle and senior managers and presenting our own reflexive learning, we address a lack of empirical accounts of managerial vulnerability. We offer three processes of relational vulnerability: (1) recognising and claiming vulnerability, (2) developing social support to share vulnerability with trusted others, and (3) recognising alternative ways of conceptualising and responding to vulnerability. Rather than defensiveness in the face of vulnerability constructed as weakness, the value of vulnerability lies in its openness and its generative capacity for alternative ways of managerial being and learning.
Article
Full-text available
Research on organizational paradox has been burgeoning in recent decades. While consensus is growing on the definition of organizational paradox as persistent contradictions between interdependent elements, its ontology continues to be contested. The inherent and constitutive views of organizational paradox adopt competing ontological positions on organizational paradox as existing irrespective of, or only through, organizational members’ discursive construction. In this paper, we develop a novel ontological approach that conceptualizes paradox as both inherent and socially constructed, thereby highlighting the paradoxical nature of the ontology of paradox. For developing our approach, we mobilize the ontological underpinnings of quantum mechanics and re-conceptualize the ontology of paradox with regard to its latency, salience, and persistence. As per our quantum approach, paradox is co-constituted by latency—the inherent but indeterminate potential of paradox; salience—the concrete enactment of paradox in a socio-material context; and persistence—the repeated enactment of paradox in similar socio-material contexts. Thereby, we explain how inherent material factors and socially constructed meaning co-constitute paradox. Our quantum approach to the ontology of paradox transcends the standoff between the inherent and constitutive views and provides a theoretical account for the dual nature of paradox as being both inherent and socially constructed.
Article
The dynamics of paradox can be vicious and virtuous. Facing competing yet interrelated demands, organizational actors may find themselves paralyzed by tensions, embroiled in a vicious cycle, or energized by and thriving amid the friction in a virtuous cycle. While studies offer insights into each type, little is known about how actors move from one to the other. Through an action research study at a multinational company, we investigate shifting paradox dynamics. Our model depicts how organizational actors transition from vicious to virtuous cycle, moving through a cycle break and a cycle reversal. Our collaborative methodology sheds light on how supporting actors can shape the social and symbolic dimensions influencing focal actors’ capacity to shift their patterned responses to paradoxical tensions. Supporting actors, positioned as insiders to the organization but outsiders to the paradox, enable this shift by breaking dysfunctional dynamics, facilitating new responses, and embedding virtuous dynamics in the organization.
Article
In this paper, we explain how and why collective emotions enable institutional creation work. Based on an ethnography in Limonade, a Haitian community affected by the 2010 earthquake, we identify social practices that elicit collective emotions through the creation of new institutions across the three disaster recovery phases. Our study’s key insight is that new institutions converge collective emotions such that they in turn justify ongoing, as well as motivate engagement in new, institutional creation work practices. Theorizing from our findings, we develop a generative model that describes the justifying and motivating function of collective emotions in the establishment of embedded institutions. In conclusion, our paper advances theory on collective emotions in institutional work and generates implications for post-disaster management practice.
Article
Organizations increasingly grapple with hybridity—the combination of identities, forms, logics, or other core elements that would conventionally not go together. Drawing on in-depth longitudinal data from the first ten years of a successful social enterprise—Digital Divide Data, founded in Cambodia—we induce an empirically grounded model of sustaining hybridity over time through structured flexibility: the interaction of stable organizational features and adaptive enactment processes. We identify two stable features—paradoxical frames, involving leaders’ cognitive understandings of the two sides of a hybrid as both contradictory and interdependent, and guardrails, consisting of formal structures, leadership expertise, and stakeholder relationships associated with each side—that together facilitate ongoing adaptation in the meanings and practices of dual elements, sustaining both elements over time. Our structured flexibility model reorients research away from focusing on either stable or adaptive approaches to sustaining hybridity toward understanding their interaction, with implications for scholarship on hybridity, duality, and adaptation more broadly.