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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 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 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 what’s been predominantly viewed as a bidirec-
tional—positive and negative—spectrum 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) 484–489
© 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 conflicting complementarities quantifying and
qualifying the tensions that vulnerability offers.
On Vulnerability
The construct of vulnerability, defined as the capability of “being physically or emo-
tionally wounded,”can be traced to 1616 (Merriam-Webster, 2021). Etymologically
stemming from vulnus—or ‘wound’in Latin—vulnerability 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 ‘heroic’leadership, 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 experience—an 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 leaders’emotional 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 fortified 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 ‘remediation’via 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 granularity—the capacity to describe
emotional states with “precision and specificity,”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 “eudaemonic”and “heliotropic”from 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 potential—unlike vulnerability—are 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 be—well—not exactly complex
(Stephens et al., 2013). While the domain of POS is beginning to raise the value of
engaging the ‘full range’of 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
‘both—and’paradigm (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 specific 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 leaders’change 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 significance 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] states”that can be simultaneously enacted, so leaders—as
humans made of fundamental particles—concurrently 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 priori—is 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, relief—along-
side both inspiration, excitement, fear, joy, disdain, preoccupation, detachment and
disappointment—recursively 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.
It’s 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 work—and within leadership development and organizational change research
in particular—the developmental ko
̄an of vulnerability lends an opportunity to reveal
the transformative nature of the paradoxical interstice.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this
article.
ORCID iD
Ekaterina Elgayeva https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7658-0908
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