| dc.description.abstract | This dissertation explores how executives cognitively and emotionally relate to
competing demands. As organizational life becomes increasingly complex, leaders’ ability to
address organizational paradoxes may determine organizations’ short-term performance and
long-term prosperity. Through a phenomenological study of 10 top executives, the study
elicits two understudied precursors of paradoxical leadership—cognitive complexity and
emotional equanimity—and explores how these are related and how they influence
executives’ decision-making. The study further investigates the interrelation between the
executives’ paradox mindset (i.e., cognitive complexity and emotional equanimity) and the
management teams’ dynamics. The findings indicate that executives’ cognitive complexity
forms dynamic cognitive patterns of differentiating and integrating opposing mental frames.
Moreover, executives build emotional equanimity through personal values-based purposes
and continuous self-care. Recurrent emotional strain tied to leading in the face of competing
demands may indicate tolerance limits and serve to protect leaders with high cognitive
complexity from over-complication. Executives with medium to high levels of paradox
mindsets adopt distinct decision-making processes characterized by slow, circular, and
values-based decisions. Finally, the study of the management teams indicates that a higher
level of executive paradox mindset is connected to distributed authority, emergent processes,
and openness to challenging assumptions in the management team. The study impacted the
participants and the researcher through mutual sensemaking (a.k.a., double-hermeneutic
process), changing how we view the leadership of complexity.
Keywords: cognitive complexity, competing demands, decision processes, emotional
equanimity, organizational paradoxes, paradoxical leadership, and phenomenology. | en_US |
