Building Sense out of Contextual Complexity: Functional Ambivalence and Leadership Processes

Abstract

There is growing consensus among leadership scholars that followers can play a significant role in influencing their leaders’ interpretative processes. Leadership theory, however, has yet to explain how and when leaders and followers collaboratively build sense of organizational complexity to make decisions. In this article, we introduce the construct of functional ambivalence – a deliberative cognitive process that converges limited cognitive resources while mitigating submission to automatic responses – to explicate how complex contexts can trigger a functional cognitive state. We then develop a taxonomy of leader and follower ambivalence to explain how leader and follower ambivalence can trigger distinct interpretative processes. Taken together, we build toward a theory of functional ambivalence at the dyadic level that explains how leader-follower sense- building can facilitate contextual interpretation, and thus ultimately, improve organizational functioning.