Dialectical Leadership in a Contradictory World

Abstract

Prior research suggests that the organizational context is not only full of complication but also contradiction. How do effective executives address this issue? Some scholars maintain that both cognitive complexity and behavioral complexity are required to effectively cope with endless organizational paradox. However, few have directly addressed top managers' mental assumptions and cognitive strategies behind it. Since organizational paradox has become a common phenomenon nowadays, it is worth exploring at great depths. Given that contradiction has been extensively discussed in the circle of philosophy for thousands of years, we first reviewed the literature of philosophy. It was found that Greek Dialectic proposes a cognitive strategy to attain deep truths through contradiction while Hegelian Dialectic illustrates a worldview where any evolving entity tends to contain contradiction, thus causing the thesis-antithesis- synthesis evolution. Next, through a multiple-case, inductive study of three world-class leaders, we found that effective executives tend to see contradiction in various sorts of things, rather than obeying Aristotle's Law of Noncontradiction. Second, effective executives also tend to witness the thesis-antithesis-synthesis process proposed by Hegel. Third, effective executives are inclined to adopt Socratic Method, thus arriving at higher truths through contradiction. However, effective executives use formal logic too when it comes to their principles or beliefs, which suggests that effective executives perceive two sorts of contradiction in reality, i.e. impossible contradiction and necessary contradiction. Lastly, ineffective executives may tend to perceive impossible contradiction only in their worldviews, thus losing the integrative potential that moves contradiction into synthesis.