Paradoxes in Organizational Change: The Crucial Role of Leaders’ Sensegiving

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn organizational change, both leaders and followers experience paradoxical tensions, to which they often react defensively. Therefore, a paradoxical lens is valuable to understand individuals' change reactions. While there is a rich discussion in the literature about the importance of leaders’ sensemaking about and managing of paradoxes in organizational change, the follower perspective, and in particular the leaders’ influence on followers’ sensemaking about paradoxes have largely been neglected so far. To close this gap, a conceptual model is introduced that, based on uncertainty management theory, highlights the role of followers’ fairness evaluations with regard to paradoxical demands. Leaders’ sensegiving about paradoxes to followers, which is based on their own sensemaking processes and stimulates followers to engage in paradoxical sensemaking, is suggested as a crucial boundary condition for followers’ fairness evaluations and their subsequent reactions to paradoxical tensions. The model thus combines the paradox and sensemaking–sensegiving literatures with the fairness literature to understand followers’ reactions to paradoxical tensions in organizational change. In doing so, the model acknowledges the paradoxical nature of organizational change and offers a new and specific focus on how to influence individuals’ change reactions positively. Testable propositions suggest directions for future research.