Paradoxical Leadership: A Literature Review and Prospects

Abstract

As contemporary organizations and their environments become increasingly complex, turbulent and uncertain, leaders will inevitably face more contradictory challenges and tensions. It becomes one of the key indicators of leadership effectiveness that how leaders integrate internal and external resources and manage contradictions and crises under complex and uncertain environments.Combining Chinese Yin-Yang philosophy with Western leadership theory, scholars put forward the concept of paradoxical leadership. Paradoxical leadership describes the new leader behaviors that are seemingly competing, yet interrelated, to meet competing workplace demands simultaneously and over time. Rather than being “either-or” contingency-based action, paradoxical leadership reflects a “both-and” strategy that behaviorally accepts and integrates contradictory demands based on Chinese traditional philosophy of Yin-Yang. Using the “both-and” strategy, paradoxical leadership highlights the opportunities for effectively managing competing demands by acceptance and integration of contradictions, which has become one of the hot topics in leadership research.The existing literature has made some progress, but there are few systematic review studies. The present paper systematically reviews previous studies on paradoxical leadership. Firstly, it introduces the concept origin, connotation and measurement of paradoxical leadership, and distinguishes paradoxical leadership from contingent leadership and ambidextrous leadership. Secondly, it systematically analyzes and summarizes the antecedents, outcome variables and influence mechanisms of paradoxical leadership based on previous empirical studies, and then constructs an integrated analysis framework. Thirdly, it points out the limitations of the existing research. We find that previous studies mostly focus on the effect of paradoxical leadership in the Eastern context, and pay little attention to its antecedents and effect in the Western context, and there are also some inconsistent conclusions. Finally, based on the shortcomings of the existing research, this paper puts forward some future research directions, including concept and measurement improvement, developing and integrating other combinations of leadership aspects by paradox lens, exploring how paradoxical leadership forms from the perspectives of sense-making and social culture, extending paradoxical leadership research in the Western context and cross-cultural studies, and using multiple research design.The contributions of this paper are to clarify the latest progress of paradoxical leadership research, to provide the limitations of the existing research and possible future research directions, and to provide an important reference for promoting the research and practice of paradoxical leadership in the Eastern and Western contexts. The last but the most important is to make researchers and managers pay more attention to Chinese traditional philosophy thought in management research and practice.