Paradoxical leadership behavior: How leaders contribute to organizational resilience

Abstract

Living and operating in a global world, the risk for a global economic crisis has never been greater. As the ongoing events in terms of the COVID-19 crisis show, organizations need to be highly resilient to survive in a crises-prone world. Acknowledging the central role of leaders during organizational crisis, we examine how leaders handle existence-threatening organizational crisis, and how this is affecting organizational resilience. As part of a larger research project on crisis management, we conducted 37 interviews with leaders operating in organizations that were faced with such a major crisis. By telling their own crisis story, our leaders were able to reconstruct their behaviors very precisely. Resulting from our inductive analysis approach, we found that our leaders’ behavior during these major crises was not straightforward but somehow paradox. In sum, we identified seven pairs of paradoxical leaders’ behaviors in all three phases of the organization’s resilience process (i.e., anticipation, coping, adaptation). Nonetheless and even while leaders also need to balance paradox demands before and after critical situations, this need was particularly relevant during crisis. By shedding light on how leaders handle major organizational crisis and how this behavior is affecting organizational resilience, we do not only provide important implications for future resilience research but also derive crucial practical implications for crisis management.