Assessing flexible leadership as a mastery of opposites.

Abstract

Because flexible leadership is vital to organizational adaptability and performance, it is important to measure flexibility to identify leadership potential and to guide the development of managers. The most common method for measuring the flexibility of managers involves coworker ratings to survey items that ask about general tendencies for a manager to change behavior in response to changing situational conditions. Unfortunately, there are significant limitations to this approach. This article discusses an alternative method grounded in complexity theories of organizations and leader behavior. In this view, flexible leadership is conceptualized as the mastery of opposing but complementary behaviors in terms of how one leads as well as in terms of what organizational issues a leader focuses on. The mechanics of assessing this conception of flexible leadership are described in detail along with a demonstration of its ability to predict leadership effectiveness. Pros and cons associated with applying the mastery of opposites approach are discussed along with suggestions for how consultants and talent managers can use it.

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