A Leadership Development Kōan: Vulnerability as Change Capacity

Meeting the Paradoxical Moment

Transformation through regeneration is a foundational facet of navigating organizational crises. And yet transformation itself is paradoxical, with pervasive tensions texturing the scope of regenerative aims (Cameron, 2008; Hahn & Knight, 2021; Pradies et al., 2021). Emotions accompanying the process of transformation are also paradoxical, lending tensions captured within what's been predominantly viewed as a bidirectional—positive and negative—spectrum of valence (Rothman & Melwani, 2016). The growing body of research on paradox theory has yet to fully examine how emotional tensions unfold and how they can inform capacity development for crisis management and remediation (Farny et al., 2019; Sharma et al., 2021).

Change, organizations, and emotions are all paradoxical in that they create tensions of complementary nature (Smith & Besharov, 2019). As a substrate of emotional expression and experience, vulnerability can reveal the multivalent dynamism of how paradoxical tensions unfold. The uncertainties and complexities accompanying individual and organizational transformation can rarely be captured bidirectionally or unidimensionally. A multivalent developmental journey more closely resembles the emotional complexity leaders engage with in their work. By embracing vulnerability, leaders step into a dynamic range of conflicting complementarities quantifying and qualifying the tensions that vulnerability offers.

On Vulnerability

The construct of vulnerability, defined as the capability of “being physically or emotionally wounded,” can be traced to 1616 (Merriam-Webster, 2021). Etymologically stemming from vulnus—or ‘wound’ in Latin—vulnerability conveys an undesirable human condition associated with “defenselessness,” “criticism,” and “failure” (Merriam-Webster, 2021). Normalized as such, vulnerability is largely construed as something to be actively repressed and avoided (Ashforth et al., 2014; Corlett et al., 2021). Research on ‘heroic’ leadership, identity and learning, crisis mediation, and organizational change corroborates this socially and culturally ingrained predisposition (Collinson, 2014; Corlett et al., 2019; Raelin, 2016). Interdisciplinarily, philosopher Judith Butler explores the ingrained understanding of vulnerability as something to be repressed and avoided through a crisis mediation lens. And yet in her theorizing, Butler (2004) aptly observes that “recognition wields the power to reconstitute vulnerability” (p. 43, emphasis added). Reconstitution can take shape via a reframing that normalizes vulnerability as an innate part of the human experience—an a priori condition of being and becoming (Butler, 2004). Such a reframing sits at the precipice of individual and collective development and transformation.

Adopting this reframed conceptualization, I contend that vulnerability is a generative substrate that infuses leaders’ emotional circuitry with multivalent emotional expression and experience. Circuits of emotionality envelop intersubjective and interdependent interactions, processes, and structures. As such, these circuits are continuously fortified with capacity for change that can be enacted by organizational actors. Vulnerability is uncertain (Corlett et al., 2021) and yet that uncertainty is generative in the sense that it unveils the pathways to developmental potential via multivalent complementarities (Hahn & Knight, 2021; Smith & Besharov, 2019).

Multivalence and Emotional Granularity

Vulnerability ‘remediation’ via repression and avoidance of negative affect feeds into tenets of positive organizational scholarship (POS), which advances the impact of positive affect on well-being, resilience, and developmental potential (Stephens et al., 2013; Waters et al., in press). To explicate emotional granularity—the capacity to describe emotional states with “precision and specificity,” emphasis is placed on “positive emotional granularity” (Tugade et al., 2004, p. 1162). Drawing on POS scholarship, positive organizational change research leans into the “eudaemonic” and “heliotropic” from a stance of “collective strength and capability-building” (Cameron & McNaughtan, 2014, p. 449, 457).

The siren song of POS lures many. After all, well-being, resilience, and developmental potential—unlike vulnerability—are all highly desirable states. Yet how is a duality of extremes intended to quantify and qualify the relative complexity of institutional work? When captured via focal emphasis on extremes within a bidirectional spectrum, emotional complexity appears to be—well—not exactly complex (Stephens et al., 2013). While the domain of POS is beginning to raise the value of engaging the ‘full range’ of emotional expression and experience, empirical emphasis on bidirectional valence maintains a stronghold (Waters et al., in press).

This emphasis has recently been contested via research on ambivalent emotions (Ashforth et al., 2014; Rothman & Melwani, 2017) and relationships at individual and interpersonal levels of analysis (Methot et al., 2017). Ambivalence advances the ‘both—and’ paradigm (Ashforth et al., 2014; Rothman et al., 2017) that is also consistent with research on paradox theory (Pradies et al., 2021). While this increasingly relevant body of research examines agentic enactment of the dynamic range of emotional expression and experience (Rothman et al., 2017), it tends to view vulnerability peripherally, if at all. And when vulnerability is integrated into this context, it is yet again aligned with unidimensional constructs within the bidirectional spectrum of valence—“joy and sorrow,” “congratulation and condolence,” for example (Creed et al., in press, p. 10). And so in both, POS and ambivalence research streams, vulnerability is peculiarly absent from theoretical and empirical discourses framing emotional complexity.

Adopting a quantum physics theoretical frame, a recent contribution to paradox theory explicates “the sources of entanglement and the specific sociomaterial context that together coconstitute the probabilities of different sets of interwoven paradoxes being enacted” (Hahn & Knight, 2021, p. 380). This level of granularity to examine emotional complexity is foundational to a broadened understanding of how the multivalent complementarities vulnerability offers develop leaders’ change capacity. Forging meaning through emotive journeying in this process infuses individual and collective emotional circuitry with renewed energy to manifest change. Normalizing vulnerability as the threshold that allows the multivalent complexity to unfold and getting granular with meaning and significance of emotional expression and experience are thus critical avenues for theoretical and empirical work for scholars across organizational science domains.

A Developmental Kōan

So how can the capacity to engage vulnerability in leadership development open up the channels of affective transmissions supporting change and transformation? Vulnerability underpins the dynamism of emotive journeying that can allow leaders to clarify, contest, and decipher courses of action within a range of alternatives, thereby enabling their developmental potential in context. As an extension of the quantum approach to paradox theory, consider this analogy. Just as subatomic particles “carry a range of possible [physical] states” that can be simultaneously enacted, so leaders—as humans made of fundamental particles—concurrently encounter multivalenced complementarities within emotional states on the path to transformation (Hahn & Knight, 2021, p. 369). Akin to subatomic particles constituting our being and becoming, vulnerability—innately, a priori—is a form of energy that envelops our emotional circuits.

As the substrate constituting emotional complexity vulnerability is paradoxical in that it is positive, ambivalent, negative, and everything in-between. It carries subplots of how both turmoil, indifference, anxiety, resignation, and melancholy, relief—alongside both inspiration, excitement, fear, joy, disdain, preoccupation, detachment and disappointment—recursively interact and counteract. Complexity in situ. And so the both-and spectrum of emotional expression and experience is interleaved with that which the positive or negative might not so readily explain.

It's time to get granular. Elevating paradoxical sublots by letting the emotional complexity unfold in our theoretical and empirical pursuits can support practitioners working with leaders on the front lines of crisis management and remediation. In institutional work—and within leadership development and organizational change research in particular—the developmental kōan of vulnerability lends an opportunity to reveal the transformative nature of the paradoxical interstice.