Is Complexity Leadership Theory Complex Enough? A critical appraisal,some modifications and suggestions for further research

Explaining discontinuity and continuity in organizations

That said, organizations are complex but not chaotic. Certain norms of behaviour and rules endure as constraining and enabling influences on individual, group and organizational behaviour, to however limited an extent. As Tsoukas (1998, p. 292) expresses it, ‘unpredictability does not imply the absence of order… recurrence does not exclude novelty’. Consistent with this insight, complexity theorists have tended to describe complex organizations in terms of complex adaptive systems (Panzar, Hazy, McKelvey, & Schwandt, 2007) that are the product of interacting parts which produce higher levels of organization (Juarrero, 2011). Complexity resides in the interaction of the parts, however so defined. It is these interactions that require study, as well as the interactions within the parts concerned (e.g. within dyads, small groups and wider organizational systems).

For example, Kupers (2001, p. 16) proposes that complex adaptive systems can be thought of as ‘a system of semi-independent agents that interact more or less randomly to influence each other’s behaviour. The agents must realise when their interactions have left them better or worse off according to a fitness criterion.’ ¹ However, the notion of a ‘fitness criterion’ assumes that there is some objective measure whereby performance and outcomes can be judged. It also assumes that organizational actors will readily cohere around the criterion in question, since they share an overwhelming unitarist interest. Yet as Grint (2005) has compellingly argued, how actors define problems and the nature of the solutions that may be available is a differentiated process of social construction. If a problem can be defined in radically different ways then it is hard to see how a common ‘fitness’ criterion can be developed to assess solutions. There is simply too much uncertainty and complexity in our social world for this to invariably happen. In the rest of this paper, I argue essentially that complexity leadership theorists have neglected to fully apply the logic of these issues to the main subject of their inquiry – leadership.

Complexity leadership, or leaders managing complexity?

McKelvey (2010) offers a particularly striking example of this thinking, in an extended discussion of Jack Welch’s leadership style that purports to show CLT in action. McKelvey (2010, p. 9) argues that ‘Welch was effective because his approach was – albeit unknowingly and inadvertently – drawing strongly and consistently on basic findings from complexity science’. This is a bold claim. Complexity science is far from straightforward, but Welch is depicted as, in effect, an ‘unconscious’ complexity scientist, aware of its main tenets without being aware that he was aware of them. In the process, he is given the main credit for General Electric’s financial success during his tenure as CEO. McKelvey (2010, p. 5) therefore aims to ‘rebuild leadership theory from the ground up by studying what Welch actually did that produced some $480 billion in GE shareholder value’. Complexity science is conceived in terms of 12 ‘action disciplines’ that Welch employed to ‘enable and steer GE to produce incredible wealth’ (McKelvey, 2010, p. 4). In violation of complexity theory, there is a straightforward view here of temporality. Events proceed in a linear fashion, from the visions and actions of the leader to the outcomes on the ground.

Organizations and the leadership processes within them are ultimately seen as a more or less rational means of achieving shared goals that necessarily reflect some kind of unitarist interest: a straightforwardly functionalist perspective (Burrell & Morgan, 1979). Ontologically, the assumption is that ‘leadership is something with an independent existence out there in the world and is located in a web of causal relationships’ (Alvesson & Spicer, 2012, p. 371). Epistemologically, it also suggests that Welch’s leadership, and that of others, can be studied in a value-free way: there is nothing here to really criticize, no substantial moral or ethical dimensions to consider, and no alternative voices worthy of attention. Such an approach airbrushes all issues of confrontation, oppression and differentiated interests between actors into oblivion. It ignores what Mumby (2000, p. 71) calls the ‘politics of epistemology’: that is, ‘the values and interests that underlie knowledge claims’.

For example, Welch’s early moves at the helm of GE saw him fire 130,000 out of 400,000 people, an approach which earned him the title ‘Neutron Jack’. McKelvey seems aware that this might disrupt his highly positive narrative: it would be hard not to. Despite this, his 33-page article devotes only 2.5 sentences to the issue. These lamely conclude that: ‘Divesting 130,000 employees is not for the weak hearted’ (p. 29). ‘Divesting’ is a curiously mild word in this context. A consistently complex perspective would be more inclined to denaturalize Welch’s leadership and critically interrogate the overwhelming priority that he consistently placed on financial metrics. Alongside Welch’s rationale, it would also explore what those affected by ‘divestment’ thought, felt and did about it. McKelvey’s (2010) reticence on these issues is far from unique, which is why it matters. It is becoming increasingly common to find papers which claim to describe complexity leadership in similar functionalist terms, including within the public sector (e.g. Murphy, Rhoes, Meek, & Denyer, 2016) and in health care (e.g. Ford, 2009).

My point here is that despite the stress within CLT on the relational dynamics that produce leadership, theorists still frequently treat the goals and actions of senior leaders as an unproblematic given that, as in this instance, require little interrogation. They are simply there, as immutable and unchallengeable features of the social landscape. This is consistent with a functionalist emphasis on ‘providing explanations of the status quo, social order, consensus, social integration, solidarity, need satisfaction and actuality’ in an attempt to ‘provide essentially rational explanations of social affairs’ (Burrell & Morgan, 1979, p. 26). From this standpoint, the negative effects on other people of Welch’s radical programme of lay-offs, and their responses to this, are relatively unimportant. Leadership is thereby employed as a term to suggest an observable, discrete phenomenon bounded by causal relationships, temporality and organizational constraints. Moreover, the leader is depicted as an all-powerful actor who is primarily responsible, by dint of their own particular super-abilities, for organizational success, and has the legitimate authority to define the criteria whereby success is determined. On the other hand, an interpretivist paradigm puts more stress on how organizational phenomena are socially constructed through the unpredictable and often innovative interactions of myriad organizational actors (Burrell & Morgan, 1979).

There is, of course, debate to be had about how mutually exclusive functionalist, interpretivist and other paradigms actually are (see Corman & Poole, 2000; Deetz, 1996; Knudsen, 2003; Moldoveanu & Baum, 2002). Researchers often seek to move within and between paradigms as they encounter complex organizational realities. As Fairhurst (2000, p. 121) suggests, ‘the world of organizations is far too complex for any single theoretical approach to fully grasp’. In this paper, I don’t wish to disappear down the rabbit hole of the paradigm wars that have erupted within our field since at least the 1980s. While paradigms have different assumptions, their boundaries are frequently fuzzy (Shepherd & Suddaby, 2017). Gioia and Pitre (1990) therefore suggest that we think of such boundaries as ‘transition zones’ rather than as markers of absolutely differentiated categories. But this does not displace a recognition that, at a minimum, there are tensions between paradigms (however these are defined). ³ Even if we grant some common ground, it remains the case that knowledge claims are advanced within particular theoretical frameworks that are indeed sometimes incommensurable (Mumby, 2000). For example, the functionalist and positivist claims of transformational leadership theorists – a relatively unproblematic statement of leader agency and authority – are in my view incommensurate with those that arise from more critical, interpretivist and, yes, complexity perspectives. In the interests of epistemological clarity and transparency, these tensions need to be acknowledged when theorists attempt to develop insights drawing from more than one of them. CLT writers have generally flunked this challenge. As one instance, a key edited book on complexity leadership (Uhl-Bien & Marion, 2008) contains over 400 pages and fourteen chapters. None cite Burrell and Morgan’s seminal work on this issue, and the words ‘ontology’ and ‘epistemology’ do not appear anywhere in the text. The reluctance of CLT researchers to seriously engage with these issues hobbles their own project of theory building.

‘The times they are a changin’ – But are they?

A key justification for the suggestion that so much rests on the shoulders of leaders – more, perhaps, than ever before – is that the world is more complex and changing more rapidly than it was thirty, forty or fifty years ago. This urgency is taken to justify reliance on individual ‘super’-leaders who can navigate us safely through turbulent waters. CLT theorists have bought into this view. Uhl-Bien and Arena (2017, p. 10) write that:

In today’s environment, complexity is occurring on multiple levels and across many sectors and contexts… the underlying causes are greater interconnectivity and redistribution of power resulting from information flows that are allowing people to link up and drive change in unprecedented ways… Leaders… drive efficiency and results in the core business, while at the same time new competitors are emerging that threaten traditional core businesses.

There is little offered to substantiate this declaration of ‘unprecedented’ change other than assertion. But rhetoric, alas, is not evidence. The challenges society now faces may be different to those of the past. However, are they really more complex than those involved in emerging from the Great Depression in the 1930s, defeating fascism in a world war, rebuilding Europe after 1945, or coping with a world in which Communism held sway over the vast landmasses of Russia, China, Eastern Europe and elsewhere? I doubt it. It is the conceit of each new generation to imagine that the problems it faces are more challenging, more rapid and, yes, more complex than those that arose in earlier times (Hughes, 2014). Ansoff, widely regarded as the father of strategic planning, concluded (in 1965!) that the business environment was becoming increasingly ‘turbulent’, a change he dated from roughly 1950. Mintzberg’s (1994) seminal critique of strategic planning notes many similar assertions from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s to the effect that the current business environment was somehow more turbulent than what had preceded it. This notion also has an intrinsic appeal for management gurus, who thrive by offering to ease a panic about the present that they themselves have partially created. For example, Tom Peters (1994) argued that ‘crazy times call for crazy organizations’ and urged what he called a form of ‘perpetual revolution’. Spector (2014, p. 305) refers to this as the ‘presentism and tranquillity fallacy’: that is, ‘the tendency to find the current era to be exceptionally, even uniquely turbulent and past eras to seem calm in comparison’. Since the interconnected nature of the challenges that we all face are more evident to us than those that confronted our predecessors forty or fifty years ago it is natural to assume that they are more ‘complex’. The strength of this belief doesn’t make it true.

Other problems flow from this sense of novelty and urgency, commonplace in the emerging CLT literature (e.g. Schreiber & Carley, 2006). Arena and Uhl-Bien (2016, p. 23) write that ‘the central question addressed by CLT is: How, in the context of bureaucratic organizing structures, can organizational leaders enable emergence of the new solutions and innovations needed to survive and thrive in today’s complex world?’ Such notions as the view that shareholder value is the ultimate criteria of organizational success are here exempted from any suggestion of complexity. If the world really is now more volatile, unpredictable, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) ⁴ than any time in the past, perhaps there isn’t time to reflect on issues such as the core purposes pursued by business. Nor is there the need to study other periods of turbulence, and perhaps draw lessons from them.

Moreover, leadership remains ‘out there’, and acts on various bodies to produce observable, measurable effects in pursuit of straightforward goals that simply exist. But why do these goals exist, why do they have priority over others, who sets them and whose interests do they represent? In essence, we are presented with what claims to be a complexity theory of leadership that paradoxically sidesteps the processes that produce leadership, and focuses instead on how powerful leaders should attempt to exert influence on organizational systems. Social constructions (such as ‘new solutions’, ‘innovations’ and ‘thrive’) are presented in realist and functionalist terms as advancing truth claims about an unobjectionable objective reality. In adopting this approach, CLT has more in common with conventional leadership theories than may be immediately apparent. Leaders are expected to intervene in everything, everywhere, at all times, and display mastery of a growing list of competencies that would stretch the powers of any CEO super-hero. In contrast, I argue that:

Leadership as a process of complex becoming

Acknowledging this, I propose that leadership is a process that is itself an integral component of the complexity that constitutes organizational action. This view is consistent with wider process theorizing in organization studies (Tsoukas & Hatch, 2001). Process theories offer a dynamic view in which an organization is viewed as ‘an ungraspable flow marked by its ongoing novelty’ (Hussenot & Missonier 2016, p. 523). Van de Ven and Poole (2005, p. 1377) capture its essence as follows: ‘A fundamental issue that influences how we look at change is whether we view organizations as consisting of things or processes.’ It is a position that is naturally sympathetic to complexity thinking and the view of leadership expressed in this paper in particular.

Thus, conventionally, leadership is often viewed as a ‘thing’. There are material human entities that we call leaders, who then exercise influence on others. McKelvey’s (2010) discussion of Jack Welch, discussed above, is a prime example of a CLT scholar reproducing this standpoint. Uhl-Bien and Arena (2017, p. 18) also do so, when they discuss how leaders can exercise influence on others by employing ‘a unique set of skills’ while also showing ‘deep conviction and humility’. ⁵ The sense of urgency is palpable, built on the familiar view that our times are more turbulent than those in the past. In a later paper, these same authors cite the executive chairman of Cisco, John Chambers, to support their view that ‘one of the biggest challenges facing leaders today is the need to position and enable organizations for adaptability in the face of increasingly dynamic and demanding environments’ (Uhl-Bien & Arena, 2018, p. 1). Moreover, while acknowledging that ‘a key contribution of complexity to organizational science is the concept of emergence’ (p. 7) they seem to view leadership as a more or less independent agent whose own emergence requires little attention. Consistent with this, some scholars associated with CLT have continued to produce research papers that ignore the critical literature on transformational leadership and seek to identify ever more positive outcomes that purportedly flow from it (e.g. Osborn & Marion, 2009). All this manages to suggest that we depend for our survival on a few very special people who resemble super-heroes, but disregards how leaders themselves emerge and how followers influence them. CLT is evidently viewed by at least some scholars as quite compatible with heroic leadership images rather than incommensurate with it.

From a process perspective, however, organizations are constituted through the relationships between people. The question here is: through what relational processes do people assume leadership roles? By what means do followers also exercise an influence on leaders? ‘Great man’ theories notwithstanding, people are not born as leaders. Rather, they assume that designation through their attempts to claim a leadership role, and the extent to which that claim is granted, withheld or withdrawn by others following subsequent events (Spector, 2016). A process view recognizes that entities, attributes and events change in meaning over time (Van de Ven & Poole, 2005). It stresses the importance of the political, historical, economic and temporal contexts in which leadership processes take place. As Marx wrote in 1852:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

This suggests limits on the agency of actors, including leaders. Any analysis that remains on the level of how individuals seek to influence events and other people by dint of their own particular abilities or weaknesses is inherently limited. It represents a failure to consistently apply the notion of complexity to functions that have become overly naturalized in the minds of scholars.

I draw here on the work of Tsoukas (2017) who argues in favour of conjunctive rather than disjunctive theorizing in organization studies – that is, for theorizing that makes connections between diverse aspects of human experience rather than studying them in terms of their ‘separateness’. Disjunctive theorizing encourages model building that is, of necessity, a simplistic rendition of reality, while conjunctive theorizing is more likely to probe interconnectedness, contradiction and interaction. The difference, Tsoukas suggests, is between viewing organizations as ‘trivial machines’ – that is, as ‘systems whose outputs and inputs are connected with a predetermined rule’ (p. 139) – and ‘nontrivial machines’, in which predictability, causality and stimulus-response effects vary from context to context.

Complexity leadership theorists often depict leadership in disjunctive rather than conjunctive terms. Marion (2012) offers a good example of this, when discussing the role of complexity leadership in facilitating creativity. The conjunctive nature of the social world in which leadership effects are exercised is recognized; that is, he acknowledges that ‘creativity… emerges from the interactions and conflicts of diverse people and ideas rather than from the mind of any given individual (p. 458). But this understanding seems to break down when leadership itself moves to the forefront of study:

Enabling leadership functions to foster conditions in which complex dynamics can emerge… Formal leaders… are particularly well-positioned for this role because of their access to resources and authority, although one cannot assume that all positional leaders are capable of performing the enabling function. (Marion, 2012, p. 468)

Leadership becomes ‘trivial’ rather than ‘nontrivial’ in that its existence is assumed to be more or less self-evident. Theorists suggest ways in which leaders can ‘enable’ these complex processes, rather than offer a theory that captures the complexity by which leadership itself emerges. Leadership devolves from suggestions of complexity to the projection of quasi-heroic images to which few transformational or authentic leadership scholars would object. I can, for example, imagine leaders cast in a transformational mode continuing to behave as they have always done, but persuading themselves (and some credulous researchers) that they are now performing an ‘enabling’ function and therefore ‘doing’ complexity leadership.

In downplaying these issues, I suggest that complexity leadership theorists are so immersed in mainstream leadership theory that they have been unable to fully escape its framing effects. Thus, in communication and process terms, researchers commit a twofold category mistake when they use ‘leader’ as a synonym for ‘leadership’ and when they describe complex systems but position leaders/leadership as independent agents standing apart from organizational complexity. Rather than leadership existing as a fully-fledged phenomenon, a process and complexity approach registers that the position of actors in organizations is a crucial part of unfolding complexity processes (Tsoukas & Hatch, 2001). We need to step back and see how leaders are themselves complexly constructed and deconstructed over time:

The pervasiveness of paradox and contradiction

Organizations and leadership are riven by paradoxes, contradictions, tension and differentiated interests between actors (Smith, Erez, Jarvenpa, Lewis, & Tracey, 2017). These are key elements that drive complexity, and can never be fully resolved. But, in contrast to such a view, Uhl-Bien et al. (2007) speak of ‘adaptive change’ as something produced

by the clash of existing but (seemingly) incompatible ideas, knowledge and technologies… A familiar form of this change occurs when two interdependent individuals who are debating conflicting perceptions of a given issue suddenly… generate a new understanding of that issue. (Uhl-Bien et al., 2007, p. 307)

While asserting that complexity leadership ‘does not support an “every person on the same page” assumption, preferring instead a heterogeneous environment in which there are healthy debates over ideas’ (Uhl Bien et al., 2007, p. 298), the preponderant assumption is that ‘healthy debate’ prepares the ground for ‘a new understanding’. While creative tension between actors and the contest for power and resources is acknowledged, we are still presented with a Habermassian view, in which ‘ideal speech acts’ enables the open ventilation of all opinions between actors in the course of which their ‘real’ common interests and therefore agreement comes to the fore (Fryer, 2011). Leaders sensitized to complexity in this way are purportedly able to re-energize ‘employees by valuing them as humans with freedoms, voice, equality and openness to participation’ (Morrison, 2011, p. 159). However, as critically oriented communication and leadership scholars have pointed out, communication generates dissensus as often (or more) than it generates consensus (Tourish, 2014). This draws upon what Kuhn (2012, p. 550) describes as a ‘logic of difference’ that sees disjuncture and dissonance as an ongoing feature of communication processes rather than an aberration that will be resolved through it.

From this perspective, organizations are complex, interacting processes dominated by paradox and contradiction (Cooren, 2015; Cooren & Fairhurst, 2008; Schoeneborn, 2011). Thus, a decision made in organizations ‘also communicates its own alternative. A decision cannot help but communicate its own critique (i.e. communicate that it could also have been made differently)’ (Knudsen, 2005, p. 110). Thus, if ‘to organise is always to reorganize’ (Latour, 2013, p. 42), it is also always to disorganize. The process of making and enabling or refusing entitative claims for leader roles in organizations likewise opens open multiple possible critiques and alternatives that are resistant to closure (Nicotera, 2013). A claim to leader agency affirms that other leader possibilities exist, while a given leadership style also affirms its opposite and a range of positions in between. Conflict, often irresolvable, is inherent to these processes.

This understanding is central to a deeper understanding of complexity leader dynamics. A processual communication theory of complexity is more inclined to see leadership as an inherently contested process whereby putative leaders are attempting to promote category convergence (shared meanings). But the dynamics of organizational life ensure that these efforts can only be partially successful at best, and that they often fail outright. There are always competing institutional logics from which actors can draw. The struggles around this process and that result from it constitute the essence of complex leadership dynamics. Additionally, to lead (particularly in the transformational manner advocated by many theorists) is to ensure that someone else does not. It is therefore inadequate to simply explore how leadership identities are constructed through the means whereby ‘claims and grants of leader and follower identities are endorsed with reciprocal grants and claims’ (DeRue & Ashford, 2010, p. 633). Rather, we need to explore more fully how the dis-recognition of leader and follower roles occurs. People also resist or reject the fostering of leader and follower identities. A dialectical process of conflict recognizes ‘the push-pulls between opposing forces that enact social reality’ (Putnam, 2013, p. 24), and acknowledges that such contestations are endemic to most people’s experiences of organizational life (Hargrave & Van de Ven, 2017; Putnam, 2015). Complexity leadership theories that minimize their presence are neglecting some of the most important dynamics that occur within organizations. Thus:

Within unitarist approaches, conflict appears as some kind of irrational aberration from a unitarist norm. ⁷ Leaders act to reduce it and produce consensus. However, within a consistently complex perspective, leadership cannot be viewed as the resolution of critique or its abolition, since critique is embedded in the act of decision. To decide means to choose and at least implicitly communicate to others that something else has not been decided. The quest for discursive closure is inherently self-defeating. The more closure is pursued, the more an implicit oppositional stance by some actors is likely to become explicit. Every organization has refuseniks. Sometimes they become a majority. Organizations are an ongoing series of continuous, interrelated communicative actions that are built around specific premises, commitments, decisions, expectations and processes for the further resolution of issues. This is an ongoing process rather than one with a defined endpoint. Thus, leaders’ roles are constituted and reconstituted by the demands of others as much as by the demands that the leader places on these same others, through championing visions, missions and strategies. Our awareness of these possibilities and the structural constraints within which they are realized is always mediated through communication (Fairclough, 2005).

Thus, the formal articulation of difference may sometimes be the product of misunderstanding, and may therefore be fixable through further interaction. Equally, articulating difference is as likely to reflect deeply entrenched and variegated interests on the part of the actors concerned, become endemic to their relationships, and generate ever greater complexity and discord as it develops. CLT needs to embrace a deeper process view of communication, in which communication is seen less in a traditional ‘transmission’ mode whereby powerful leaders manage meaning for others, and in which meaning is ceaselessly co-constructed, debated, iterated and ransacked by multiple competing interests among individuals and groups. Thus, and as summarized in Table 1, some conflict and dissent may be ephemeral and resolvable. But, at a deep structure level, conflict expresses variegated organizational interests. In such instances, further communication is likely to produce greater dissensus rather than consensus, and intensify the complexity endemic to leader–follower relations. Accordingly: