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What does complexity theory offer business

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Whilst there is strong support for leaders to demonstrate qualities such as honesty, values, integrity and resoluteness, there was extreme caution, even reluctance on how to handle the question of how visible leaders should be on these questions if they could impact their organization. If this means that a leader must mask much of self and play a 'role', then the leader is unable to be 'fully present, authentic and delivering fully to the whole for the best outcome to emerge'. The need to control the outcome is already communicated by the ‘role’ being played by the leader. How then should we answer the question…?

Is an authentic leader someone who effectively leads the company they run, or does the 21st Century demand they also take an active role in leading community debates on a variety of issues? (Fox 2003a)

Person as puppet.jpgIn an organizational context, it can be argued there is considerable pressure on people to play a role and deny self – even if only by choosing not to comment on an issue or reveal an important and powerful aspect of oneself in the interests of the "organization", stakeholders or preservation of the present equilibrium. (status quo). Its most tragic manifestation is in the concept of "splitting". (Krantz and Gilmore 1990b).

That is:
  • Separating self from role and playing the ‘role’ of leader in which aspects of the self are significantly denied. John MacFarlane of Westpac may be an example of one amongst many, determined to resist this pressure and maintaining his connection with music [playing in a rock band] and through it, making himself vulnerable and at the same time, real, authentic.
  • Separating leadership from management so that leaders are left free to articulate a great vision and ideal, without the encumbrance of having to wrestle with the operational complexities and casualties of achieving that vision.
For example, setting the vision of becoming the lowest cost global producer without participating in the consequences of engaging in child labour. Or for example, determined to leverage the tools of modern technology to become the most productive and responsive of organizations, without participating in the implications of employees working longer and longer hours to the detriment of self and family as they embrace the vision – an issue topical in our national media right now. That is…

.. the essential link between new or visionary ideas and the organizational apparatus required to realize them is broken...the driving motivation for unconscious adoption of these neutralizing social defences is to avoid the doubts, uncertainties, and disturbing anxieties which are stimulated in the course of confronting the adaptive requirements of the emergent organizational environments

(Krantz and Gilmore 1990a)
 

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