Leadership Research Summary:
• This empirical study investigates cognitive shifts in both leader and follower teams when developing consensus or agreement in how to resolve a slowly emerging organizational crisis over time. The cognitive maps of leaders and followers are analyzed in team settings to explain where consensus is formed.
• The findings indicate that consensus, or the agreement on the causal beliefs held to be critical to organizational adaptation and success, builds over time within both leader and follower teams.
• However, when comparing the development of consensus longitudinally, the findings confirm that the mental models of leadership teams converge towards follower teams, and not the other way around, during the crisis.
• The study provides new insights into the importance of the causal beliefs of follower teams when developing a vision to coordinate action to resolve a crisis.
Leadership Research Implications and Findings:
• The study’s main findings demonstrate that leaders mental models, over the two phases of data collection, change and increase in similarity to those of followers at the onset of the crisis. Therefore, the findings support hypothesis 3b; that followers are the initial locus of consensus rather than leaders. It is significant to note that during slowly evolving cumulative organizational crises, shared mental models can emerge in follower teams before the leadership.
• The convergence in mental models is also reflected in the partial support for hypothesis 2; that higher cognitive shifts occurring in leaders during a crisis. Our key findings confirm, that during organizational crises, followers can play a central role in the process of forming consensus to resolve a crisis.
• In this current study, through analyzing the mental models of both leaders and followers in a naturalistic setting, researchers have been able to identify where consensus first forms during a crisis. The findings question whether a coherent prescriptive mental model was in place in the leadership teams of the organization shortly after the onset of the crisis (Combe & Carrington, 2015; Mumford et al., 2007).
• Developing a prescriptive mental model for the future would require leaders to have a substantial cognitive capacity to simplify events in such a way that a viable vision can be formulated (Partlow, Medeiros, & Mumford, 2015, p. 466). The study’s findings raise serious concerns that leaders are able to do this easily.However, the findings suggest that cumulative organizational crises can intensify a dynamic exchange between the mental models of leaders and followers.
• Here, followers may have just as much influence on leaders than leaders on followers. This concurs with prior research undertaken by Carsten et al. (2010) who also confirm that followers can be challenging and should not be viewed as just passive and obedient. Particularly as strategic planning can fail when those involved in implementation are excluded, participatory planning to include non-leaders becomes essential (Ketokivi & Castañer, 2004).
• Furthermore, a strategy is less likely to be sabotaged if disagreements are synthesized into a common vision (Olson, Parayitam, & Bao, 2007).Prior empirical research suggests that alternative job roles based around different task environments, shape mental models (Daniels et al., 1994; Hodgkinson & Johnson, 1994).
While we did not study antecedents to cognition, the findings point to a similar conclusion. Initially, it seems that the role or position of an individual within the organization did have some influence on their beliefs in how to respond to the crisis. Followers, in client facing roles emphasized operational issues, such as service quality, from the start of the crisis, while top managers focused on a variety of more strategic issues.
• Some of the potential reasons for study’s findings not supporting the expectation that consensus to resolve a crisis will first develop in leaders is predicated on the following:
o One main reason is based on the context of this current study, because the resolutions to resolve the crisis were more operational, rather than strategic, in nature. Redesigning the process for tendering for new contracts, to resolve the financial crisis brought about by the loss of major contracts, required coordinating data and analysis on previous performance in service delivery.
o This data already existed in the organization, but was not used in the tendering submissions previously. The more robust demonstration of successful service delivery in existing and past contracts, resulted in the award of several large new contracts, which resolved the financial crisis.
o The increased focus on service quality was required to meet client expectations, because the firm started to emphasize previous high levels of service delivery in the tendering process. As service delivery is largely the domain of followers it is perhaps not surprising that followers took the lead in thinking of this focus as a way forward.
o Another possible explanation for our findings is that followers are closer to key external actors, such as customers and suppliers (Ketokivi & Castañer, 2004, p. 341), and can articulate change from their perspective, first to each other, and then to leaders.
o In cumulative organizational crises, interaction with these external actors is likely to take up a major part of the followers’ time in their job roles, and be influential in their thinking about overcoming crises. After interacting with key external actors, followers may be more willing to criticize each other’s thinking than leaders, so that critical reflection and cross understandings could occur more in followers than leaders during cumulative organizational crises (Huber & Lewis, 2010).