Paradoxical leadership as sensegiving: stimulating change-readiness and change-oriented performance

Abstract

Purpose

Paradoxical leadership (PL) is an emerging perspective to understand how leaders help followers deal with paradoxical demands. Recently, the positive relationship between PL and follower performance was established. This paper builds on and extends this research by interpreting PL as sensegiving and developing theory about mediation in the relationship between PL and adaptive and proactive performance.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper develops a new measure for PL as sensegiving and provides a test of the mediation model with data from two different sources and two measurement times in a German company.

Findings

Multilevel mediation analysis (N = 154) supports the mediation model.

Originality/value

The paper presents sensegiving about paradox as a core element of PL, which informs the choice of change-readiness as mediator. This study also develops and validates a scale to measure PL in future research.

Citation

Sparr, J.L., van Knippenberg, D. and Kearney, E. (2022), "Paradoxical leadership as sensegiving: stimulating change-readiness and change-oriented performance", Leadership & Organization Development Journal, Vol. 43 No. 2, pp. 225-237. https://doi.org/10.1108/LODJ-04-2021-0161