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Unprecedented complexity is reshaping the financial services industry and presenting formidable challenges to financial services leaders and their organizations. “Sensemaking of Complexity: Leadership in Financial Services,” highlights seven leadership principles that could help leaders and their organizations respond effectively to the complexities inherent in financial services today.

After in‐depth secondary research on the topic of leadership and events in the financial services industry, the report offers a novel and holistic approach to managing complexity in today's marketplace.

Beyond the leadership principles, the research suggests that values, competencies and motivations – or “VCMs” – are like an organization's DNA, or the building blocks of organizational behavior, and therefore the basis for real improvement across an organization's many dimensions. VCMs play a critical role in the outcome of change initiatives and an organization's capacity to adapt, yet they are often overlooked in the leadership dialogue.

VCMs that are well aligned with the seven leadership principles can help empower the effective functioning of organizational levers – such as intelligence and risk management, corporate governance, business models, talent processes and organizational culture – and enhance an organization's ability to adapt to complexity, drive strategic agendas, and improve day‐to‐day operations.

Unprecedented interdependencies in the financial services industry may require a move away from the status quo of many leadership strategies, which tend to deal with complexity in a disjointed fashion. Instead, leaders may need to uncover and understand the interconnected root causes of complexity within their organizations and in the marketplace. We believe a focus on leadership principles and the right set of values, competencies, and motivations to support them can help leaders and their organizations systematically and holistically react to and manage their complicated competitive environments.

This chapter examines the complexity of global leaders themselves. As global leadership research has begun to move beyond a limiting overemphasis on skills and competencies, we merge one focus on the deep structure of leader cognition with a focus on cultural identity that has matured largely independently. In so doing, we seek to push the field toward answering the broader question of what makes a global leader sufficiently complex to handle the vast complexities of the role. We place the construct of self-concept complexity as central to the performance of global leaders in ways ranging from organizational performance to social and community responsibility. By advancing our understanding of the role of self-concept complexity in driving global leadership outcomes, this research seeks to spur further theoretical development and practical application toward a deeper comprehension of the complexity of truly global leaders.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between complexity leadership and contextual ambidexterity as well as the mediating effect of organisational innovation climate in this link. This study is an answer to a call on which leadership approach and mediating factors can meet today’s seemingly contradictory challenges of efficiently managing business demands, while simultaneously searching for new opportunities.

The researchers analysed 1,204 usable survey responses from employees of South African organisations. Analysis was in the form of structural equation modelling. Mediation analysis was carried out on estimates of the indirect effect.

Results show that complexity leadership was a strong predictor of innovation climate; in turn, innovation climate positively impacts exploratory innovation by 64 per cent; complexity leadership and innovation climate positively affect exploitation by 57 per cent. The innovation climate plays a total mediator role between complexity leadership and exploratory innovation and a partial effect on exploitation.

This study gives human resource management (HRM) insight into strategically directing leadership recruitment and development towards creating an organisational climate to enhance ambidexterity. HRM must conduct regular climate surveys to ascertain whether current leadership is creating an environment that enables exploratory and exploitative innovation.

The authors’ contribution includes a theoretical contribution to the emerging field of complexity leadership by offering conceptual as well as empirical evidence of its role in ambidexterity. This study extends previous research in highlighting organisational climate’s mediating role of being open to new ideas to enable exploratory innovation.

This paper aims to examine the factors of financial sustainability of project management when they face complexities using the complexity theory. This research argues that to manage project complexities, the employees’ performance readiness, situational leadership style and trust in leaders increase financial sustainability.

The study used a quantitative approach using a questionnaire survey with the Project Management Institute members in Indonesia. From the total population of 190 project managers, 91 questionnaires were valid and used for analysis. PLS-SEM is the statistical tool used to test the eight hypotheses formulated in this research. The survey was designed to analyze the factors influencing financial sustainability and how these variables are related to each other to overcome project complexity issues and deliver financial sustainability.

The research recommends that to overcome project complexities, the readiness of the employees to perform is important. These variables, which are supported by trust in the leader and situational leadership, have positively significant effects on financial sustainability. The findings strengthen the initial arguments of this research and confirm the existing studies.

This research, however, comes with several limitations. First, the situational leadership was chosen in this research because of the short project duration that requires the leader to be acting accordingly based on the employee’s abilities. The short project duration made it impossible for the leader to build any relationships with the team members. Therefore, this research might not be appropriate to explain the organizational long-term strategies. Thus, it is suggested that the future research should address this. Second, with the very limited studies regarding the performance readiness and maturity, where in this research are used interchangeably, there should be further research to explain both variables independently as it holds an important role in project management and to overcome project complexities. Hence, this research adds the various studies found on the project complexities and how performance readiness, trust in leaders and situational leadership interact to increase financial sustainability in projects.

This study contributes to the limited research on the financial sustainability of project management in developing countries. Moreover, the research on project complexities has not been related to financial sustainability and, therefore, promotes a high novelty. The findings of this study also provide substantial empirical evidence for future work in the project management area.

Current organizations face a complex competitive landscape driven by globalization and technology that puts them in the course of a new economic age. This complexity stresses learning and innovation as fundamental mechanisms for organizational survival. This paper aims to propose that how learning and innovation emerge and affect organizational performance can be better understood through the complexity leadership theory.

The authors review literature on complexity leadership theory, learning and innovation in complex bureaucratic environments and then present reflections regarding how learning and innovation can be achieved through the interaction of three complexity leadership functions: adaptive, administrative and enabling. This conceptual framework suggests that individuals are in constant interaction, exchange information, influence each other and collectively produce emergent properties that promote effective learning and innovation.

We propose that learning and innovation can be better achieved in organizations if the complexity leadership theory is applied as an alternative to centralized forms of influence and control.

This paper presents a reflection on the benefits of the complexity leadership theory as an alternative framework to understand organizational leadership. Furthermore, this paper proposes that the complexity leadership theory is more adequate to generate learning and innovation in complex, fast-changing work environments.

Major social changes, such as those induced by the COVID-19 pandemic, intensify the need for organisations in Africa to accelerate adaptation. Leadership plays an important role in their organisations’ adaptation. This study focuses on how leaders can build adaptive organisations through appropriate complexity leadership practices by establishing which of these most predict organisational adaptation. The study aims to contribute to dramatic social change (DSC) theory and to empirically confirm conceptual relationships between complexity leadership theory and perceptions of organisational adaptability (OA).

The convenience non-probability sample include 126 senior management respondents from 24 small and medium enterprises in Zimbabwe. The study focuses on these individual senior managers’ perceptions of their organisations’ adaptation, leadership practices and the social changes during COVID-19. The questionnaire used a five-point Likert scale, based on some items from existing scales on entrepreneurial, operational and enabling leadership of complexity leadership and items on OA and DSC. The study applied structural equation modelling using SmartPLS and SPSS software.

The study formulates recommendations for the boundary conditions under which each or a combination of the complexity leadership practices will bring about the appropriate level of adaptability. The enabling and entrepreneurial leadership practices required, include brokering, decentralisation and establishing multilevel collaboration.

The study contributes insight for leaders to differentiate between the levels of adaptation their organisations require at particular times in particular contexts. Different adaptations will require a different combination of complexity leadership practices. When the adaptation sought is internal, operational leadership is more appropriate, whereas if the motive is market adaptation, entrepreneurial leadership is more appropriate.

Mackenzie's LAMPE theory provides a new view of leadership that is multi-level, processual, and reflective of leadership as it actually occurs in practice. While we see this approach as representing a much needed frameshift for leadership research, we believe Mackenzie may be able to “break the frame” even farther by incorporating elements of complexity science into his thinking. We suggest how complexity science might help Mackenzie flesh out his ideas about distributed leadership, as well as consider leadership that is not only about alignment and control but also about enabling and releasing informal, interactive dynamics within the organization.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate a leadership crisis in Africa with the view to suggested new model that help overcome the leadership gap.

This paper adopt the complexity leadership approach to explicate the leadership crisis in Africa.

This paper suggested that the use of complexity leadership model of enabling leadership to better understand the complex leadership crisis.

The application of the leadership enables an appreciation of contemporary leadership realities.

This paper adopting complexity leadership is novel and helps to fill the gap in understanding of present leadership crisis.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of transformational leadership on employee’s innovative work behavior, and the mediating role of motivation to learn, and the moderating role of task complexity and innovation climate on the link between transformational leadership and innovative work behavior.

A questionnaire, designed as a self-reported survey, was distributed to full-time employees and their respective supervisors working in 35 firms (services and manufacturing sectors) in Pakistan. Data were collected from 338 employee–supervisor dyads. The hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling.

Results showed that transformational leadership had a positive impact on employees’ innovative work behavior and motivation to learn mediated transformational leadership–innovative work behavior link. The study further showed that task complexity and innovation climate moderated the relationship between transformational leadership and employees’ innovative work behavior.

Based on the premises of interactionist perspectives on individual innovation, this study integrated multi-level variables to investigate leaders’ influences on followers’ innovative work behavior. This study contributed to the existing literature by providing empirical evidence on influence of transformational leadership on employees’ innovative work behavior as well as the impact of both individual and organizational level variables.

The close connection among transformational leadership, motivation to learn and innovative work behavior suggests that transformational leadership traits among managers are important to enhance employees’ innovative work behavior. Organizations should pay attention to creating a climate that is supportive of innovation and encourage individuals to learn new knowledge and skills, and provide employees with opportunities to use their acquired knowledge and skills.

This paper contributed to leadership and innovation literatures and provided insights into how the practitioners could use an appropriate leadership style to enhance innovative work behavior among employees. The study adopted a distinct model comprising five variables to investigate innovative work behavior from a multi-level perspective, i.e., motivation to learn and innovative work behavior at the individual level, task complexity at the unit level and innovation climate and leadership at the organizational level. This integrated model of using predictors from multiple levels supported the theoretical assumptions that innovative work behavior resulted from the interaction of individual, group and organizational level factors.

Technological advances, globalization, network complexity, and social complexity complicate almost every aspect of our organizations and environments. Leadership educators are challenged with developing leaders who can sense environmental cues, adapt to rapidly changing contexts, and thrive in uncertainty while adhering to their values systems. In a complex leadership context, inadequate leader responses can result in devastating organizational impacts akin to the butterfly effect from chaos theory. This paper advances a simple model for leadership education based on a program we designed to develop leaders who understand the nature of complex systems, reliably use their ethical value systems, are emotionally intelligent and resilient, and can adapt to emergent situations.