Experimentation in the face of ambiguity: How mindful leaders develop emotional capabilities for change in teams

Abstract

SummaryStrategic change in organizations prompts pervasive ambiguity. As change initiatives cascade down the hierarchy, they can be met with habitual, inertial responses that ultimately generate negatively charged emotions—or they can prompt novel, experimental behaviors that forestall them. What remains unclear, however, is which factors drive teams, and the leaders that guide them, toward or away from this negative emotional reaction to change. In this study, we integrate social cognitive theory and research on mindfulness to unpack collective responses to change through a field study on 88 teams in a mortgage industry firm undergoing strategic change. We theorize that, when faced with ambiguous goals, team leaders low on mindful attention will lack the necessary cognitive capabilities to enact experimental behaviors—as they neither have clear external goals from senior managers nor internal dispositions to drive their attention into noticing novel information and eliciting unscripted experimental responses. In contrast, the experimental behaviors of team leaders who are high on mindful attention will not be affected by ambiguous goals—and the experimental behaviors of team leaders, in turn, will prompt greater experimental behaviors within their team, thereby lowering the team's negative emotional reaction to change. Finding support for these hypotheses, our study contributes to research on dynamic managerial capabilities, collective responses to organizational change, and mindfulness.