Vicious or Virtuous: Exploring Whether Cognitive and Emotional Capabilities Predict a Manager’s Reaction to Organizational Paradox
Open AccessThis study explored the cognitive and emotional factors that contribute to how managers in high-hazard organizations respond to paradox. To achieve this, the study sought to test Smith and Lewis’s (2011) Proposition 2a: “Actors with cognitive and behavioral complexity and emotional equanimity are more likely to accept paradoxical tensions rather than respond defensively” (p. 392). Established measures of these psychological constructs were used to create a research design to assess the ability of cognitive complexity, emotional management, and their interaction to predict defensiveness to paradox.Targeting managers in high-hazard organizations—with the assumption that they would be likely to encounter organizational paradox and that their response to it would be consequential to health, safety, and environmental concerns—143 individuals were recruited and 40 complete data sets were obtained. Data analysis involved data visualization, correlation and regression analyses. No statistically significant result was detected due to lack of power in the sample size. However, scatterplot analysis suggested promising areas for future research, including the ability for emotional management to predict defensiveness to paradox and the strength of the interaction between cognitive complexity and emotional intelligence with respect to predicting defensiveness to paradox.
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