LDR 736 Week 2 Emerging Leadership Theories Example

Paradox, Adaptability and Three Waves of Theory: Emerging Leadership Ideas for a Shipyard Facing Electric Vessels

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University of Phoenix

LDR/736: Architecture of Leadership

Week 2 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

Bayou Coast Marine, its leaders and its projects are composites written for a model paper.

Week 1 traced how leadership theory moved from great men to traits and why Bayou Coast Marine's new general manager, Camille Arceneaux, need not imitate her charismatic predecessor. This week turns to newer theories and to a new challenge. The composite Houma, Louisiana, shipyard has won a contract to build two battery-electric ferries for a state department of transportation, worth about $48 million, with delivery in 30 months. The yard has never built an electric vessel. Electrical integration, battery safety and new regulatory standards will demand learning and experimentation. Meanwhile, the tugboat line, which produces most of the yard's profit, must continue delivering vessels on schedule with steel-hull methods refined over decades. Camille feels the pull between two kinds of leadership: tight control and efficiency for the tugs, openness and experimentation for the ferries. This paper examines emerging leadership theories that address such tensions.

Three Waves of Theory

Lord et al. (2017) reviewed a century of leadership research in applied psychology and described its development in waves. Early research focused on leaders' traits and behaviors. Later research emphasized relationships, followers and how leadership is perceived. More recent work emphasizes context, processes over time and leadership as a collective phenomenon. They noted that new waves build on earlier ones rather than discarding them.

Paradoxical Leader Behaviors

Zhang et al. (2015) studied paradoxical leader behavior in people management in Chinese companies, defined as seemingly competing yet interrelated behaviors used simultaneously and over time. They identified five dimensions: combining self-centeredness with other-centeredness, maintaining both distance and closeness, treating subordinates uniformly while allowing individualization, enforcing work requirements while allowing flexibility and maintaining decision control while allowing autonomy. Leaders with holistic thinking and integrative complexity showed more paradoxical behavior, which was associated with employees' proficiency, adaptivity and proactivity.

Leadership for Adaptability

Uhl-Bien and Arena (2018) synthesized research on leadership for organizational adaptability. They described three types of leadership: operational leadership, which runs the formal system efficiently; entrepreneurial leadership, which generates new ideas and innovations; and enabling leadership, which creates conditions for entrepreneurial ideas to emerge and moves them into the operational system. Adaptive organizations need all three, and enabling leaders manage the tension between them.

The Tug Line Through the Adaptability Lens

The tug line needs operational leadership: standardized processes, schedules, quality inspections and cost control. Camille's production manager provides it well. Experimentation here would raise risk without clear benefit.

The Ferry Project Through the Adaptability Lens

The ferry project needs entrepreneurial leadership: engineers and electricians learning battery systems, experimenting with layouts and solving problems no one at the yard has solved before. A young electrical engineer hired from an automotive battery company is leading much of this work.

The Enabling Role

Camille's role is enabling leadership: protecting the ferry team's freedom to experiment while connecting its learning to the yard's systems, so that, for example, safety procedures developed for batteries become standard and tug workers who move to the ferry project bring their craft knowledge.

Camille's job is not to choose between the tug line and the ferry team; it is to keep each from swallowing the other.

Paradox in Daily Leadership

Zhang et al.'s dimensions translate into concrete choices. Camille enforces strict schedules and quality standards on both lines while giving the ferry team flexibility in methods. She treats all crews fairly on pay and safety rules while recognizing individual expertise, such as the battery engineer's. She keeps final decision authority on budgets and safety while letting teams decide how to solve technical problems. She maintains closeness with long-time welders while keeping enough distance to make hard calls.

What Workers on Each Line Said

Interviews with workers on both lines showed the tension. Tug line welders worried that the ferry project would pull experienced people and attention away from their schedules, and some saw the electric ferries as a passing experiment. Ferry team members, several of them younger, felt frustrated when standard procedures, such as approval routines designed for steel work, slowed their experiments. Each group saw the other's needs as obstacles, which is the kind of tension paradox and adaptability theories address.

A Moment of Paradox in Practice

In the third month, the ferry team asked to bypass a standard weld inspection step for battery compartment frames to test a new technique. The tug line's quality manager objected. Camille held both positions: she required the inspection for any frame installed in a vessel but allowed the team to test the technique on mock-ups without it, with results reviewed jointly by both teams. The decision protected quality while preserving room to learn.

Why Older Theories Fall Short Here

Trait approaches say little about holding competing demands. Contingency theories suggest matching one style to one situation, but Camille faces two situations at once inside one organization, and the same people sometimes move between them. Transformational leadership offers inspiration but little guidance on balancing efficiency with experimentation.

What the Emerging Theories Add

Older theories, such as contingency approaches, would ask which single style fits each situation. Paradox theory adds that a leader can and should use opposing behaviors together, and adaptability theory adds an organizational design for holding exploration and exploitation in one system. Both address the yard's dual demands better than a single style.

Measuring Whether It Works

Camille will track tug line schedule adherence and cost alongside ferry project milestones and lessons adopted by the tug line, and will ask both teams quarterly whether they feel supported or constrained. If one line's measures slip, the balance needs adjusting.

Evidence and Limits

Paradoxical leadership research is relatively new, with much evidence from one cultural setting and a measure still being tested elsewhere. Adaptability theory is largely a synthesis with growing but limited empirical tests. Both are promising but less established than older theories.

Implications for the Yard

The ferry team will have its own space and weekly learning reviews, while the tug line keeps its standard schedule. A monthly forum will bring both teams together to share lessons, such as welding techniques for battery compartments. Camille will practice paradoxical behaviors deliberately, reviewing each week where she leaned too far toward control or freedom.

Implications for Camille's Architecture

Camille will carry two ideas into her leadership architecture: that she can combine control and autonomy rather than choosing one, and that her role as general manager is largely enabling, connecting innovation to operations.

Conclusion

Leadership research has moved in waves from leaders to followers to context and collectives, and emerging theories of paradoxical leadership and leadership for adaptability address tensions older theories handle poorly. At Bayou Coast, where efficient tug production must coexist with experimental electric ferry work, these theories describe Camille's challenge and suggest how to meet it: hold opposites together and enable innovation to flow into operations. Their evidence is still developing, but they offer valuable building blocks for her leadership architecture.

References

Lord, R. G., Day, D. V., Zaccaro, S. J., Avolio, B. J., & Eagly, A. H. (2017). Leadership in applied psychology: Three waves of theory and research. Journal of Applied Psychology, 102(3), 434-451. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000089

Uhl-Bien, M., & Arena, M. (2018). Leadership for organizational adaptability: A theoretical synthesis and integrative framework. The Leadership Quarterly, 29(1), 89-104. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2017.12.009

Zhang, Y., Waldman, D. A., Han, Y.-L., & Li, X.-B. (2015). Paradoxical leader behaviors in people management: Antecedents and consequences. Academy of Management Journal, 58(2), 538-566. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2012.0995