Leaders' sensemaking under crises:emerging cognitive consensus over time within management teams

Abstract

When facing a crisis, leaders' sensemaking can take a considerable amount of time due to the need to develop consensus in how to deal with it so that vision formation and sensegiving can take place. However, research into emerging cognitive consensus when leaders deal with a crisis over time is lacking. This is limiting a detailed understanding of how organizations respond to crises. The findings, based on a longitudinal analysis of cognitive maps within three management teams at a single organization, highlight considerable individual differences in cognitive content when starting to make sense of a crisis. Evidence for an emerging viable prescriptive mental model for the future was found, but not so much in the management as a whole. Instead, the findings highlight increasing cognitive consensus based on similarities in objectives and cause-effect beliefs within well-defined management teams over time.

Publication DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2015.02.002
Divisions: College of Business and Social Sciences > Aston Business School > Marketing & Strategy
Additional Information: © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Funding: ESRC - EREBUS capacity building cluster - reference: RES-187-24-00
Uncontrolled Keywords: cognitive content,cognitive mapping,collective leadership,mental models,Business and International Management,Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management,Applied Psychology,Sociology and Political Science
Publication ISSN: 1873-3409
Last Modified: 22 Mar 2024 18:50
Date Deposited: 23 Apr 2015 08:20
Full Text Link:
Related URLs: http://www.scop ... tnerID=8YFLogxK (Scopus URL)
https://www.sci ... 0363?via%3Dihub (Publisher URL)
PURE Output Type: Article
Published Date: 2015-06-01
Published Online Date: 2015-04-07
Authors: Combe, Ian A. (ORCID Profile 0000-0002-0105-4241)
Carrington, David J. (ORCID Profile 0000-0001-7977-9210)

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