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.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Pages (from-to) | 307-322 |
Number of pages | 16 |
Journal | Leadership Quarterly |
Volume | 26 |
Issue number | 3 |
Early online date | 7 Apr 2015 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 1 Jun 2015 |
Bibliographical note
© 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
Keywords
- cognitive content
- cognitive mapping
- collective leadership
- mental models