Experimentation in the face of ambiguity: How mindful leaders develop emotional capabilities for change in teams
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Summary Strategic 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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".