The complexity turn in studies of organisations and leadership: relevance and implications

The widespread experience of complexity is the experience of radical unpredictability and loss of clear connections between cause and effect. The typical response from leaders and researchers is to suggest that more complex contexts require new ways of management control and that particular ways of organising and leading are better than others in order to deal with this. However, the complexity orientation in organisational studies demonstrates that complexity is not a phenomenon that can be brought under control for subsequent analysis, manipulation and change from 'the outside'. What are the implications of this for the understanding of organisational dynamics and leadership? Complexity research is seeking to understand this by exploring what seems to be the core of the issue at hand: the interactional and paradoxical nature of leadership and organisational stability and change.