Adaptive Behavior

What tensions do leaders face and how do they adapt?

Andy Weeger

Neu-Ulm University of Applied Sciences

February 14, 2026

Learning objectives

After completing this unit, you will be able to:

1. Distinguish paradox from contradiction and explain why paradox is fundamental to contemporary organizations.
2. Explain the Competing Values Framework as a diagnostic tool for leadership tensions.
3. Differentiate technical problems from adaptive challenges using Heifetz’s framework.
4. Apply the concept of behavioral complexity to analyse leadership situations.

Introduction

Agenda

• Warm-up 15 min
• Paradox & behavioral complexity 30 min
• Competing Values Framework 30 min
• Break
• Adaptive leadership 25 min
• Synthesis 20 min
• Reflection & closing 10 min

The session is designed as a flipped classroom — students have pre-read Lavine (2014) and answered four guiding questions about ambidexterity, behavioral complexity, CVF paradoxes, and their digital-era relevance.

• The activation uses a snowball discussion (1-2-4-plenary) to surface pre-reading insights with progressively larger groups.
• The paradoxes block uses a fishbowl format — one group in the center discusses while others observe and then rotate.
• The adaptive leadership block uses a devil’s advocate format — students argue opposing positions.
• The integration exercise uses role-play — groups represent different organizational roles.

Opening remarks

The hallmark of a first-class leader is the ability to demonstrate contrary or opposing behaviors while maintaining a certain level of integrity, credibility and direction. Denison et al. (1995)

Great leaders don’t just pick a side when facing competing demands. They hold both sides simultaneously. This sounds abstract — but it is deeply practical. Today we will build three frameworks for understanding and navigating this reality.

Warm-up

Latticework check-in

Which mental models from Unit 1 and Unit 2 might help us think about paradox?

Write down 2-3 mental models that might help think about paradox.

03:00

Just writing, no talking yet.

Individual reflection

What interesting insights did you get from reading Lavine (2014)?

Write down

• One insight that confirmed something you expected.
• One finding that surprised you.

03:00

Just writing, no talking yet.

Pair share

On which surprising insight can you agree on?

Pair with your neighbor(s) and share your individual notes.
Agree on your one most surprising insight

04:00

Plenum

Share one finding with the plenary.

05:00

Each pair presents their top insight.

One spokesperson per group shares their finding.

Expected connections:

• Inversion — what would happen if a leader were completely inflexible?
• Both/and thinking — what if opposing demands are not a choice but a creative tension?
• Trait paradoxes from Unit 2 — every strength has a shadow
• Map vs. territory — our frameworks simplify complex reality

Land on: today we formalize the idea that paradox is not a flaw to be resolved but a condition to be navigated. The energy flows directly into Block 1.

Paradoxes in leadership

Opening remarks

Leadership requires the capacity to recognize and react to paradox, contradiction, and complexity. Denison et al. (1995)

What is a paradox?

What is a contradiction,
what a paradox?

03:00

Let students share their intuitive understanding before introducing the formal definitions. Many conflate the two. The key distinction: contradictions are either/or; paradoxes are both/and tensions that persist over time and resist simple resolution.

Collect answers on the board in two columns. Then reveal the formal definitions on the next slide.

Paradox

Contradiction refers to bipolar opposites that are mutually exclusive and interdependent such that the opposites define and potentially negate each other (Putnam et al., 2016, p 6).

Example: A supervisor manages a remote team by strictly enforcing a ‘9-to-5’ login policy. If an employee attends a child’s school play, they are physically and legally ‘not at work.’ Here, work and family are treated as mutually exclusive blocks of time; the presence of one necessitates the absence of the other.

Paradox refers to contradictions that persist over time, impose and reflect back on each other, and develop into seemingly irrational or absurd situations because their continuity creates situations in which options appear mutually exclusive, making choices among them difficult (Putnam et al., 2016, p 8).

Example: An organization implements ‘Unlimited Paid Time Off’ to give employees total autonomy. However, because employees want to prove they are worthy of such trust, they feel pressured to work harder and take less leave than before. The very policy designed to provide freedom (autonomy) ends up tightening the ‘invisible’ leash of self-surveillance (control). This is paradoxical because the increase in freedom directly causes an increase in constraint, creating an absurd cycle that persists regardless of how many ‘days off’ are offered.

Walk through each definition with its example. Emphasize the temporal dimension: contradictions can be resolved by choosing one side; paradoxes persist because choosing one side intensifies the other.

Ask: “Can you think of a paradox from your own work or study experience?” Take 1–2 quick examples. This bridges to ambidexterity.

Ambidexterity

What is ambidexterity,
what is behavioral complexity?

03:00

Students encountered both concepts in Lavine (2014). Let them articulate their understanding before you formalize it. This is a payoff moment for those who did the reading.

If the room is quiet, prompt: “The reading used the phrase ‘organizational ambidexterity’ — what did it mean?”

Ambidexterity

Ambidexterity refers to “an organization’s capacity to address two organizationally incompatible objectives equally well.” Birkinshaw & Gupta (2013, p. 291)

The ability of senior leadership teams to embrace tension between old states and activities and new ones is a key predictor of firm success (Tushman et al., 2011).

Leaders must “embrace inconsistency by maintaining multiple and often conflicting strategic demands.” O’Reilly III & Tushman (2011, p. 76)

Ambidexterity is the organizational-level concept. The classic example is exploiting existing business while exploring new opportunities — efficiency vs. innovation. Make sure students see that this is a paradox by the definition we just established.

Transition: “Ambidexterity describes what organizations must do. But what does it take from the leader? That’s behavioral complexity.”

Behavioral complexity

It takes complexity to defeat complexity. Uhl-Bien et al. (2007, p. 301)

Increasing social and organizational complexity requires cognitive complexity and behavioral complexity — “we must conceive and perform” (Denison et al., 1995, p. 524).

Effective leaders are those who have the cognitive as well as the behavioral capacity to recognize and react to paradox, contradiction, and complexity in their environments (Denison et al., 1995; Lawrence et al., 2009; Spreitzer & Quinn, 1996).

Key points:

1. Cognitive complexity = the ability to see multiple competing demands simultaneously.
2. Behavioral complexity = the ability to act on multiple competing demands — to shift between seemingly contradictory behaviors.
3. This is not being inconsistent or unpredictable. It is a repertoire of leadership behaviors deployed intentionally.

Connect to Unit 2: “Remember the trait paradoxes? Behavioral complexity is the capacity to hold those paradoxes rather than resolving them.”

Effective leadership is dependent on behavioral complexity, “the ability to perform the multiple roles and behaviors that circumscribe the requisite variety implied by an organizational or environmental context”. (Denison et al., 1995, p. 526)

This capacity to act flexibly across competing demands is exactly what adaptive leadership theory formalizes.

Paradoxes in practice

Think of a leader you have observed (boss, coach, teacher, project lead).

1. Identify a paradox they faced — two contradictory demands at the same time.
2. How did they handle it — did they choose a side, oscillate, or hold both?
3. Would you describe their approach as showing behavioral complexity?

08:00

Fishbowl discussion (12 min total).

Set up a fishbowl: 4–5 volunteers sit in a central circle; everyone else observes from the outer ring. The inner circle discusses the three questions for 6 minutes. One empty chair — any outer-ring student can sit down to contribute, and someone in the inner ring must leave.

After 6 minutes, debrief with the outer ring (4 min): “What patterns did you observe? What did you notice about how the inner group navigated the paradox of discussing paradox?” Push on: - “Were the examples they gave true paradoxes or mere contradictions?” - “Did the inner group itself exhibit behavioral complexity?”

Build the pattern: leaders who oscillate between extremes are perceived as inconsistent; leaders who hold both sides simultaneously are perceived as complex but authentic.

Transition: “The CVF gives us a structured way to map these competing demands.”

Competing values framework

Opening remarks

The competing values framework highlights the trade-offs, tensions, contradictions, and paradoxes inherent in organizations and their leaders. Lavine (2014, p. 194)

The CVF is the theoretical backbone of this session. Students encountered it in the reading, but many will have only a surface understanding. Walk through the framework step by step.

Competing values (complexities)

Competing values in an organization based on Quinn (1988)

 

 

 

 

 

Walk through each layer:

1. Two dimensions: flexibility vs. stability (vertical), internal vs. external (horizontal).
2. Clan/Collaborate: human development and participation produce effectiveness. Family-like, collaborative, team-oriented.
3. Adhocracy/Create: innovation, vision, and constant change produce effectiveness. Dynamic, entrepreneurial.
4. Hierarchy/Control: control and efficiency with appropriate processes produce effectiveness. Structured, process-oriented.
5. Market/Compete: aggressively competing and customer focus produce effectiveness. Results-oriented.
6. Full framework: all four are needed simultaneously, and they are inherently in tension.

Emphasize that the verbs collaborate, create, compete, and control are more accessible than the academic labels.

Leadership traits

Clan (collaborate)	Adhocracy (create)
Mentors, facilitators or team builders — they hold everything together when times are tough, and encourage the pursuit of shared objectives. They’ll help members of their team develop the skills needed to work together more effectively.	Visionaries — they embrace change and new thinking, and are often not overly worried about risk. They’re not just imaginative, but eager to turn their ideas into reality.
Hierarchy (control)	Market (compete)
Managers — they’re focused on organizing, problem solving, and ensuring things are done correctly. They’re scrupulous about paying attention to detail, staying informed, and being rigorous in their analyzes.	Deal makers — they are results-driven, and usually focused on the short-term. They like to take charge, and act fast to close deals with customers.

Table 1: CVF — management skills and leadership behaviors (Lavine, 2014)

Reveal each quadrant’s leadership description one at a time. After all four are visible, ask: “Which quadrant feels most natural to you?” (rhetorical — they will explore this in the exercise).

Key point: most leaders have a natural home quadrant. Behavioral complexity means operating effectively in all four, even the uncomfortable ones.

Implications

Leadership qualities seem to be best demonstrated by more movement throughout the framework, suggesting complex adaptation to changing circumstances (Denison et al., 1995).

Complex situations require complex responses. Sometimes organizations benefit from stability, and sometimes they benefit from change. Often organizations need both stability and change at the same time. In contrast to earlier approaches, the development of the competing values framework did not assume that stability and change were mutually exclusive, an either/or decision. Quinn et al. (2020, p. 12)

CVF analysis

Map a real organization onto the CVF.

Form grops of 3-4. Choose an organization you know well (workplace, university, sports club, startup) and:

1. Identify which CVF quadrant dominates.
2. Assess which quadrant is weakest or most neglected.
3. Describe a leadership challenge that arises from this imbalance.
4. Propose what a behaviorally complex leader would do differently.

08:00

Group exercise (15 min total: 10 min group work, 5 min plenary).

Walk around and push for specificity:

• “Which quadrant dominates? Give a concrete example.”
• “What is the cost of neglecting the weak quadrant?”
• “What would a behaviorally complex response look like in practice?”

In plenary, have 2–3 groups share. Build the pattern: imbalances create predictable pathologies (e.g., too much control stifles innovation; too much create leads to chaos).

The CVF tells us what tensions exist. But how should leaders respond — especially when the problem itself is unclear? That’s where adaptive leadership comes in.

Digital paradoxes

How does the digital age influence these paradoxes?

How do digital technologies amplify the paradoxes and/or enable leaders to manage them?

05:00

Brief plenary discussion (5 min).

Collect quick responses. Expected themes:

• Digital tools enable real-time data for control but also enable distributed collaboration.
• Remote work amplifies the autonomy paradox.
• AI and automation intensify the exploit/explore tension.
• Platform companies must compete aggressively while creating new ecosystems.

Do not resolve — park these insights for Block 4 (connecting frameworks).

Break

Situational & adaptive leadership

The CVF tells us that effective leaders move flexibly across competing demands.

Adaptive leadership helps us understand why some challenges resist our usual approaches — and what to do about it.

We briefly mentioned contingency and situational theories in the evolution of leadership thought. Now we go deeper.

Situational leadership

The Situational Leadership model (Hersey & Blanchard, 1977) proposes that leaders should adapt their style based on the readiness level of their followers — their ability and willingness to perform a specific task.

Follower readiness	Leadership style	Leader behavior
Low ability, low willingness	Telling	High task, low relationship Provide specific instructions and close supervision
Low ability, high willingness	Selling	High task, high relationship Explain decisions and provide opportunity for clarification
High ability, low willingness	Participating	Low task, high relationship Share ideas and facilitate decision-making
High ability, high willingness	Delegating	Low task, low relationship Turn over responsibility for decisions and implementation

Table 2: Follower readiness and leadership style based on Hersey & Blanchard (1977)

Situational leadership serves as a bridge model. Its core insight: there is no single best leadership style. The most effective approach depends on the development level of the people you lead.

Key limitation to flag:

• Situational leadership assumes that the problem itself is well-defined and the solution is known.
• What happens when the problem itself is unclear?
• This is where adaptive leadership enters …

Adaptive leadership

Heifetz (1994) distinguishes between two fundamentally different types of challenges leaders face, which require different behaviors:

Technical problems

• Problem definition is clear
• Solution is known
• Expert knowledge can solve it
• Implementation through authority

Example: A hospital needs to upgrade its IT system — the requirements are known, vendors can be evaluated, and the project can be managed.

Adaptive challenges

• Problem definition is unclear
• No known solution exists
• Requires learning and changed behavior
• Implementation through engagement

Example: A hospital needs to fundamentally change its culture to reduce medical errors — this requires changed beliefs, behaviors, and relationships at every level.

Mini-lecture (5 min).

The most common leadership failure, Heifetz (1994) argues, is treating adaptive challenges as if they were technical problems.

Digital transformation is the quintessential adaptive challenge: it is not primarily a technology problem (technical) but a problem of changed behaviors, processes, mental models, and organizational culture (adaptive). Leaders who approach DT as a technology implementation project often fail.

Exercise

Think of a challenge from your own experience
(work, study, personal project).

Discuss with your neighbor:

1. Was it a technical problem or an adaptive challenge?
2. How was it treated — technically or adaptively?
3. If there was a mismatch, what were the consequences?

05:00

So how do leaders actually lead through adaptive challenges? Heifetz identifies four key practices.

Adaptive leadership practices

Heifetz & Linsky (2002) identify four key practices for leading through adaptive challenges:

1. Getting on the balcony — Step back from the action to observe patterns, political dynamics, and systemic issues. Leaders who are only “on the dance floor” cannot see the larger picture.
2. Regulating distress — Adaptive work generates discomfort because it challenges existing beliefs and competencies. Leaders must create enough disequilibrium to motivate change, but not so much that people become overwhelmed.
3. Giving the work back — The leader cannot solve adaptive challenges alone. The people with the problem must do the work of adapting. The leader’s role is to create the conditions for this learning.
4. Protecting voices of leadership from below — People closest to the problem often have critical insights, but their views may be suppressed. Adaptive leaders protect and amplify dissenting voices.

For each practice, give a brief concrete example:

1. Balcony: A project manager who pauses a heated meeting to ask “What pattern are we repeating here?”
2. Regulating distress: Announcing a restructuring (creates disequilibrium) while simultaneously providing a clear timeline and support (contains distress).
3. Giving work back: Instead of deciding how to implement a new process, the leader facilitates a workshop where the team designs it themselves.
4. Protecting voices: A senior leader publicly supports an intern’s dissenting view in a meeting.

These practices require a fundamentally different orientation. Rather than providing answers, the adaptive leader asks questions.

Behavioral complexity

Adaptive challenges require behavioral complexity — the movement across all four CVF quadrants:

• Collaborate — facilitate group learning and create psychological safety for experimentation
• Create — experiment with novel approaches and tolerate productive failure
• Compete — make difficult trade-off decisions when resources are scarce
• Control — establish structures that provide enough stability for people to take risks

Adaptive challenges are inherently paradoxical — they require simultaneous stability and change, direction and empowerment, urgency and patience.

The CVF and adaptive leadership are both mental models that help leaders diagnose what type of challenge they face and select appropriate responses.

Synthesis

An integrated view

Three lenses on the same challenge:

Framework	Asks	Insight
CVF	What competing demands exist?	Map the tension landscape
Situational	What do followers need?	Match style to readiness
Adaptive	Is the problem technical or adaptive?	Choose the right mode of leadership

Table 3: Overview of frameworks

Together, they provide a diagnostic toolkit
for behavioral complexity.

A leader who can use all three lenses simultaneously is demonstrating behavioral complexity.

The LTEE model showed that development happens at the mediator level. These frameworks are mediators — cognitive tools that translate your traits into effective behavior.

Exercise

Analyze a leadership challenge
using all three frameworks.

Scenario: A mid-sized company is implementing AI-driven customer service, replacing 30% of human agents. The remaining team is anxious, the technology is unproven, and customer satisfaction is dropping.

1. CVF: Which quadrants are in tension?
2. Situational: What do different stakeholders need (e.g., transformation lead, CEO, anxious customer-service agent, customer representative)?
3. Adaptive: Technical problem, adaptive challenge, or both?
4. Synthesis: What would a behaviorally complex leader do?

08:00

• CVF: The leader needs to control (manage the rollout), create (experiment with new models), collaborate (support the anxious team), and compete (maintain customer satisfaction).
• Situational: Remaining agents are high-ability but low-willingness (anxious) — needs Participating (S3).
• Adaptive: Technology implementation is technical; the cultural shift is adaptive.

Experiencing the competing demands is more powerful than analyzing them on paper.

Leading innovation

Opening remarks

Leading innovation takes a distinctive kind of leadership, one that unleashes and harnesses the “collective genius” of the people in the organization. Linda A. Hill

Innovation

What is an innovation?

An innovation can be defined as an idea, practice, or material artifact perceived to be new by the relevant unit of adoption and offers worthwhile benefits (Dewar & Dutton, 1986).

Nature of innovating

Innovating is not about some genius having an aha moment.

Innovating is a team sport — combining individual’s member’s separate slices of genius into a single work of collective genius. Innovation requires a place where people are willing and able to do the hard work that innovative problem solving requires (Hill et al., 2014a).

Significance

Competitiveness depends to a large extent on the ability to innovate. So the ongoing challenge is to build an organisation that is able to innovate all the time.

The rhetoric of innovation is often about fun and creativity, but the reality is that innovation can be very taxing and uncomfortable, both emotionally and intellectually. Hill et al. (2014a, pp. p. 5)

This requires leadership—a different kind of leadership?

Leadership

The role of a leader of innovation is to create a community that is willing and able to generate new ideas. (Hill et al., 2014a, p. 4)

So the question is not “how do I make innovation happen?”
but rather, “how do I set the stage for it to happen?”

Paradoxes of innovation

The paradox at the heart of innovation is the need to unleash the talents of individuals and to harness those talents in the form of collective innovation (Hill et al., 2014b).

Hard work of innovation

The role of an innovation leader is to create a community that is willing and able to innovate over time (Hill et al., 2014a).

Figure 1: Willingness to innovate

Figure 2: Ability to innovate

Creative abrasion

Art challenges technology.
Technology challenges art.

Part of the magic of Pixar is that these two disciplines bump up against each other and create something better than either could create by itself. Greg Brandeau, Pixar Animation Studios

Creative agility

Pursue. Reject. Adjust.

We used to launch products in an “all or nothing” mode to all of our users. Now we had the capability to test multiple different live versions of new products on 1 percent samples of our users. This yielded huge data sets and brought with it a change in mind-set for approaching innovation. We began to avoid projects that only allowed for “zero or one” decisions, instead choosing projects that could be rolled out and evaluated in small slices. Philipp Justus, eBay Germany

Creative resolution

From either or
to both-and thinking

We hired innovators and if I were to forbid a passionate team to do something, it really would have misused their talents. I wanted people with a vision, and the ambition to build the next great thing. We needed to let teams go far enough so they could in fact discover this great new thing. Or, in another scenario, they had to recognize it was not quite right, then decide to work on something else, in the best-case scenario integrating their knowledge to another solution. Bill Coughran, Google

Innovation leaders

The leaders Hill et al. (2014b) studied had some things in common — they call it the right stuff

They are found to be:

• idealist, yet pragmatists;
• integrative thinkers, yet action oriented;
• generous, yet demanding¹; and
• human, yet highly resilient²

Latticework update

New models added to your latticework:

• Competing values as a diagnostic framework
• Technical vs. adaptive problem distinction
• Inversion and both/and thinking for navigating paradox

Reflection

Which new models have you added to your latticework?

How do these new models connect to the ones we already had?

Expected connections: - Map vs. territory applies to the CVF — the four quadrants simplify a complex reality. - Trait paradoxes from Unit 2 are a specific instance of the broader paradox concept. - Second-order thinking applies to adaptive challenges — the second-order effect of a technical fix to an adaptive problem is often worse than the original problem.

Closing remark

Leadership requires the capacity to recognize and react to paradox, contradiction, and complexity. (Denison et al., 1995)

Q&A

Homework

Read House (1996) and answer following questions:

• What is the essence of the theory?
• How does leader behavior impact subordinates’ motivation, satisfaction, and performance?
• What leader behaviors have you experienced?
• Do you have empirical evidence on the propositions made?

Look for connections between the CVF quadrants and the leader behaviors described by House.

The next reading shifts from what leaders do (paradox, behavioral complexity) to why it works (path-goal theory’s motivational mechanisms).

Literature

Birkinshaw, J., & Gupta, K. (2013). Clarifying the distinctive contribution of ambidexterity to the field of organization studies. Academy of Management Perspectives, 27(4), 287–298.

Denison, D. R., Hooijberg, R., & Quinn, R. E. (1995). Paradox and performance: Toward a theory of behavioral complexity in managerial leadership. Organization Science, 6(5), 524–540.

Dewar, R. D., & Dutton, J. E. (1986). The adoption of radical and incremental innovations: An empirical analysis. Management Science, 32(11), 1422–1433.

Heifetz, R. A. (1994). Leadership without easy answers. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Heifetz, R. A., & Linsky, M. (2002). Leadership on the line: Staying alive through the dangers of leading. Harvard Business School Press.

Hersey, P., & Blanchard, K. H. (1977). Management of organizational behavior: Utilizing human resources (3rd ed.). Prentice-Hall.

Hill, L. A., Brandeau, G., Truelove, E., & Lineback, K. (2014a). Collective genius. Harvard Business Review, 92(6), 94–102.

Hill, L. A., Brandeau, G., Truelove, E., & Lineback, K. (2014b). Collective genius: The art and practice of leading innovation. Harvard Business Review Press.

House, R. J. (1996). Path-goal theory of leadership: Lessons, legacy, and a reformulated theory. The Leadership Quarterly, 7(3), 323–352.

Lavine, M. (2014). Paradoxical leadership and the competing values framework. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 50(2), 189–205.

Lawrence, K. A., Lenk, P., & Quinn, R. E. (2009). Behavioral complexity in leadership: The psychometric properties of a new instrument to measure behavioral repertoire. The Leadership Quarterly, 20(2), 87–102.

O’Reilly III, C. A., & Tushman, M. L. (2011). Organizational ambidexterity in action: How managers explore and exploit. California Management Review, 53(4), 5–22.

Putnam, L. L., Fairhurst, G. T., & Banghart, S. (2016). Contradictions, dialectics, and paradoxes in organizations: A constitutive approach. Academy of Management Annals, 10(1), 65–171.

Quinn, R. E. (1988). Beyond rational management: Mastering the paradoxes and competing demands of high performance. Jossey-Bass.

Quinn, R. E., Clair, L. S. S., Faerman, S. R., Thompson, M. P., & McGrath, M. R. (2020). Becoming a master manager: A competing values approach. John Wiley & Sons.

Spreitzer, G. M., & Quinn, R. E. (1996). Empowering middle managers to be transformational leaders. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 32(3), 237–261.

Tushman, M. L., Smith, W. K., & Binns, A. (2011). The ambidextrous CEO. Harvard Business Review, 89(6), 74–80.

Uhl-Bien, M., Marion, R., & McKelvey, B. (2007). Complexity leadership theory: Shifting leadership from the industrial age to the knowledge era. The Leadership Quarterly, 18(4), 298–318.

Footnotes

1. Generosity here means the willingness, based on their own sense of personal security, to share power, control and credit

2. This includes the willingness to admit imperfections and asking for help