When Leaders Don't Have All The Answers: How Leader Ambivalence Enhances Team Performance

In the workplace, leaders often feel pressure to project certainty and decisiveness. Conventional wisdom suggests that effective leaders should appear confident and resolute at all times. However, research by Cristiano L. Guarana, Naomi B. Rothman, and Shimul Melwani challenges this notion with a surprising finding: leaders who experience subjective ambivalence—simultaneously holding positive and negative thoughts about the same issue—can actually drive better team performance.

In their article "Leader Subjective Ambivalence: Enabling Team Task Performance via Information-Seeking Processes," published in Personnel Psychology, the researchers present compelling evidence that leader ambivalence, when properly channeled, creates a cascade of positive effects that ultimately enhance team performance.

Understanding Subjective Ambivalence in Leadership

Subjective ambivalence is defined as the "psychological state of conflict associated with holding both positive and negative thoughts and feelings at the same time about the same object, person, or issue." It's important to distinguish this from indecision or lack of knowledge. Ambivalence represents a complex cognitive state where contradicting viewpoints are simultaneously acknowledged.

For leaders, ambivalence commonly arises when:

• Managing competing goals (balancing short-term and long-term objectives)
• Navigating contradictory roles (being both a decision-maker and team player)
• Addressing multifaceted issues (meeting conflicting requests from stakeholders)

Previous research has shown inconsistent findings regarding the effects of leader ambivalence. Some studies suggest it negatively impacts subordinate task engagement, while others indicate it increases broader participation and enables more novel strategic responses. The authors of this study sought to resolve these contradictions by identifying the mechanisms through which leader ambivalence affects team performance.

The Key Findings: A Two-Step Process

The researchers discovered that leader ambivalence improves team performance through a two-step process:

1. Leaders seek more information: When experiencing ambivalence, leaders are motivated to seek information from their team members to reduce their internal conflict and increase attitude certainty.
2. Information-seeking behavior spreads: Team members observe and model their leader's information-seeking behavior, creating a norm of information sharing throughout the team.

Through three studies—two laboratory experiments and one longitudinal field study involving 164 projects with 164 leaders and 725 subordinates—the researchers demonstrated that this process significantly improves team task performance.

Why Ambivalent Leaders Seek More Information

The research clearly demonstrates that subjective ambivalence motivates leaders to seek information from their teams. This stems from fundamental psychological principles:

• Ambivalence creates discomfort because it violates our need for cognitive consistency
• This discomfort motivates individuals to process additional information to reduce tension
• Leaders experiencing ambivalence are more likely to value others' perspectives and opinions

In the first laboratory experiment, the researchers found that leaders experiencing ambivalence sought significantly more information before making decisions compared to leaders who were purely positive, negative, or indifferent about a project.

How Leader Ambivalence Influences Team Behavior

Despite conventional notions that leaders should project unwavering confidence, ambivalent leaders who seek information from their teams create positive downstream effects:

• They signal openness to multiple perspectives
• They demonstrate that they value team members' knowledge
• They model the importance of self- and other-awareness

Through social learning theory, we understand that team members pay attention to and emulate behaviors they deem valuable. When leaders seek information, team members interpret this as an implicit expectation that they should behave similarly. This creates a climate where seeking others' expertise becomes the norm.

The second laboratory experiment confirmed that teams led by ambivalent leaders performed better than teams with non-ambivalent leaders, and this improved performance was mediated by increased information-seeking behaviors among team members.

The Critical Role of Project Complexity

One of the most significant contributions of this research is identifying when leader ambivalence is most beneficial. The field study revealed that project complexity acts as a key moderator of the relationship between leader ambivalence and information-seeking behaviors.

Specifically:

• When projects are highly complex, leader ambivalence has a stronger positive effect on information-seeking behaviors and subsequent team performance
• When projects are simple, the benefits of leader ambivalence are diminished

This finding helps reconcile previous contradictory results about leader ambivalence by showing that its effects depend on contextual factors. Complex projects place greater demands on knowledge, skills, and resources, making information-seeking more valuable.

Leaders experiencing ambivalence are more attuned to contextual cues, allowing them to adjust their information-seeking patterns based on project complexity. This contextual sensitivity enables them to seek more information when it's most needed (during complex projects) and less when it's not (during simple projects).

Practical Implications for Organizations and Leaders

This research offers valuable insights for both leaders and organizations:

1. Embrace ambivalence as a resource: Rather than suppressing feelings of ambivalence, leaders should recognize it as a potentially valuable state that can motivate information-seeking and improve decision-making.
2. Create cultures that normalize ambivalence: Organizations should foster environments where leaders can express uncertainty and ask questions without fear of appearing incompetent.
3. Match leadership approach to project complexity: The benefits of ambivalence-induced information seeking are strongest for complex projects. Organizations might consider encouraging this approach particularly for complex, non-routine tasks.
4. Develop procedural structures that encourage ambivalence: Organizations can implement practices like formal debates, counterfactual thinking exercises, and cross-department discussions to cultivate constructive ambivalence.

Beyond Information-Seeking: Additional Considerations

While the research focuses primarily on information-seeking as the mechanism through which leader ambivalence improves team performance, the authors acknowledge other potential factors:

• Ambivalent leaders may be more adaptive in their decision-making
• Their expressions of ambivalence might directly empower followers
• Shared ambivalence between leaders and team members might create additional benefits

Future research might explore how leader ambivalence influences other team dynamics, such as psychological safety, creative problem-solving, or resilience during change.

Limitations and Cultural Considerations

It's worth noting some limitations of the research. The field study was conducted in Brazil, which has a more collectivistic culture than some Western contexts. This might affect how readily team members adopt information-seeking behaviors modeled by their leaders.

Additionally, the specific content of information exchanged between team members wasn't measured, only the frequency of information-seeking behaviors. Future studies could examine the quality and nature of information sharing in teams with ambivalent leaders.

Conclusion: The Unexpected Advantage of Not Having All the Answers

This research challenges fundamental assumptions about effective leadership by demonstrating that experiencing and expressing ambivalence can actually enhance team performance. When leaders acknowledge that they hold conflicting thoughts about complex projects, they initiate a process that ultimately benefits the entire team.

The key insight is that advantages exist for team performance when leaders don't have all the answers. By simultaneously holding positive and negative thoughts about complex projects, leaders are motivated to seek information from team members, creating a norm of information sharing that improves collective performance.

In a business environment characterized by increasing complexity and rapid change, the capacity to embrace ambivalence may represent an undervalued leadership competency. By understanding when and how ambivalence can be beneficial, organizations can support leaders in leveraging this complex cognitive state for improved team outcomes.

Rather than striving to project unwavering certainty at all times, effective leaders might benefit from acknowledging complexity, expressing thoughtful ambivalence, and engaging their teams in collaborative information-seeking—particularly when facing complex challenges that require diverse perspectives and innovative solutions.