Leadership: Leaders, Followers, Environments

Change and control

In today's society, there is increasing complexity, turbulence, and information, along with rapidly changing technology. These changes create challenges for managers and leaders. There are limits to the human mind, and decisions are often made with ambiguous or incomplete information. The tolerance of ambiguity (originally developed by Stanley Budner)²⁶ and locus of control²⁷ scales provide information about two dimensions of a person's orientation, or attitudes, toward change. Tolerance of ambiguity measures the extent to which individuals are threatened by or have difficulty coping with situations that are ambiguous, changing rapidly, or unpredictable; where information is inadequate; or where complexity exists. Tolerance of ambiguity appears to be correlated with creativity, risk aversion, psychological resilience, lifestyle, orientation toward diversity (cross-cultural communication, intercultural competence), and leadership style.²⁸ The concept measures a person's cognitive complexity: If you have a high tolerance for ambiguity, you have more cognitive complexity. While that sounds good, there are both positive and negatives to a high tolerance for ambiguity. Can you think of any disadvantages to having too much comfort with or tolerance of ambiguity?

TOLERANCE OF AMBIGUITY SCALE

This scale measures your comfort or tolerance with ambiguous situations that might be new, complex, unstructured, vague, insoluble, or contradictory. Respond to the 16 items below ...