Human Resources Management and Leadership

Under VUCA conditions of high complexity, turbulent environmental dynamics, and considerable uncertainty, human resource management experiences increased importance, as more decision-making and directive rights are transferred to employees or teams in agile companies than in traditionally managed companies. In this context, the concept of transformational leadership is experiencing a renaissance. However, the conventional actor-centered transformational leadership style cannot meet the requirements of agility because it lacks the necessary strong communication orientation. Incremental-iterative and, in particular, recursive and discursive leadership expand the current model into communication-centered leadership. This in turn is closely linked to the leadership tool of diversity management. This is because the ability of employees and managers to change, based on diversity, is seen as a central aspect of agile action. The learning and effectiveness approach of diversity management is particularly interesting for management behavior in agile organizations. Managers and employees must be able to recognize the different logics of a complex world and the options that emerge, and must be able to adopt a variety of perspectives in order to do so. This can lead to contradictory assessments of situations when individuals view and try to understand them from their perspective, their linguistically bound, specific view of the world. However, differences in interpretative patterns and symbol systems that arise in lived plurality are not eliminated with the help of communication-centered leadership, but are used for further development. In this context, it is essential that communication management places particular emphasis on designing dialogs.