Impact of Career Complexity on Leadership Competencies: A Longitudinal Study of Senior Executives

In today’s complex business environment managers must have the capacity to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances. This research addressed the impact of career experiences on the development of adaptability in senior managers. We measured features of the careers of 47 highlevel managers in a Fortune 100 company. We examined the effect of career complexity— defined as the diversity in an individual’s functional area experiences, institutional context experiences, and temporal experiences over the span of his or her career—on managers’ longterm levels of adaptability. For those managers whose careers did not include an early opportunity to observe decision-making at the most senior level, there is an optimal number of role type changes (line, matrix, and staff) and time in each role type that maximized development of adaptability. For managers whose careers did include an early opportunity to observe seniorlevel decision-making, 82% developed a high level of adaptability that allowed them to adjust their tactics to the situation, independent of the number of role types or time in each role in their careers. Contrary to expectations, the point in a manager’s career when s/he first held a role with profit and loss responsibility did not influence the development of managerial adaptability. Submission #11038 p. 3 Impact of Career Complexity on Leadership Competencies: A Longitudinal Study of Senior Executives In today’s difficult business and financial environment, survival is not just a matter of getting through a down cycle and getting back to business as usual at the other end. Most organizations today are in what Heifetz (1994) called an adaptive crisis as distinguished from a task crisis. Businesses need leaders, from CEOs to HR executives, who can help others to develop and demonstrate adaptability in several forms, such as the ability to face adversity with courage, learn, and manage uncertainty (Dotlich, Cairo, & Rhinesmith, 2008). For this research we define adaptability as the ability to work effectively within a variety of changing situations, and with various individuals or groups. In the same vein, Kantor, Kram, & Sala (2008) argue that, given the need for rapid change and flexibility, it will be executives who can best adapt to change who will deliver the most outstanding results. In other words, adaptability will become one of the most critical competencies of the most successful leaders. For organizations to become more adaptive, they need both leaders and members who are adaptable. If adaptability is a key to managing complexity in the organization, it is important to understand how managers develop adaptability. We propose that the answer lies in turning the relationship between adaptability and complexity on its head: The complexity of the individual’s passage through his or her career creates adaptability. In other words, adaptability is best learned through experience (Karaevli & Hall, 2006). And the best kind of experience for this learning is the very complexity that adaptive leaders must learn to master—in other words, handling a variety of experiences and actions. Submission #11038 p. 4 In this paper, then, we will test the notion that particular types of variety in a manager’s experience lead to the development of adaptability. We draw on a unique database containing the career histories of fifty-two senior executives in a major global corporation. We use the term career complexity to represent the degree of variety in a manager’s career experiences and test the degree to which career complexity contributes to the development of adaptability later in their careers. THE LINK BETWEEN CAREER COMPLEXITY AND ADAPTABILITY