Organizational Behavior Area / Strategy & Organization Joint Seminar: Wendy Smith
Wendy Smith
University of Delaware
Invitational Contexts: How leaders foster environments for navigating paradox
Date: Tuesday November 18, 2025
Time:聽2:30pm 鈥� 3:45pm
Location: Bronfman 011
All are cordially invited to attend.
Abstract:
Paradox theory highlights the importance of not only engaging organizational tensions, but also effectively cascading this complex strategy across organizations. Extant theory emphasizes top-down framing or structural solutions that underplay emotional and cognitive challenges. Drawing on a multi-year inductive study of Shorefast Foundation, a paradox-rich social enterprise in Newfoundland, Canada, we theorize how leaders move from prescribing meaning and action to instead creating invitational contexts - intentionally shaped environments enabling individuals to grapple with complexity and paradox in their own time and on their own terms. Through practices such as rhetorical polysemy, emotional openness, and temporal patience, leaders adopt approaches that enable members to create distinct meaning in their own time. These individualized journeys accumulate into an emergent collective capacity for navigating paradox. Taken together, this model of invitational contexts shifts paradox theory from top-down informing to relational engaging and shifts the role of leaders from framers of meaning to facilitators of interpretive spaces.
