Anatomies of Connecting Amidst Tension: An Affective Expansion of the Adaptive Process in Pressures For Gender Diversity in Leadership

Complexity and complex challenges call for leadership that enables people to collaborate and create across diverse forms of knowledge, backgrounds, and perspectives. The challenge is that complexity and differences challenge dominant masculine leadership norms and conventional problem-solving practices, which generates tension. These tensions are affective—and more often than not, they divide rather than connect people. This dissertation points to the heart of a complex tension dynamic that exemplifies why efforts to adapt to pressures for increased gender diversity in leadership positions across private companies in Denmark are not automatically transformed into relational leadership practices that connect different people, different thinking, and different bodies
This dissertation argues that complexity requires leadership that embraces tension as a constructive potential—both as a driver of adaptation and as a force that can challenge dominant leadership practices. Complexity Leadership Theory (CLT), to some extent, builds on this foundation by conceptualizing adaptation to complexity as the process of conflicting and connecting amidst tension, which leads to adaptive outcomes. However, while CLT emphasizes the productive role of tension, it does not account for the embodied and affective tensions that emerge when leadership norms are challenged—tensions that shape whether people enter into the potential of tension or whether they shut tensions down and turn away. On this basis, the dissertation explores: What it takes to enable the process of connecting amidst tensions that emerge in pressures for gender diversity in leadership in the context of Denmark, how norms of gender and leadership are sustained, and how the interplay between gendered leadership norms and affective encounters shapes responses to tension.
CLT forms the metatheoretical entry point for examining how tensions generated by pressures for gender diversity can serve as catalysts for adaptive change. To support my point that adaptation requires a multi-level understanding of tension to both encompass a view on tension as a pressure to adapt, and as a potential to unsettle norms that keep dominant structures in place, I integrate my metatheoretical with a spatial metaphor and definition of tension as a “tensile structure”—tent-like constructions that depend on tensions between poles to generate structural strength, and resilience thereby creating space and openness for alternative approaches. Combining these perspectives enables an understanding of tension as both a driving force for adaptation and a space that broadens the potential to challenge prevailing leadership practices.
To broaden CLT’s conceptualization of tension to include normative and affective dimensions, this dissertation integrates this metatheoretical foundation with affect theory and post-structuralist feminist perspectives on norms and their performativity. Together, this integrated theoretical foundation enables an inquiry into how the complex interplay between gendered expectations of leadership, the performativity of norms, and affective dynamics shapes responses to the tensions that emerge under pressures for increased gender diversity in leadership. In doing so, the dissertation offers insight into the relational processes that either facilitate or hinder the constructive engagement of difference and tension in the context of complexity.
Through an affective ethnographic approach to research, the dissertation highlights how normative, sensory, and embodied experiences shape relational dynamics and emotional responses to tension. This process is based on qualitative interviews with people working primarily in leadership positions across Danish private-sector organizations, combined with informal conversations, everyday interactions, and the researcher’s affective experiences and responses in the field.
The findings reveal how tensions surrounding leadership and gender diversity manifest as both normative forces, affective currents, and embodied reactions. At the same time, they demonstrate that such tensions often reinforce dominant gendered understandings of leadership, yet affective tensions can also open space for connection and the emergence of alternative perspectives. Enabling such connection requires noticing when and how affective tensions shape our responses, and being willing to stay with the sensory and vulnerable states that arise when normative structures are unsettled. This suggests that complexity leadership is not only a matter of structure and decision-making in tension-filled contexts but also a matter of affective and embodied presence in relational processes.
Consequently, this dissertation offers an affective, embodied expansion of CLTs concept of the adaptive process. It also contributes methodologically to advancing an affective approach to leadership research—one that extends critical thinking with critical feeling, and thereby brings the sensing body, affect, and emotion into play alongside discursive elements. In doing so, it advances an approach to studying leadership that foregrounds embodiment, affect, and emotion.