Situational stress and restriction of stylistic repertoire in high potential managerial aspirants: Implications for the implementation of the ‘new organization’

The literature on new organizational forms commonly stresses the key role of ‘collaborative individuals’ in delivering the challenging balance of creativity and productivity, vision and focus, openness and decisiveness critical to achieving coherence and responsiveness in the turbulent environment of the 21st Century. This paper reports a recent study that considers these requirements as expressed by competing psychological types/brain styles and assesses the impact of stressors within the task environment on the breadth of stylistic repertoire of high-potential managerial aspirants. It finds that stress significantly shrinks stylistic repertoire and, more critically, moves the focus away from creative, collaborative and ambiguity-tolerant styles towards performance-driven, control-oriented, and grounded styles. The implications of this finding for building the strategically coherent but flexible and developmental cultures advocated in the ‘new organization’ literature are discussed.