RESUMO
The COVID-19 pandemic has amplified and exacerbated organizational paradoxes felt by individuals largely because of the nostalgia individuals feel for the "old" normal while facing the need to let go in order to create a "new" normal. We position improvisation as a synthesis-type approach to working through the paradoxes of the pandemic. Furthermore, we look at individual differences that underpin the ability to improvise, and identify that it is the strength of character and character-based judgment of the individual that enables the enactment of a focal context, the choice to improvise, and the act of effectively improvising to work through paradoxes. Linking character to improvisation, and, vice versa, improvisation to the development of character, reveals the importance of dimensions such as courage, humility, temperance, transcendence, humanity, and collaboration in the practice of improvisation.
RESUMO
We investigated the relationship between self-ratings of leader character and follower positive outcomes-namely, subjective well-being, resilience, organizational commitment, and work engagement-in a public-sector organization using a time-lagged cross-sectional design involving 188 leader-follower dyads and 22 offices. Our study is an important step forward in the conceptual development of leader character and the application of character to enhance workplace practices. We combined confirmatory factor analysis and network-based analysis to determine the factorial and network structure of leader character. The findings revealed that a model of 11 inter-correlated leader character dimensions fit the data better than a single-factor model. Further, judgment appeared as the most central dimension in a network comprising the 11 character dimensions. Moreover, in a larger network of partial correlations, two ties acted as bridges that link leader character to follower positive outcomes: judgment and drive. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.
