HOW CAN LEADERS OVERCOME THE BLURRY VISION BIAS? IDENTIFYING AN ANTIDOTE TO THE PARADOX OF VISION COMMUNICATION

摘要

Evidence suggests that organizational leaders can inspire employees by communicating a vision of the future with image-based rhetoric-words and phrases that are readily envisioned in the mind's eye (e.g., "our vision is tomakemoviegoers laugh"). Yet research has demonstrated that most leaders do not craft visions with image-based rhetoric, instead favoring abstract language that cannot easily be visualized. We integrate theory on leadership and dual cognitive processing to argue that this problem is exacerbated when leaders focus on word selection when crafting visions because they overemphasize the meaning-based cognitive system (in which they consider the abstract meaning of words) and underemphasize the experience-based cognitive system (in which they can generate vivid mental images of what the future could look like). We introduce a novel tactic to help leaders activate the experience-based system and, in turn, generate and communicate more impactful visions. We also investigate boundary conditions. We test our predictions with three experiments featuring three distinct samples, including one with senior corporate executives and one in which members of the British government crafted visions on the day Britain announced it would exit the European Union ("Brexit").