The Lived Experience of Paradox: How Individuals Navigate Tensions during the Pandemic Crisis

Abstract

Organizational life has always been filled with tensions, but the COVID-19 pandemic is amplifying this experience in fundamental ways. Across the globe, employees were forced to quickly adjust to working from home, striving to remain productive while adapting to new technologies and workpractices (Lanzolla et al., 2020). Essential employees, such as medical personnel, have been grappling with the desire to deliver care to those with need without risking themselves (Kniffin et al., 2020). Leaders have been balancing optimism with realism and finding ways to engender psychological proximity despite managing their followers from afar (Gibson, 2020). These interconnected tensions have been accentuated not just within domains (e.g., work), but also across domains (Ladge et al., 2012). Working parents, for example, have been renegotiating boundaries as they pursue their work goals while home-schooling their children and caring for their elderly relatives (Power, 2020). To address the multitude of tensions that employees are experiencing during the pandemic, we turn to paradox theory, which provides a metalevel approach to studying tensions across organizational contexts (Schad et al., 2016), including work–life boundaries (Peters & Blomme, 2019). Paradox theory addresses questions about how people perceive tensions (Sharma & Good, 2013), frame tensions (Keller et al., 2017; Miron-Spektor et al., 2011; Pradies et al., 2020), reason about tensions (Keller & Sadler-Smith, 2019), and feel about tensions (Ashforth et al., 2014; Pradies et al., forthcoming; Vince & Broussine, 1996). Paradox theory begins with the premise that employees’ experience with tensions is shaped by both environmental factors and employees’ cognitive and emotional processes (Smith & Lewis, 2011). The environmental factors do not only include macrolevel conditions such as those stemming from a pandemic crisis (Schad & Bansal, 2018), but more proximal conditions within the organization, such as organizational systems (Keegan et al., 2019), leadership (Zhang et al., 2015), and social context (Keller et al., 2020; Pradies et al., forthcoming). Paradox theory therefore provides a holistic account of how employees experience and respond to tensions from major events such as the pandemic crisis. In this article, we present seven short essays that focus on various aspects of the lived experience during the pandemic crisis through a paradox theoretical lens, providing new insights on the pandemic while also using the pandemic experience to push the boundaries of paradox theory. Bednarek and Lê (see below) discuss how the boundary between work and life has become blurred yet our sense of them opposed has peaked. To them, the pandemic invites us to expand our understanding of the concept of balance central to paradox theory. The next three essays focus on how managers shape 986874 JMIXXX10.1177/1056492620986874Journal of Management InquiryPradies et al. research-article2021