A Paradox Approach to Organizational Tensions During the Pandemic Crisis

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic is a massive exogenous shock that reverberated around the world, forcing all types of organizations to change overnight—from the local coffee shop to the international airline. As we try to make sense of the events surrounding the pandemic, one question that has perplexed both scholars and managers alike has been the extent to which this experience is qualitatively different from others. One area of research to turn to is research on organizational paradoxes, as the organizational paradox literature has focused extensively on how organizations experience change (e.g., Jay, 2013; Lüscher & Lewis, 2008; Smith & Tracey, 2016). According to the paradox literature, major exogenous change impacts organizations by increasing the saliency of organizational tensions (Smith & Lewis, 2011), such as tensions between exploration and exploitation (e.g., Smith, 2014), cooperation and competition (e.g., Raza-Ullah et al., 2014), or control and collaboration (e.g., Sundaramurthy & Lewis, 2003). The increased salience of tensions is critical for understanding organizations undergoing major change because tensions are both multi-level and multi-faceted, impacting actors ranging from the CEO to the front-line employee (Jarzabkowski et al., 2013) and involving responses that are cognitive (e.g., MironSpektor et al., 2018), emotional (e.g., Vince & Broussine, 1996), and material (e.g., Knight & Paroutis, 2017). By focusing attention on the tensions that organizations experience during the pandemic and their responses, the paradox literature can provide shards of clarity to this otherwise incomprehensible event. At the same time, unpacking the pandemic experience through a paradox lens can reveal new insights on organizational tensions, enabling scholars to gain sense of future, seemingly, senseless events. To address the organizational experience during the COVID-19 pandemic through a paradox lens, we explore five examples of tensions that have been especially salient during the pandemic crisis: the short-term versus long-term tensions (see Slawinski later in the text); social versus economic goal tensions (see Schrage later in the text), learning versus performing tensions (see Winther-Hansen, Carmine, Andriopoulos, and Gotsi later in the text); common good versus individual privacy tensions (see Raza and Keller later in the text) and agency tensions (see Krzeminska, Mafico, and Härtel, and Tunarosa later in the text). As uncertainty about the size and scope of the pandemic, the duration of the pandemic, and the government’s capacity to manage the pandemic has raised the saliency of tensions, organizations have been faced with the heightened urge to navigate short-term and long-term goals (see Slawinski later in the text). For organizations that depend on global supply chains (i.e., multinational corporations), 986863 JMIXXX10.1177/1056492620986863Journal of Management InquiryCarmine et al. research-article2021