Managing a Strategic Paradox across Organizational Boundaries

Top managers are increasingly embedding paradoxes into the goals of the firm’s strategy to reinforce both/and thinking and manage competing demands simultaneously. The paradox literature offers important insights into how management can address strategic paradoxes effectively. However, given that paradoxes are persistent by definition, the paradox literature theorizes surprisingly little about how firms can deal with continuously emerging tensions from strategic paradoxes. In this paper, we draw on an in-depth case study to examine how a top management team manages a strategic paradox that opposes organizational efficiency and employee identity goals. The study reveals how the proliferating tensions emerging from a strategic paradox may be managed by incorporating opportunities that reach beyond organizational boundaries. We identify a set of managerial practices that enact mutually exclusive, mutually constraining, mutually enabling, and mutually reinforcing relationships among contradictory elements, and that taken together offer an integrative and dynamic model of the management of strategic paradox. The model extends the previous literature by incorporating practices that traverse organizational boundaries, and by integrating a diverse set of practices into a holistic explanatory framework.