Managing Strategic Contradictions: A Top Management Model for Managing Innovation Streams

TLDR

Sustained organizational performance depends on top management teams effectively exploring and exploiting, yet these strategic agendas are linked to contradictory organizational architectures. The study develops a model of managing strategic contradictions grounded in paradoxical cognition, arguing that the locus of paradox lies with either the senior leader or the entire team, and identifies conditions that enable paradoxical cognitive processes. The model is built from literature on paradox, contradictions, and conflict, and specifies that leaders and teams articulate a paradoxical frame, differentiate strategy and architecture for existing products versus innovation, integrate these elements, and adopt conditions that facilitate paradoxical cognition.

Abstract

Sustained organizational performance depends on top management teams effectively exploring and exploiting. These strategic agendas are, however, associated with contradictory organizational architectures. Using the literature on paradox, contradictions, and conflict, we develop a model of managing strategic contradictions that is associated with paradoxical cognition—senior leaders and/or their teams (a) articulating a paradoxical frame, (b) differentiating between the strategy and architecture for the existing product and those for innovation, and (c) integrating between those strategies and architectures. We further argue that the locus of paradox in top management teams resides either with the senior leader or with the entire team. We identify a set of top management team conditions that facilitates a team’s ability to engage in paradoxical cognitive processes.