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.
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\nOne 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., Miron-Spektor 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.