Active and defensive strategies to cope with paradoxes in a change context : a middle managers’ perspective

This paper aims to understand how middle managers cope with paradoxical tensions. As it is increasingly common for organizations to have to simultaneously juggle with competing demands (Smith & Lewis, 2011), the juxtaposition of coexisting opposites has increased experiences of paradoxical tensions, challenging organizational actors in their daily work. Among these actors, middle managers are generally more prone to tensions (Wooldridge, Schmidt, & Floyd, 2008) as organizations have become flatter due to downsizing and reengineering, and responsibility is delegated downwards (Balogun & Johnson, 2004), with middle managers reporting a significant increase in their workload (Armstrong-Stassen, 2005). As tension is considered to lead to burnout and stress, more recent work has recognized that it is not the existence of contradictions per se that is productive or destructive, but the way they are managed (Tracy, 2004). Despite accumulate insights into the management of organizational paradoxes (Jarzabkowski, Lê, & Van de Ven, 2013), relatively little is known about coping strategies at the intermediate level (Lüscher & Lewis, 2008). In response, this longitudinal real-time analysis of an IT transformation program opens the black box of middle managers’ responses to paradoxical tensions. Specifically, our original contributions are twofold: firstly, to identify seven dualities through which organizational paradoxes are perceived by middle managers, and secondly, to categorize their responses to cope with paradoxes into four active and three defensive strategies. We suggest that our overview of paradoxical tensions and related coping strategies provides significant insights for organizations as well as for their managers.