Project Description
As our world becomes increasingly “VUCA” – i.e., volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (Lewis & Smith, 2022: 530), organizations increasingly feature structures, systems or practices which may be perceived as contradictory (e.g., Schad et al., 2016; Smith & Lewis, 2011). Managing and leading through the resulting paradoxical tensions, has been described as the “ultimate advantage and challenge for organizations” (Andriopoulos & Lewis, 2009: 709; Lüscher & Lewis, 2008).
Prior research offers numerous management approaches in order for managers to navigate paradoxes within and across organizations successfully (Lewis & Smith, 2022; Schad et al., 2016), and recently emphasized paradoxical leadership (PL) – the integration of seemingly contradictory yet interrelated leadership behaviors (e.g., maintaining both distance and closeness) – as an important prerequisite to successfully lead individuals, teams, or even whole organizations through paradoxical tensions (Zhang et al., 2022).
Despite these advancements, the emerging research on PL is still relatively fragmented and fails to explain the full complexity of managing paradoxes, particularly in multinational organizations. Accordingly, this project strives to first review the literature on PL to integrate and consolidate the different research streams. Subsequently, it aims at empirically investigating a large multinational organization to understand how paradoxical tensions emerge and are managed across national borders and distinct national cultures.
Relevance to Liechtenstein
The research project is mainly addressing three of the six core research foci of the University of Liechtenstein, namely innovation, responsibility, and sustainability.
Innovation in organizations often requires a balance between optimization and renewal. The adoption of paradoxical leadership (PL) by leaders can serve as an important mechanism for overcoming the perceived conflicts between these two. The findings and results of this project should therefore help organizations to successfully implement innovative projects across boundaries.
Sustainability and responsibility are another source of potential paradoxical tensions in organizations, as organizations often try to reconcile the contradictions between sustainability and profitability and/or between performance and care to remain competitive in the marketplace while still having a positive impact on their own organizational members and on society in general. To successfully manage such tensions, adapting PL is therefore an important mechanism, especially in change processes, which make paradoxical tensions become more salient.
Our findings will be highly insightful for organizations from Liechtenstein and the Rhine Valley region as many local companies already position themselves as particularly sustainable and responsible innovation leaders with a strong business sense. It is precisely these companies that are thus increasingly confronted with paradoxical tensions, and which could therefore benefit from the findings of this research project as well.
Scientific, Economic and Societal Impact
Subproject 1: Given a fragmented picture of the literature on paradoxical leadership (PL), the proposed review has three main objectives. First, we consider the multilevel nature of PL and describe paradoxical tensions rooted in the leader and in the organization as two distinct but interrelated types of PL. Furthermore, we provide an overview of findings on the effects of PL on individual- and organizational-level outcomes and the boundary conditions for these relationships. Finally, based on our approach, we derive opportunities for future research and propose to consider the interplay of PL at the individual and organizational levels, as well as their separate and integrative drivers and outcomes.
Subproject 2: This project aims to study management's approach to paradoxical tensions at the subsidiary level in a multinational company, examining the implementation process of a cultural change initiative in a leading global company headquartered in the DACHLI region. By examining how the management of the organization's subsidiary perceived and managed such tensions during a cultural change initiative, this research project aims to identify similarities and differences, understand where they originated, and identify more and less effective management approaches for similar group-wide initiatives in the future.
