Juggling Paradoxical Goals: Unpacking persisting dysfunctional dynamics

Paradoxical goals, such as demands in industrial R&D for exploratory learning and short-term business performance, may foster synergistic possibilities, but also surface tensions that can paralyse actors. Defensive responses can trigger vicious cycles, where over-focusing on one goal provides actors with temporary comfort, but intensifies the pull from the neglected goal. Paradox studies identify typical initiators of vicious cycles and have started to unpack managerial interventions to reverse into virtuous dynamics. Yet, we still know little about how dysfunctional dynamics drive persisting vicious cycles. Our in-depth longitudinal qualitative case study of an ICT corporate research lab reveals multifaceted and nested dysfunctional dynamics at the heart of persisting vicious cycles. Our study makes three interconnected contributions to the paradox literature. First, while extant studies suggest that managerial interventions can enable organizations to reverse vicious into virtuous cycles, our findings show that interventions may backfire and instead re-fuel dysfunctional dynamics. Particularly when paradoxical goals are almost impossible to attain in practice, managerial interventions that treat the symptoms of over-focusing on one goal instead of addressing the impossibility of the task, can feed dysfunctional dynamics. Second, our process model shows how defensive responses are continually ‘becoming’. Unpacking the shifting nature of defensive responses introduces granularity into current conceptualizations of paradox dynamics but also enriches our understanding of how the management of paradoxes may sometimes feature as an impossible task. Third, our model shows how dysfunctional dynamics are nested across organizational levels. Extending current insights on paradox nestedness, we show that persisting vicious cycles are fuelled by the interlocking effects of senior management interventions to restore dynamic equilibrium and counter-balancing defensive responses at lower organizational levels. We stress the key role of middle managers in contextualizing paradoxical demands into concrete everyday activities that employees can comprehend, while attending to employees’ concerns.