How managers detect paradox: critical realism, moderate constructivism and sensemaking in action

In practice managers confront paradoxical demands to do two opposite things simultaneously as part of their daily work life, sometimes not necessarily noticing . For example, they have to be realistic/pragmatic and inspirational/aspirational (March & Weil, 2005); they engage their organizations in both exploration and exploitation (March, 1991; Tushman & O’Reilly, 1996); they are asked to ‘do more with less’ (Withers, Drnevich & Marino, 2011); they articulate competing expectations between headquarters and the distinctive needs of local branches (Wakayama & LaPierre, 2017); they cultivate stability and promote change (Farjoun, 2010); they are challenged by cross-cultural similarities and differences (Gannon & Deb, 2018). Most of these tensions need to be tackled on an ongoing basis, as they cannot be solved and their poles imply one another reciprocally: they can thus be framed as paradoxes. Paradoxes refer to “persistent contradictions between interdependent elements” (Schad, Lewis, Raisch, & Smith, 2016, p. 10). They differ from tensions, dilemmas and dialectics (Putnam, Fairhurst, & Banghart, 2016), containing opposition, interrelation and persistence (Smith & Lewis, 2011). As Li (2016) put it, they compose an unstable mix of synergy and trade-off. They are persistent and pervasive: interrelated oppositions that can be articulated but not solved (Schad, Lewis, Raisch, & Smith, 2016). Managers are constantly exposed to such tensions and contradictions in separate aspects of their job. As Drucker synthetized, “planning and doing are separate parts of the same job; they are not separate jobs. There is no work that can be performed effectively unless it contains elements of both” (Drucker, 1954, p. 284). While all employees may be exposed to dilemmas and contradictions, in practice the exposure of managers is larger and amplified. Managers should neither plan in the absence of experiential doing (professional scientific management) nor do in the absence of planning (ad hockery). In addition, managers are expected “to buffer” other employees’ (subordinates, followers) sense of equivocality in the face of paradox by sensegiving that delivers clear and unambiguous messages (Smith, Ashmos Plowman, & Duchon, 2010). As remarked by Ashforth, Rogers, Pratt and Pradies (2014, p. 1459), “because senior managers act on behalf of subunits and organizations, their experience of ambivalence implicates entire collectives”. A rich literature has treated a number of issues, such as how managers experience paradox (Vince & Broussine, 1996; Zhang, Waldman, Han, & Li, 2015), how they can tackle opposition fruitfully over time (Saïd Business School, Heidrick & Struggles, 2015; Sharma & Bansal, 2017), and how they navigate tensions (Jay, 2013). One issue, however, deserves more attention than it has received: how do managers detect paradoxes and how do they know that a paradox is a paradox? We will first discuss the issue of consequential detection before considering critical realist and moderate constructivist paradigms, to explore the real (objective) and constructed (interpreted) nature of paradox. A realist epistemology focuses on the identification of the objective existence of paradoxes whereas the constructivist refers to paradoxes as human enactments. The conceptual question for this paper flows from this duality: how does the detection of paradox articulate the real and the socially constructed?