How does failure emerge and develop during organizational change? As organizations are pushed for change, the notion of failure that relates to change becomes gradually ingrained in contemporary research. However, with studies having primarily added to the conversation from a static outset, extant scholarly work might not fully capture the transience that marks change in essence. This article contributes to the literature on failure in change by advancing a dialectical perspective, offering the scholarly community insight in the emergence and development of failure as happening in three processes. In a retentive process, change agents adhere to a change approach deemed successful in spite of alternatives emerging, causing tensions to gradually build within the organization’s social atmosphere. In a reactive process, looming tensions find themselves affirmed and flare up, instigating the display of a new change approach that is antithetical to the one initially adhered to. Finally, in a recursive process, organizational members collectively recall the positive aspects of prior failure, smoothening organizational change towards re-combinatory synthesis. Marking failure’s emergence and development as a dialectic, this article notes failure in organizational change to be as generative as it is deteriorating, paving the way for both success and failure to continuously remit.
Although research relating to paradox has burgeoned throughout the past decades, how paradox has been used in generating theoretical contributions remains largely tacit. Hinging on the systematic analysis of 476 publications, this literature review uncovers how scholars have leveraged paradox in demarcating theoretical contributions in the area of management and organization research. First, scholars can make use of paradox as a means to theorize, adding to the core conceptual conversation on paradox. Second, scholars can make use of paradox as a means to understand or advance insight on particular phenomena, drawing from paradox's conceptual knowledge to push forth discussions or debates in other strands of the management and organization field. Finally, scholars can make use of paradox as a way to verbalize something puzzling or surprising, supporting how readers are to appreciate or make sense of theoretical contributions advanced. Denoting approaches identified as highly complementary, this paper offers explicit handholds for academics to develop theoretical contributions through paradox, supporting the consolidation and further elevation of scholarly impact for the paradox community as such.
While work on affect in strategy-making has been increasingly developing, relatively little research has been conducted on the emotional dynamics of strategy processes directed by strategy consultants. Drawing on a variety of qualitative data gathered during a one-year consulting case, this article looks into the way emotions unfold when managers solicit external strategic advice. Specifically, this article reveals the mechanisms underpinning managers’ emotions in guided strategy-making from pre- to post-strategizing, highlighting processes as they develop over time. In doing so, three fundamental emotional drivers are laid bare: interaction – or how practitioners engage with each other; temporality – or how practitioners engage with time; and impression – or how practitioners engage with mental representations of strategy-making and strategy consultancy. By revealing how emotions evolve when managers find themselves strategically directed, this article offers insight into how a guided strategy-making trajectory can be affectively managed – to make sense of emotions when they unfold, and to address them appropriately as they do.
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