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This study examines how an externally imposed management control system (MCS) – hospital accreditation – influences the salience of organisational tensions and consequently attitudes of management towards the system.

Data are collected using a case study of a large public hospital in Spain. In-depth interviews were conducted with 27 senior and middle managers across different functions. Relying on the organisational dualities classification in the literature, tensions are unpacked and analysed.

Evidence is presented of how hospital accreditation increases the salience of organisational tensions arising from exposition of the organisational dualities of learning, performing, organising and belonging. Salient tensions were evident in the ambivalent attitudes of management towards the hospital accreditation system.

The role of mandatory external control systems in exposing ambivalence and tensions will be of interest to organisational managers.

The study extends the management control literature by identifying an active role for an external MCS (accreditation) in increasing the salience of organisational tensions and triggering ambivalence. Contrary to the prior literature, the embedding of both poles of an organisational duality into the MCS is not a necessary precondition for increased tension salience. The range of attitudes towards MCSs beyond those specified in the previous literature (positive/negative/neutral) is extended to include ambivalence.

A major part of knowledge management for knowledge-intensive firms such as professional service firms is the increasing focus on thought leadership. Despite being a well-known term, it is poorly defined and analysed in the academic and practitioner literature. The aim of this article is to answer three questions. First, what is thought leadership? Second, what tensions exist when seeking to create thought leadership in knowledge-based organisations? Third, what further research is needed about thought leadership? The authors call for cross-disciplinary and academic–practitioner approaches to understanding the field of thought leadership.

The authors review the academic and practitioner literature on thought leadership to provide a rich oversight of how it is defined and can be understood by separating inputs, creation processes and outcomes. The authors also draw on qualitative data from 12 in-depth interviews with senior leaders of professional service firms.

Through analysing and building on previous understandings of the concept, the authors redefine thought leadership as follows: “Knowledge from a trusted, eminent and authoritative source that is actionable and provides valuable solutions for stakeholders”. The authors find and explore nine tensions that developing thought leadership creates and propose a framework for understanding how to engage with thought leadership at the industry/macro, organisational/meso and individual/micro levels. The authors propose a research agenda based on testing propositions derived from new theories to explain thought leadership, including leadership, reducing risk, signalling quality and managing social networks, as well as examining the suggested ways to resolve different tensions.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, they are the first to separate out thought leadership from its inputs, creation processes and outcomes. The authors show new organisational paradoxes within thought leadership and show how they can play out at different levels of analysis when implementing a thought leadership strategy. This work on thought leadership is set in a relatively under-explored context for knowledge management researchers, namely, knowledge-intensive professional service firms.

Grounded in paradox theory, and with the objective of structuring and extending existing knowledge of conflicts of interest (e.g. trade-offs) in packaging logistics, the purpose of this paper is to identify categories of paradoxical tensions in packaging systems used in supply chains, and to develop a conceptual framework that describes these categories.

This research uses a theory building approach. It develops a conceptual framework of paradoxical tensions for packed products in supply chains. It revises and extends current knowledge in this domain by applying paradox theory from organisational research.

The paper develops a generic, conceptual framework that identifies, categorises and describes packed product paradoxes on two system levels: supply chain and company levels. The categories of paradoxes refer to performing, organising, belonging and learning.

The framework provides a new theoretical explanation of conflicts of interest in packaging logistics in terms of paradoxical tensions related to packed products in supply chains. It structures and increases general understanding of such tensions within and between actors in a supply chain. The paper also discusses differences in terminology between tensions which are possible to settle and those which lead to paradoxes.

The framework provides a structure for analysing the organisational impact of strategic packaging decisions. It can help highlight different stakeholders' organisational constraints related to packaging.

The framework's systematic categorisation of four types of paradoxical tensions, with thorough descriptions of the meaning of packed product paradoxes of each type, offers an expanded and in-depth explanation of the organisational impacts of packed products in supply chains.

This study aimed to provide an exploratory analysis of digitalization processes in small professional service firms (SPSFs) by examining their main drivers and barriers and their impact on customer management practices, considering the intra-organizational, inter-organizational and service offering dimensions.

This study adopted a qualitative, exploratory and inductive research methodology based on in-depth interviews with 19 owners or consultants of small tax/accounting firms, focusing on the role of digitalization in their internal and external processes.

The findings reveal external and internal barriers to and drivers of digitalization, as well as its effects on customer management practices. They also reveal the emergence of tensions related to the intra-organizational, inter-organizational and service offering dimensions.

This work contributes to the research on the role of digital technologies in the professional service sector, with a focus on SPSFs, which has thus far received limited attention. This research highlights the complexity of combining increasingly standardized processes and services with the need to maintain flexibility and informality in internal and external interactions.

Women leaders struggle with the persistent paradoxical expectations. Literature suggests that a paradox mindset helps to leverage these tensions. This study aims to understand the nexus between the microfoundations of individual women leaders’ experiences, their responses and the organisational context, which enables or hinders their paradox mindset.

This study adopted a qualitative approach by conducting semistructured interviews with 14 women, all senior leaders in corporate South Africa.

The results reveal the interaction in the nexus between, firstly, women leaders’ authenticity and awareness as key anchors that enable them to adopt a paradox mindset and, secondly, the organisation’s role in creating hindrances or opportunities to leverage tensions. Women leaders in our sample applied one of two strategies: they either adapted to the environment or curated a subenvironment. This study shows that, if done authentically, through her own agency, a woman can influence interactions that make it easier to manage tensions within her environment, especially those created by negative performance evaluation because of unconscious institutional gender bias.

The extent to which the findings of this research can be generalised is constrained by the selected research context.

This research contributes to the literature on paradox theory by revealing organisational contextual influencers, such as institutional bias in negative performance evaluation, which hinders a woman leader’s opportunity to be hired or promoted. These organisational influences also interact with women leaders’ ability to embrace paradox and internally leverage agentic and communal tensions.

The purpose of this paper is to advance the understanding of paradoxes, underlying tensions and potential management strategies when integrating digital technologies into existing lean-based production systems (LPSs), with the aim of achieving synergies and fostering the development of production systems.

This study adopts a collaborative management research (CMR) approach to identify patterns of organisational tensions and paradoxes and explore management strategies to overcome them. The data were collected through interviews and focus group interviews with experts on lean and/or digital technologies from the companies, from documents and from workshops with the in-case researchers.

The findings of this paper provide insights into the salient organisational paradoxes embraced in the integration of digital technologies in LPS by identifying different aspects of the performing, organising, learning and belonging paradoxes. Furthermore, the findings demonstrate the intricacies and relatedness between different paradoxes and their resolutions, and more specifically, how a resolution strategy adopted to manage one paradox might unintentionally generate new tensions. This, in turn, calls for either re-contextualising actions to counteract the drift or the adoption of new resolution strategies.

This paper adds perspective to operations management (OM) research through the use of paradox theory, and we (1) provide a fine-grained perspective on why integration sometimes “fails” and label the forces of internal drift as mechanisms of imbalances and (2) provide detailed insights into how different management and resolution strategies are adopted, especially by identifying re-contextualising actions as a key to rebalancing organisational paradoxes in favour of the integration of digital technologies in LPSs.

The aim of the study is to deepen the knowledge about municipalities' risk communication for preparedness. This objective was pursued by analyzing how risk communication functions were organized in municipalities and by scrutinizing tensions in risk communication management.

The study relies on 19 qualitative, semi-structured interviews with communication practitioners in Swedish municipalities. The sample was purposive and included Swedish municipalities varying in number of inhabitants, geographical location, degree of urbanization, size and risk profile.

Risk communication is seen as a sub-field of crisis communication in municipalities' communication management. The task of initiating risk communication activities and campaigns is frequently assigned to the municipalities' safety units or emergency coordinators and is normally not part of communication practitioners' duties. Municipal communication practitioners often face challenges in trying to demonstrate the significance of the practitioners' role in risk communication and other risk-related activities within the municipality. The practitioners' work is characterized by four categories of tensions that are identified as follows: constitutional/legal, organizational, cultural and technological.

The identified tensions in risk communication are important for reflexive practitioners to consider, and the paper suggests three steps that municipal communication managers can take to handle them.

The study contributes with novel knowledge about municipal communication management in a context of risk communication. The study challenges the existing and dominant risk communication research and offers a more contextual and reflexive understanding of actual risk communication processes in municipalities.

As hybrid organizations become increasingly common, the authors observe that some hybrid forms are becoming institutionalized and legitimated. The authors explore the implications of the institutionalization of hybridity, addressing both the internal tensions that plague many hybrids and the external tensions stemming from evaluator assessments and stakeholder uncertainty. The authors propose that institutionalization can dampen internal tensions associated with hybridity and also facilitate legitimation and acceptance by external audiences. The authors present identity as a useful theoretical lens through which to examine these questions, as identities are born from, but also have the potential to modify, existing institutional arrangements. The authors present directions for future research at the juncture of identity, hybridity, and institutionalization, suggesting potential avenues of inquiry in this productive stream of research.

This paper aims to analyze the digital servitization (DS) process with the paradox theory lens. The purpose is to catch how intra- and inter-organizational tensions generate complexity along a DS journey to find “where” and “when” industrial companies can intervene to face them.

The methodology is a qualitative, in-depth single case study, which longitudinally explores the DS strategy of a manufacturer along with three phases of development: design, implementation and assessment.

The analysis reveals six intra- and inter-organizational tensions in DS and provides insights on tensions’ origin and how to face them. A theoretical framework on DS complexity and an empirical framework on tensions’ origin is produced.

The research combines service and organizational paradox literature. Together with a longitudinal methodology, it results in a spatial and temporal analysis of DS, from which theoretical and managerial implications are drawn.

This paper investigates the consequences of job insecurity among hotel employees during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Data were obtained from the employees of two five-star chain hotels in Turkey. The study hypotheses were tested via structural equation modeling.

The research findings demonstrate that job insecurity exacerbates job tension. Job tension erodes employees’ trust in organization and aggravates their propensity to leave work early and be late for work. As hypothesized, job tension mediates the effect of job insecurity on organizational trust and the abovementioned outcomes.

This study adds to the hospitality literature by assessing the interrelationships of job insecurity, job tension, organizational trust and nonattendance intentions.