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The COVID-19 pandemic has caused havoc on a global scale for supply chains, which put forward higher demand for organizations to reassess their global supply chain strategy and improve supply chain sustainability. The purpose of this paper is to understand how leader's paradoxical cognition affect supply chain sustainability.

This study conceptualizes a research model grounded in upper echelons theory and propose a chain-mediating model under the moderating effect of big data analytics. Using PLS-SEM method, we test the hypotheses using survey data collected from supply chain managers or leaders of the supply chain team from 193 firms.

The results indicate that supply chain ambidexterity and organizational learning play a mediating role in the relationship between leaders' paradoxical cognition on supply chain sustainability, respectively, and these two variables have a chain-mediating role in the relationship above. In addition, the big data analytics negatively moderates the relationship between leader's paradoxical cognition and organizational learning, and further moderates our chain mediating model.

This research initiatively focuses on the micro-foundations of supply chain sustainability from managerial cognition and firstly provides empirical evidence about the impact of leader's paradoxical cognition on supply chain sustainability.

Despite the escalating significance and intricate nature of supply chains, there has been limited scholarly attention devoted to exploring the cognitive processes that underlie supply chain management. Drawing on cognitive-behavioral theory, the authors propose a moderated-mediation model to investigate how paradoxical leadership impacts manufacturing supply chain resilience.

By conducting a two-wave study encompassing 164 supply chain managers from Chinese manufacturing firms, the authors employ partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to empirically examine and validate the proposed hypotheses.

The findings indicate that managers' paradoxical cognition significantly affects supply chain resilience, with supply chain ambidexterity acting as a mediating mechanism. Surprisingly, the study findings suggest that big data analytics negatively moderate the effect of paradoxical cognition on supply chain ambidexterity and supply chain resilience, while positively moderating the effect of supply chain ambidexterity on supply chain resilience.

These findings shed light on the importance of considering cognitive factors and the potential role of big data analytics in enhancing manufacturing supply chain resilience, which enriches the study of behavioral operations.

The results offer managerial guidance for leaders to use paradoxical cognition frames and big data analytics properly, offering theoretical insight for future research in manufacturing supply chain resilience.

This is the first empirical research examining the impact of paradoxical leadership on supply chain resilience by considering the role of big data analytics and supply chain ambidexterity.

Past studies have associated top management’s paradoxical cognition and actions with the ambidextrous performance of firms. Compared to large firms, the top management members of small firms play a focal role in resolving the paradoxical tensions of explorative and exploitative innovation strategies. Anchored in the upper echelons perspective, the purpose of this paper is to explore the influences of two top management team (TMT) processes on organizational ambidexterity: TMT behavioral integration and TMT involvement in small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

The research is set in the context of 78 hi-tech SMEs across IT, biotech, and electronics industry. Multiple responses were collected from each firm. The authors used hierarchical regression analysis to test the hypotheses.

The findings from this paper demonstrate that the process of TMT behavioral integration enhances organizational ambidexterity. However, the results show that neither the top management’s involvement, nor the interaction of the top management’s involvement with the behavioral integration of a TMT, enhances organizational ambidexterity.

The limited examination of two TMT processes has restricted the scope of this paper. The study has also been unable to measure paradoxical cognition in the TMT objectively and without proxy measures.

The results from this study add to the existing literature on paradoxical cognition, ambidexterity, and behavioral integration. The results from this study also lend support to the upper echelons perspective. Further, the findings from this paper present significant practical implications by throwing light on the senior team processes necessary for small ambidextrous firms in emerging economies. The volatile and rather unpredictable nature of emerging economies underscore the relevance of examining the facilitating conditions of small ambidextrous firms in these countries.

In the face of external paradoxical requirements, the cognitive framework of managers and employees use to perceive, interpret and reconstruct information is important to ease anxiety and improve job performance. The Yin-Yang balancing of eastern philosophical thought is particularly good at explaining and predicting changes and conflict environments. For this reason, this study aims to propose the eastern construction of the paradoxical cognitive framework based on the Yin-Yang balancing theory and its antecedent framework.

This paper contrasts the similarity and differences between Chinese and Western philosophy’s thoughts on paradoxes. On this basis, the eastern construction of the paradoxical cognitive framework is proposed. Then, the paper puts forward the antecedent framework of managers’ cognitive framework and employees’ paradoxical cognitive framework.

This paper proposes the eastern construction of the paradoxical cognitive framework includes the following three dimensions: the unity-in-diversity of paradoxical elements, the asymmetric balance of paradoxical elements and mutual transformation of paradoxical elements. In addition, this paper proposes an antecedent framework of the eastern construction of the paradoxical cognitive framework – the paradoxical requirement of organizational environment exerts a direct impact on managers’ and employees’ paradoxical cognitive framework; managers’ paradoxical cognitive framework has a positive impact on paradoxical leadership; paradoxical leadership exerts an indirect impact on employees’ paradoxical cognitive framework through the collective paradoxical cognitive framework; paradoxical leadership directly affects employees’ paradoxical cognitive framework.

This paper focuses on comparing the similarities and differences of the individual paradoxical cognitive framework in Chinese and Western cultures and proposes the eastern construction of the paradoxical cognitive framework and its antecedent framework. Future research needs to further verify the theoretical framework proposed in this paper.

This paper makes a detailed comparison of the paradox views in Chinese and Western philosophy. It is the first to propose the eastern construction of the paradoxical cognitive framework and its antecedent framework, laying a theoretical foundation for future empirical research.

The purpose of this paper is to reframe the debate about the tension between management control and employee empowerment by drawing on a theory of paradox. Reframing the problem in this way draws attention to the variety of ways in which organisations can attend to both control and empowerment simultaneously.

The authors undertake a conceptual examination of the relationship between empowerment and control using a paradox theory lens. First, the authors bring together two dimensions of empowerment – structural empowerment and psychological empowerment – and combine them to produce three new empowerment “scenarios”: illusory empowerment, obstructed empowerment and authentic empowerment. For each of these three scenarios, the central tenets of paradox theory are applied in order to explain the nature of the paradoxical tension, anticipated behavioural responses and the resulting challenges for ongoing management control.

The authors find that neither structural nor psychological empowerment alone can account for variation in behavioural responses to management control. The conceptual analysis highlights the interplay of socio-ideological control and systems of accountability in generating psychological empowerment and demonstrates that this does not come at a cost to management control but instead results in a reduction in the scale and scope of ongoing challenges.

This paper contributes a new theoretical perspective on the classic problem of tension between management control and employee empowerment. Rather than positioning control and empowerment either as a managerial choice or dialectic, the authors identify three different ways in which organisations can engage with both paradoxical elements simultaneously.

The purpose of the study is to explore inductively the unique paradoxical tensions central to family business (FB) and to analyze how FB's members face these tensions and their implications in the personal and professional realms.

A multiple-case study with 11 parent–offspring dyads from Portuguese FBs was conducted putting the focus on the micro-level interactions.

The slopes of roles and relationality in FBs produces three persistent sets of tensions around cognition, emotion and action. These tensions exist in a paradoxical state, containing potentiality for synergy or trade-off.

Our study is the first to empirically demonstrate that paradoxical tensions between parent and offspring are interrelated, by emphasizing the uniqueness of FB as a paradoxical setting and offering insights to negotiating of these singular paradoxes.

Grounded in Yijing, the wellspring of Chinese philosophies, this research aims to propose a novel interpretation of the indigenous Yin-Yang harmony cognitive framework, and to elaborate on how to use it as a meta-theorising tool to characterise the conflicting yet complementary dynamics of strategy, commonly seen as the prominent feature of Chinese strategic thinking.

Using the Yin-Yang harmony approach (i.e. Yin as the endogenous factors and Yang the exogenous factors), the authors first put forward eight paradoxical situations facing Chinese organisations as per the changing paradigm of Yijing. Then the authors use the thick description model as a roadmap to identify three evolving trajectories in Chinese higher education (HE) system. Finally, they raise four strategic propositions regarding how competing HE institutes handle the conflicting yet complementary dynamics in China.

Results show that the main strategic choices used by two different types of higher education institutes to cope with the current high-level uncertainty and competition could be described in terms of the two “Qian” and “Li” strategic situations, respectively. More details are discussed in the four propositions.

This research brings potentially valuable implications for global regulators, policymakers, providers and other stakeholders through better understanding of HE-related issues, as well as certain distinct conceptual complexities in terms of developing strategies in China. It implies potentially significant differences in cognition between East and West, and illustrates what may be their workings.

This indigenous eight-dimensional paradigm demonstrates the conflicting yet complementary dynamic gestalt of organisational strategic choices that may only be realised in Chinese terms, and that cannot be elucidated by theories purely derived from Western experience. It thus can foster the transfer of understanding between the East and West and open a new chapter for future research.

This paper aims to explore the social entrepreneurs’ attention allocation and their resource action that lead to hybrid organization using the paradox theory. Paradox theory deepens understandings of the varied nature, dynamics and outcomes of entrepreneurial tensions. This study explores the systematic effects of internal and external attention on both economic and social performance.

First, theoretically, hypotheses linking different attention allocations to ambidextrous behavior and entrepreneurial performance were formulated. Subsequently, the empirical studies based on Chinese social entrepreneurship were conducted to test the hypotheses.

The study provides support to the hypotheses showing that external attention is linked to resource acquisition and social performance, while internal attention is linked to resource acquisition and strategic human resource management and thus these ambidextrous behaviors promote both social and economic performance. Furthermore, normal pressure moderates the relations between internal attention and strategic human resource management only.

The research measures entrepreneurs’ attention with questionnaire rather than psych test. Also, static data rather than longitudinal research is designed to test the hypotheses.

Deeper understanding of the attention of social entrepreneurs and resource action can help entrepreneurial outcomes and can potentially contribute to paradox and tension management by entrepreneurial practitioners in China.

Social entrepreneurs’ different attention allocation and related entrepreneurial ambidextrous behavior processes are linked to paradoxical thinking for the first time. The findings of this research can potentially enhance social entrepreneurship paradoxical thinking aimed at preventing mission drift.

Much of management research has been based on what can be called a “deficit‐based” approach. In contrast, there is the recent emergence of a new paradigm shift with the appearance of positive organizational studies. This paper aims to discuss how to integrate knowledge coming from both sides of the fence and exemplify it by testing a model that looks for the intricate and paradoxical relationships between optimism and pessimism.

Using cluster analysis, a theoretical model is developed that includes the existence of a paradoxical type of personality beyond the dichotomous optimistic and pessimistic profiles. The validity of this model is tested in a sample of 343 workers of a company.

The data evidenced a good fit with the four cluster theoretical model and showed that almost half of the sample (46.36 percent) were clustered as “paradoxical optimists”, individuals that simultaneously reported optimistic and pessimistic expectations towards the future.

Management researchers should make an effort to better understand how positive and negative phenomena in organizations relate to one another, namely by studying paradoxical personality individuals. They should go beyond the normal positive/negative dichotomy and search for more integrative forms of functioning. In the specific case of optimism, they should also distinguish paradoxical optimists from both “purely” optimists and pessimists.

The paper illustrates that positive and negative issues in organizations can and should be integrated in more integrative theories. It develops and shows evidence of the construct of “paradoxical optimist”, a personality type that should be better investigated.

This study aims to explore how employees respond to tensions in groups and whether experiencing tensions could spur on their creativity (including radical and incremental creativity). Through integrating the literature on tension and regulatory focus theory, this study develops a model depicting the process from experiencing tensions to creativity via regulatory foci. This study further investigates the moderating effect of employees’ hierarchical level on these processes.

A two-wave survey was conducted with a sample of 375 employees in China. MPLUS was used to examine the moderated mediation model.

The results show that experiencing tensions can simultaneously activate employees’ prevention focus and promotion focus, both of which in turn influence radical and incremental creativity. Specifically, prevention focus mediates the negative relationship between experiencing tensions and the two aforementioned types of creativity, and promotion focus mediates the positive relationship between experiencing tensions and radical creativity. Employees’ hierarchical level significantly buffers the link between experiencing tensions and prevention focus.

Organizations should optimize their work design to simplify the role demand of employees in the early stages of their careers. Top-tier employees should be encouraged and empowered to think and act with a paradoxical approach, which can drive them to generate more creative outcomes. Besides, when aiming to discover radical ideas, managers should emphatically cultivate employees’ promotion focus.

This study contributes to the literature on tension through revealing and testing the dual paths resulted by employees’ experiencing tensions. It also advances current research by contrasting the effects of experiencing tensions on different types of creativity.