Year: 2005
Type: article
Abstract: Sustained organizational performance depends on top management teams effectively exploring and exploiting. These strategic agendas are, however, associated with contradictory organizational architectures. Using the literature on paradox, contradictions, and conflict, we develop a model of managing strategic contradictions that is associated with paradoxical cognition—senior leaders and/or their teams (a) articulating a paradoxical frame, (b) differentiating between the strategy and architecture for the existing product and those for innovation, and (c) integrating between those strategies and architectures. We further argue that the locus of paradox in top management teams resides either with the senior leader or with the entire team. We identify a set of top management team conditions that facilitates a team’s ability to engage in paradoxical cognitive processes.
Source: Organization Science
Authors: Wendy K. Smith, Michael L. Tushman
Institution: Harvard University
Language: English
Subfield: Strategy and Management
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2108114881
