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Les environnements dynamiques poussent de plus en plus les organisations à répondre à des demandes concurrentes et imbriquées. Ce phénomène accentue les tensions dans l’organisation du travail quotidien des employés. Notre recherche vise à comprendre quelles sont les stratégies d’adaptation mises en place par les cadres intermédiaires pour faire face aux tensions paradoxales en contexte de changement. Il y a relativement peu de recherches dans la littérature portant sur les stratégies individuelles mobilisées par des acteurs organisationnels pour surmonter les paradoxes organisationnels. Notre recherche repose sur une étude de cas approfondie menée durant quatre ans et portant sur une transformation informatique dans une organisation internationale. Cette recherche qualitative a permis d’ouvrir la boîte noire de l’expérience paradoxale vécue par les cadres intermédiaires et leur manière d’y répondre. Nous avons obtenu trois principaux résultats. Premièrement, notre recherche explicite les paradoxes organisationnels dans une perspective empirique, en décortiquant les tensions vécues par les cadres intermédiaires durant un processus de changement organisationnel. Deuxièmement, nos résultats font émerger différentes stratégies d’adaptation mises en place par les cadres intermédiaires. Troisièmement, en reliant ces stratégies d’adaptation à chaque tension paradoxale rencontrée, nos résultats démontrent que les cadres intermédiaires utilisent d’abord des mécanismes d’ajustement discursif pour faire face aux paradoxes de type « appartenance » et « organisationnel ». Par contre, ils mobilisent plutôt des mécanismes de scission (splitting) des tensions paradoxales pour faire face au paradoxe de type « performance ». Ces résultats permettent d’aider les dirigeants à mieux comprendre les comportements des cadres intermédiaires en contexte de changement afin de mettre en place des dispositifs de soutien adaptés.

Based on a case study of 21 middle managers impacted by the implementation of a new SAP system, this research aims to analyze how the change context intensifies the paradoxical nature of middle managers’ work. Based on two series of interviews, this research highlights the double difficulty encountered by middle managers in a change context: on the one hand, the exacerbation of day-to-day business tensions due to lack of time available; on the other hand, the addition of three tensions specifically related to the change context (change agent vs change recipient; change manager demands vs top manager demands; change demands vs business-as-usual). The complexity of middle managers’ work can lead them to be opposed to the change project by developing resistance not towards the change itself but vis-à-vis the consequences it entails such as work overload.

This paper aims to understand how middle managers cope with paradoxical tensions. As it is increasingly common for organizations to have to simultaneously juggle with competing demands (Smith & Lewis, 2011), the juxtaposition of coexisting opposites has increased experiences of paradoxical tensions, challenging organizational actors in their daily work. Among these actors, middle managers are generally more prone to tensions (Wooldridge, Schmidt, & Floyd, 2008) as organizations have become flatter due to downsizing and reengineering, and responsibility is delegated downwards (Balogun & Johnson, 2004), with middle managers reporting a significant increase in their workload (Armstrong-Stassen, 2005). As tension is considered to lead to burnout and stress, more recent work has recognized that it is not the existence of contradictions per se that is productive or destructive, but the way they are managed (Tracy, 2004). Despite accumulate insights into the management of organizational paradoxes (Jarzabkowski, Lê, & Van de Ven, 2013), relatively little is known about coping strategies at the intermediate level (Lüscher & Lewis, 2008). In response, this longitudinal real-time analysis of an IT transformation program opens the black box of middle managers’ responses to paradoxical tensions. Specifically, our original contributions are twofold: firstly, to identify seven dualities through which organizational paradoxes are perceived by middle managers, and secondly, to categorize their responses to cope with paradoxes into four active and three defensive strategies. We suggest that our overview of paradoxical tensions and related coping strategies provides significant insights for organizations as well as for their managers.

This paper aims to understand how middle managers cope with paradoxical tension in change context. As it is increasingly common for organizations to have to simultaneously juggle with competing demands such as change vs stability (Farjoun, 2010; Stoltzfuz et al., 2011), exploitation vs exploration (Smith & Tushman, 2005) or collaboration vs control (Sundaramurthy & Lewis, 2003), the juxtaposition of coexisting opposites has increased experiences of paradoxical tension, challenging organizational actors in their daily work...