Leadership Ignoring Paradox to Maintain Inertial Order

Abstract

Paradoxical inertia is an organization condition that has received far less attention than organizational change. We investigate, ethnographically, an Australian Intellectual Property service firm, whose Board members proved to be unable to respond strategically to a rapidly changing environment that threatened their organization’s survival. In the face of discontinuous change, this failure to address the management of paradoxes threatening embedded routines reinforced a paralysing inertia. Extant research has emphasized how managers handle paradox; we discuss how they fail to do so. The inertia is derived from the finessing of tensions as non-issues. Constituted as non-issues there were non-decisions about these tensions that maintained internal stability and harmony; they did so, however, in world of change increasingly disrespectful of internal concerns for ongoing professional stability and harmony. The inability to become collectively and critically aware of the specific forms of inertia undermined recursive learning and thus the transformation of the sensemaking practices of the Board.