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The multiple faces of tension: dualities in decision-making

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Abstract

In making decisions about strategic and operational actions, managers commonly need to consider dualities such as long-term versus short-term, innovation versus tradition, and stability versus change. As these dualities often entail contradictory objectives, paradoxical tensions may arise in their pursuit. Despite growing interest in this topic, the extant literature offers little guidance on how paradoxical framing can be used to understand these tensions. To address this gap, a qualitative study of 18 marketing managers in the Austrian traditional beverage industry investigated how managers interpret and assess such tensions by deploying paradoxical cognitive frames. Our findings suggest that these managers confront duality-type decisions under three categories: identity ambiguity, renewal dynamics and competing coalitions. In addition, we find that marketing managers perceive such tensions as either vicious, virtuous, dialectical, ambivalent or neutral. The present study contributes to the literature by empirically addressing context-specific dualities in a traditional industry that involves marketing and innovation activities. The findings also extend our knowledge of duality-related paradoxical tensions and their particular managerial framing.

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Notes

  1. Please note that duality and paradox have been treated as distinct but also partially overlapping concepts in the previous literature. In this study we have chosen to use “duality” as an umbrella concept to generally describe decision-making pairs, and “paradox” when there is a simultaneous need to fulfill opposite demands of the duality. For more discussion on the conceptual distinctions of duality and paradox, please see e.g., Fairhurst and Putnam (2018), Gaim et al. (2018), Putnam et al. (2016), and Smith and Lewis (2011). See also Table 1 of the current paper.

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  1. School of Business and Management, Lappeenranta University of Technology, PL 20, Skinnarilankatu 34, 53850, Lappeenranta, Finland

    Päivi Karhu & Paavo Ritala

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  1. Päivi Karhu
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Correspondence to Paavo Ritala.

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Karhu, P., Ritala, P. The multiple faces of tension: dualities in decision-making. Rev Manag Sci 14, 485–518 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11846-018-0298-8

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