Navigating paradoxical tensions through the interplay of temporal structures

Abstract

Organizations at the boundary of two institutional fields are often required to meet contradictory but interrelated demands. While transcendence – accepting both sets of demands as necessary and complementary – has been shown to be an important response to such paradoxes, achieving it places significant cognitive and behavioural strain on managers. Despite the importance of ‘and/both’ approaches for the survival of institutionally pluralistic organizations, we still know little about the practices that managers resort to when initial efforts to achieve transcendence break down. Through a longitudinal study of a joint-venture spanning two institutional fields, we demonstrate that managers can address otherwise insurmountable paradoxical tensions through an emphasis on the interplay of their temporal structures. By deconstructing conflicting demands into their respective temporal qualities of temporal depth – defined as the span into the past and future that they typically consider – and temporal horizons – measured by the frequency of milestones within this span – managers can process paradoxical demands in novel ways. Through a process of temporal work, managers on both sides of the institutional divide were able to negotiate a new, shared temporal depth that accommodated the temporal horizons of both sides. We show that this process enabled managers to achieve a form of transcendence, providing a structure within which to consider the demands on both sides as necessary and complementary, which was not previously possible. We suggest that ‘zooming in’ to focus on the complexity of temporal structures can unveil novel and surprising sensemaking processes amongst managers navigating paradoxes.