Digital Technologies in the Workplace: A Ne(s)t of Paradoxes

Abstract

Digital technologies are omnipresent in our professional and personal lives. While they provide manifold potentials, digital technologies also cause tensions. Many of these tensions are of paradox nature – they confront individuals with conflicting, yet synergetic and interdependent, alternatives that persist over time. Coping with ten-sions by unlocking their potential through a paradox mindset has become an increas-ingly valuable capability. By using a qualitative research design and applying a par-adox lens to the interview data from middle managers, this study explores the ten-sions that managers perceive in the increasingly digital workplace. We find empirical support for a previously identified paradox (the autonomy paradox) and we identify additional paradoxical tensions, which increase with rising exposure to digital tech-nologies – the information, interaction, opportunity, and engagement paradoxes. Furthermore, our results indicate a nested, meta-paradoxical nature of the engage-ment and opportunity paradoxes that combine a wide variety of tensions in an over-arching theme