Emotion and Paradox: Engaging with Emotional Dynamics That Underpin Organizational Paradox

In this essay, we develop the connection between emotion and paradox. We argue that existing thinking has favored a cognitive view of the role of emotion based on the effort to make sense of emotions in context. This has created both limited comprehension of the impact of emotion in organizational paradox studies and limited opportunity for theory development. In response, we create a framework for the analysis of emotion and paradox based on systems psychodynamic theory. An assumption that informs our framework is that emotional dynamics associated with tensions are likely to be both defensive and receptive. Tensions connected with underlying emotions simultaneously both support creative purposes and create personal and social defenses in organizations. We aim to encourage paradox scholar’s engagement with unconscious emotions and dynamics that underpin the lived experience of organizational paradox, particularly tensions between knowing and not knowing. Our framework helps address problems that arise when emotions are positioned as either positive or negative, rather than both positive and negative. We share examples from business and management school learning opportunities and from well-known empirical papers to illustrate our argument. We link this to a call for action to develop emotion and paradox learning, teaching, and research.