Organizational Resilience Through Paradox Work: Empirical Insights from Critical Infrastructure Organizations in Germany

Abstract In times of ongoing uncertainty and disruption, organizational resilience plays a key role in sustaining functionality and enabling adaptation. A central challenge of resilience lies in balancing stability and flexibility – an inherent organizational paradox. While this tension is well acknowledged in theory, there is limited insight into how individuals within organizations navigate it in practice, particularly in settings with high societal relevance and structural constraints. This study explores how employees and managers in German critical infrastructure organizations engage with the flexibility-stability paradox in their daily work, and how these practices relate to organizational resilience. Based on 40 qualitative interviews, the study identifies three key areas where tensions are especially pronounced: (1) organizational framework conditions between structure and adaptability, (2) work behavior between autonomy and collective processes, and (3) leadership between egalitarianism and directive clarity. The findings contribute to resilience research by offering empirically grounded insights into individual responses to paradoxical demands. In addition, the study further develops the concept of paradox work by highlighting its contextual nature and the variation in how individuals approach tension-laden situations.