Exploring autonomy in pluralistic organizations: How top managers use responses to paradox to shape autonomous strategic planning

Abstract Literature has provided valuable insight into how top managers lead strategic processes in pluralistic organizations and address challenges of pluralism. However, there is still limited understanding of how top managers shape employees' autonomy in strategic planning, with concrete consequences for alignment. Through an inductive case study at a Scandinavian university faculty, this paper investigates this gap by looking into how top managers use different responses to paradox to enable and constrain autonomy. The findings show how top managers shape autonomy by articulating responses to paradox through particular types of strategy discourse that help them impose and release power over others, thereby creating different patterns of autonomy. These findings contribute to the literature on top managers' roles in pluralistic organizations and the paradox literature. They show how responses to paradox question roles and change mindsets to introduce alternative approaches to strategic planning, and how shifting power relationships are related to the reasoning behind specific responses. They also demonstrate how different types of alignment emerge through communicative practices that enroll others in particular mechanisms.