2025

Lempiälä, Tea; Tiitinen, Sanni; Fugere, Taylor

In this paper, we examine leadership practices through which active, integrative responses are fostered across knotted paradoxes in a hybrid organization. Our study shows how three sets of practices at multiple levels of organizational life foster a culture that embeds synergistic complexity across knotted paradoxes of learning-performing, belonging-performing, and organizing-performing. Importantly, our research shows that it is precisely the ability of the leadership approach to address the knotted nature of these paradoxes that enables a sustained integrative culture in the organization. We adopt a practice perspective to paradox, which emphasizes paradoxes as being intertwined with the interactions and everyday endeavors of organizational actors, highlighting the social and cultural embeddedness of the identified practices. We examine this in the context of a social enterprise that seamlessly combines strict quality standards and an uncompromising social mission. Our paper contributes to paradox research that has examined the interconnected nature of organizational paradoxes, and highlights the need for integrative approaches not just for one paradox, but across paradoxes of performing, learning, belonging, and organizing.