Abstract
Digital technologies have become omnipresent in our professional and personal lives. While they provide numerous opportunities, they also cause tensions, many of which are paradoxical. They confront us with conflicting yet synergetic and interdependent alternatives that persist over time—such as benefiting from the increasing availability and access to information at the risk of information overload and technostress. Thus far, we know little about the specific paradoxes caused by digital technologies in the workplace and how managers perceive and cope with them. This article offers a comprehensive perspective on the multiplicity and interrelatedness of paradoxes in the digital white-collar workplace and suggests how managers can develop effective coping mechanisms for convergent change and transforming work practices in paradoxical environments.
Keywords
To further explore the effects of these technologies on individuals’ behavior and related tensions, we build on the paradox literature 14 to argue that the emerging complexity brought about by engaging with digital technologies provides the foundations for paradoxical tensions that persist over time and challenge us to strike a balance between contradictory but synergetic and interdependent options. 15 The term “tensions” refers to “elements that seem logical individually but inconsistent and even absurd when juxtaposed.” 16 The paradox perspective emphasizes interdependencies, not only at the individual-level tensions among the opposing alternatives but also between multiple tensions. 17 Organizations and their members constantly face multiple situations in which they must make choices between opposing alternatives, such as deciding whether to respond to social challenges or maximize economic profits, the choice between exploration and exploitation emphases, and the balance between collaborative and competitive activities. 18 People’s innate tendency when reacting to conflicting demands is to focus on one demand at the expense of another. 19 However, contradictory demands provide rich potential: apparently distinct and opposing elements can be synergetic by being tied through informing, enabling, and reinforcing mechanisms. 20 To activate tensions’ synergetic potential, individuals need to recognize the complex relationships between their opposing elements. 21
An example of a tension in the digital workplace is the autonomy paradox, which illustrates how digital communication tools provide high levels of flexibility while creating the pressure of constant connectivity and availability. 22 Overall, there is an increasing awareness of the diffusion of digital technologies in the workplace and of related tensions. However, both researchers and practitioners lack an overall perspective of what the tensions and related paradoxes—that digital technologies cause in the workplace—are and how managers perceive and cope with these tensions. Therefore, this study’s objective is to explore how and why the diffusion of digital technologies in the white-collar workplace causes tensions by answering the following research question: which tensions and related paradoxes do digital technologies create in the workplace, and how do managers perceive and cope with them?
While prior research mostly focused on managing individual paradoxes, 23 this study aims to provide a better understanding of the multiplicity of paradoxes related to the digital workplace, their interrelatedness, and the corresponding coping mechanisms. Our results indicate that with higher exposure to digital technologies, managers experience individual- and meta-level paradoxes. Individual-level paradoxes refer to tensions that occur again and again in specific contexts. 24 Individual paradoxes (autonomy, interaction, and information) occur when the appropriation of workplace technologies leads to immediate organizational changes—individuals adjust their behaviors to deal with these tensions. Meta-paradoxes occur when workplace technologies challenge the nature of work and its meaning. Meta-paradoxes are less specific, less structured, and less similar to one another than individual-level paradoxes; for those reasons and others, they are more complex to understand and embrace. 25 Meta-paradoxical tensions indicate the interrelatedness of individual paradoxes 26 and call for an exploration of how these tensions co-appear, influence one another, and evolve in the workplace with rising exposure to digital technologies.
Managers have distinct coping mechanisms for the individual- and meta-level paradox contexts: when individual tensions are perceived, rules, mores, and subjective solution spaces indicate more prescriptive coping strategies. By contrast, when meta-level paradoxes surface, managers need to continually guide their employees, create learning spaces to experiment with the new technologies, and adjust the meaning of work. By reflecting on the effects on the nature of work from convergent change to transforming work practices, 27 we demonstrate the consequences of these transitions at the individual level. This shows that to develop effective coping mechanisms, we need to look at these increasingly nested paradoxes together. Managers need to think holistically about how to cope with paradoxes, both individual and joint. Furthermore, they should enable their teams to create awareness and cope with the multiple levels of paradox tensions caused by digital technologies in the workplace.
What Is the Paradox Lens and Why Is It Important for the Digital Workplace?
The Increasingly Digital Workplace
Avoiding digital technologies in the workplace is simply no longer an option, with COVID-19 and related lockdown measures having profoundly strengthened the development of digital and virtual work. 28 This has created a lasting effect. Employees have become more comfortable with using digital tools, and managers are more accepting of physical distance from their teams. While many organizations use hybrid workplaces that allow a combination of virtual and on-location work, a few organizations like Twitter have already decided to move to 100% digital work in the future. 29
The lockdown measures did not leave companies and their employees any choice and thus helped many individuals and organizations challenge their perspectives on digital work arrangements. Confronted with the absolute necessity to use digital tools, we learned how these technologies could help us be more efficient and productive. That potential obviously existed before COVID-19, with innovations like digital assistants helping complete or eliminate mundane and administrative tasks and freeing up capacity to focus on the most important things. For example, robot reporters, such as Cyborg at Bloomberg or Heliograf at the Washington Post, increasingly support journalists. In Norway, Bergens Tidende uses robot-generated real estate content: since 2020, 12,000 automated articles have been published, generating 3,000 to 4,000 pageviews a day. 30 Furthermore, in many service contexts, an increasing number of text- and voice-based chatbots answer basic inquiries in place of human service agents. For example, EY uses Goldie, a chatbot in human resources (HR) that reduced the workload of human HR staff by 10,000 hours within only six months in 2018. 31 Digital technologies are also assisting workers through real-time feedback. Cogito, for example, offers a call center program based on AI to increase human operators’ performance by constantly monitoring calls and instantly suggesting improvements to the human call center agent. 32
There is scarce opposition to the potential benefits of such technologies in the workplace (whether digital, physical, or blended). However, the increasing use of digital technologies at work is a double-edged sword. To help us manage our emails, we have to disclose not only the content and contact details of our correspondence but also our email habits and workflows. 33 This disclosure costs more than the monthly service fee that a few tool providers charge; many of them offer users convenience in return for access to their data. 34 Many users do not mind this, as they believe that their data are online anyway or they have nothing to hide. 35 Although these data might not appear valuable, they enable technologies to learn and improve. The better such technologies become, the more tasks they can take over. For example, there are now white-collar robots like Amelia, an IPSoft Company, and Einstein from Salesforce that are designed to replace human workers. 36 Amelia is an experienced, intelligent virtual agent that interacts with customers and employees in roles like IT operations expert or customer service agent. 37 Amelia only involves humans when it cannot handle the situation alone. 38 Most managers of Western-based companies tend to downplay the emphasis on the automation of their digital transformation activities in public, whereas Asian managers such as Richard Liu, the founder of the Chinese e-commerce company JD.com, openly emphasize the target of one day having a 100% automated company. 39 Evidence exists that the use of chatbots reduces a firm’s need for human workers. For instance, TD Ameritrade, a U.S.-based financial brokerage firm, has not hired any new human customer service agents—despite rising customer numbers—since it started using chatbots in 2017; IBM’s HR chatbots handle 40% of the basic inquiries from the firm’s 35,000 staff members, meaning that IBM no longer fills the positions of HR staffers leaving the company. 40 In addition to automation, one might question the increasing influence machines have on their capacity to learn by observing human workers and tracking everything workers do to provide them with real-time feedback. 41 However, when machines give feedback to humans, the machines become, to a certain extent, adjunct managers of those humans and could influence rewards or punishments. In the gig economy, the use of automated statistics, usually in the form of rankings against peers, is a common practice to steer independent workers, as examples of Deliveroo’s algorithm monitoring illustrate. 42 Uber drivers have proven to be rather frustrated by the constant surveillance and dehumanized form of interactions with algorithms on the Uber app. 43 Furthermore, during the lockdown, the boundaries between work and personal life have become blurred, with employees struggling with the notion of time spent working 44 and increased levels of technostress and Zoom fatigue. 45 These examples clearly illustrate that digital technologies create tensions in the workplace and indicate that some of these tensions are paradoxical, which raises an important question: what do we really know about paradoxical tensions in the digital workplace?
Paradoxical Tensions in the Digital Workplace
A paradox consists of a tension—a contradiction of competing elements that appear logical on their own but are inconsistent when juxtaposed, perhaps even canceling each other out. 46 Moreover, these elements are interdependent—they simultaneously oppose and support each other in a dynamic and interwoven manner. 47 When such contradictions persist over time, they cannot be eliminated or resolved in favor of one of the opposing elements. 48 This implies that paradoxical tensions cannot be solved by splitting and choosing 49 and means that these tensions require a simultaneous balancing of the opposing poles because “no synthesis or choice is possible [or] necessarily desirable.” 50 Paradoxes are therefore double-edged swords that potentially provide synergetic and energizing effects as well as risk anxieties, stress, and counterproductive responses. 51 Recent research has shown that in many situations several potentially interrelated paradoxes address a common, overarching theme and therefore need to be addressed as a meta-paradox. 52 In this vein, Sheep et al. 53 proposed the concept of “tensional knots,” which are defined as “discursive formulations in which members construct tensions, not only as co-occurring, but as inseparable entanglements of interdependence.”
Previous research has identified a number of paradoxes in the use of digital technologies in the workplace. One example is the autonomy paradox, which was introduced in 2013; it captures how digital technologies provide us with the flexibility to work from anywhere while limiting our independence through expectations of constant availability. 54 Studies conducted during the lockdown confirmed that employees look for ways to demonstrate that they are engaged and available, 55 as their need for visibility in digital work environments regulates employee subjectivity. 56
Digitalization affects individuals by shaping personal habits, interests, and work routines. The ubiquitous connectivity of devices like smartphones and tablets challenges the established workweek. 57 Individuals tend to respond to emails and messages 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and to check constantly for updates. To ensure recovery times, many companies have even implemented digital time off policies that force employees to disconnect. Furthermore, the very notion of the workplace is changing, especially for desk workers: it is possible to work from anywhere, blurring the border between work and nonwork environments. 58 Mazmanian et al. 59 demonstrated that gains in personal autonomy, such as employees’ flexibility to work when and where they want to and their short-term control of interactions, have come at the price of increasing professional commitment, further challenging employees’ work-life balance. This leads to different expectations regarding availability, escalating engagement, and a reduced ability to disconnect from work. Digital work environments cause individuals to face tensions between the enhanced flexibility levels and increasing expectations of availability enabled by digital technologies, particularly information and communications technologies. 60 Another example is the distraction-focus paradox, by which we are exposed to an increasing amount of information that needs to be absorbed very quickly, even as the same technologies constantly interrupt our thinking with instant notifications and messages. 61 Digital technologies provide people with increasing amounts of data and opportunities to access multiple sources of information effortlessly, 62 leading to drastically decreased learning costs and unprecedented opportunities for product and service personalization and spot-on target marketing. 63 A third example of a paradox tension stems from our increasing reliance on machines to distinguish real from fake news, although it was technology in the first place that offered numerous possibilities to create fake news and verify its authenticity. 64
As prior research illustrates, tensions caused by digital technologies now appear omnipresent in the workplace and amplify as workplaces become increasingly digital. Moreover, several authors have already started using the notion of paradoxes to label and describe the nature of these tensions. 65 We also know that different technologies can have significantly different effects on the nature of work 66 and thus lead to organizational members experiencing different tensions. With the paradox literature focused extensively on exploring the tensions and related coping mechanisms at the organizational level, studies argue that more work is needed to understand how individuals engage with paradoxical tensions and the level of support required from their organizations to help them cope. 67 We are still in the early stages of understanding the tensions caused by the digitalization of the workplace and how managers develop mechanisms to deal with these tensions.
Method
This study explores the tensions that managers must handle due to the increasing diffusion of digital technologies in their workplace. We focus on middle managers, as they are at the heart of organizational processes 68 and often the first to deal with changes in the workplace. We chose a qualitative approach because the purpose of this study is to describe, interpret, and explain a phenomenon of interest—paradox tensions caused by digital technologies in the workplace. 69 Our study emphasizes how individuals experience, perceive, and interpret these tensions. 70 We follow an inductive form of reasoning by drawing conclusions from our observations. 71 Our case study approach applies an idiographic perspective, as we aim to explore context-specific aspects, 72 with the digital workplace serving as our study’s context. By acknowledging interpretation in an enacted instead of a purely objective world and by privileging contextual understanding over an existing theory (induction), we follow an interpretive grounded theory approach, 73 based on which we seek to intensify our understanding of the nested structure of paradoxes in the workplace.
Data Collection
For our data, we relied on in-depth interviews with managers employed in medium- and large-sized established organizations in Europe. The data were collected in 2019. All the interviewees were knowledge workers with at least ten years of work experience serving in middle management roles at their organizations. We chose middle managers because they are likely to experience the full variety and intensity of tensions caused by digital technologies. Middle managers normally lead their teams through change processes—while potentially suffering from the changes themselves 74 —and often face high levels of stress and anxiety. 75 Moreover, middle managers are those who must help their employees navigate and balance any paradox tensions that arise in the work context. 76
We followed a multiple-case study approach, considering each of the managers interviewed and his or her particular situation as a distinct case. We followed a theoretical sampling strategy to select information-rich cases for our study and allow us to learn as much as possible about the central themes of our inquiry. 77 More precisely, we applied a stratified sampling strategy to illustrate and compare the characteristics of particular subgroups of interest to us: 78 middle managers working in organizational contexts on a continuum of low to high exposure to digital technologies in the workplace. To recruit participants, we actively searched for traditional firms with strong labor unions and workers’ councils to identify cases with low exposure to technology and more progressive, digital forerunners at the opposite end of the continuum.
During the semi-structured interviews, we focused on engaging our informants in telling their stories and sharing their experiences; each manager was interviewed once. During the interviews, we aimed to explore managers’ perceptions of workplace changes in general, changes in the role of digital technologies, the benefits and burdens, the challenges of their digitally enabled workplaces, and tensions and managers’ coping behaviors. This helped us understand how managers define their work environment and the role of technology in their work, the major changes they perceive in work environments, the tensions they experience due to the diffusion of digital technologies in those environments, the causes of these tensions, how they relate to one another, and how managers attempt to cope with them. Overall, we interviewed 14 informants, all holding middle or senior management positions (Table 1). The interviews took place in each informant’s native language before being transcribed and translated into English with the involvement of bilingual native speakers. In addition, each author is a native or fluent speaker of German and French, the languages used for data collection. Whenever possible, interviews were conducted in person at the interviewee’s workplace.
Data Sample.
In addition to the interviews, we discussed preliminary findings in a workshop with practitioners from several geographic and industry backgrounds. This workshop was organized during an international conference on innovation and attracted 20 participants from industry; we presented the results of our preliminary analysis—an overview of tensions—and asked participants to reflect on their perceptions of these tensions in general (i.e., In general, this is an important tension in the workplace; I have seen other people experiencing this tension in their workplaces; and I have seen that other people find it challenging to deal with this tension) for their companies and individually (i.e., I have personally experienced this tension in my workplace; I find it personally challenging to deal with this tension; and in my workplace, this tension appears again and again). The participants ranked whether they strongly disagreed or agreed with the statements related to each outlined tension and commented on their rankings. The workshop helped us refine our understanding of the tensions.
Data Analysis
In alignment with the study’s inductive nature, we followed a bottom-up approach when analyzing the data. Instead of trying to fit the data into a preexisting framework, we coded the interview material openly, relying on a thematic coding procedure to identify, analyze, and report themes that emerged from our data and acknowledging those data’s contextual focus. A theme represents a pattern in the data that captures elements relevant to answering the research question. In our context, the emerging themes are the set of paradox tensions and related coping mechanisms identified throughout the data. The themes emerged through a multistep process, 79 starting with an initial coding phase in which we tried to identify relevant incidents in the data. Consequently, we raised the codes to themes reflecting tensions. Throughout this process, we iterated between the data and extensive memo-writing about emerging ideas. We also started to compare our data with prior literature to iteratively develop and organize the list of paradox tensions. We identified those paradoxes by revealing the functional relationships between opposing elements that were enduring and synergetic. We analyzed each case individually before searching for patterns within each of the four fields along the continuum of digital technology exposure. Figure 1 provides an overview of the identified themes and underlying constructs focused on how managers perceive and deal with tensions in the workplace.
Insights from the Qualitative Analysis.
Findings: A Jungle of Paradoxes in the Digital Workplace
Individual-Level Paradoxes
The autonomy paradox
The first tension reflects the autonomy paradox, in which managers struggle to balance autonomy and flexibility gains for themselves and their teams. Managers have to cope with employees’ increased accessibility to their teams and organization through the use of digital tools. On one hand, the managers emphasized that these tools are an immense support in improving their interactions and increasing collaboration efficiency and autonomy: “Particularly with the smartphone—it makes my life so much easier. When I am away from the office, I can still stay connected and make things happen quickly. However, you are always aware that you can connect, that you need to stay updated” (Interviewee 7); “I am very flexible in terms of when I work. I do not mind working on weekends or at nighttime in case something needs to be done. For me, that is no disadvantage or pressure—it simply allows me to work when I want to” (Interviewee 10); and “It somehow calms me down as well, as I always know that everything is all right and taken care of and that the team knows how to handle the situation. To a certain extent, this is soothing and reassuring” (Interviewee 8). On the other hand, the interviewees highlighted perceptions of stress caused by their constant accessibility and expectations of immediate responses to incoming messages: “I am constantly available and people can always reach me. And somehow, there is this expectation that I react within two hours” (Interviewee 6); and “There is this level of permanent availability. It is an unexpressed idea that you just have a quick look and that you reply immediately. This response time—nobody explicitly pushes you to reply at 10 p.m., but you might still do it” (Interviewee 8).
The interviewees displayed two forms of coping mechanisms in response to the autonomy paradox. First, they focused on regaining control over their time. For example, the interviewees increasingly designated time off work when they would not be accessible: “Consequently, I try to be so consistent that I give myself space when I think that it is important for me at the moment. Therefore, I say, ‘I am not answering now’ or switch the phone off. I then sometimes take the freedom to be free during the working hours. I am therefore only seeking autonomy” (Interviewee 7). The interviewees also emphasized that when it comes to autonomy, no one-size-fits-all solution exists, but “everybody needs to find out for themselves” what works for them individually (Interviewee 4). Second, the interviewees raised the need to manage expectations concerning availability and responsiveness differently. They argued for a need to learn “new social manners—even if you can be accessible, you do not have to be” (Interviewee 5). Managers also emphasized that a number of those expectations have already begun to change: “It is also about a standard that has been established. In the early years of digitalization, everybody expected you to react. I remember that I was disappointed when I did not reach someone on a Sunday afternoon. That has changed” (Interviewee 5).
The information paradox
Managers struggle to balance the increasing availability of data with the need to deal with the risks and challenges of information overload and transparency. On one hand, the interviewees emphasized that searching for relevant information has become easier: “The means whereby we collect data and how we derive conclusions have changed. Searching for information has become less painful; most of it can be done online nowadays” (Interviewee 8). They also stressed that they increasingly rely on digital technology to master data and information flows: “The intensity of data flows is immense. We need all those tools and functionalities to control the data and information flows” (Interviewee 5). On the other hand, the interviewees described the challenges of dealing with the seemingly infinite amount of information that vastly exceeds what they are capable of capturing and processing: “When I started working—and even ten years ago—information was something rare for us. When we received information or emails before, we actually read them because they were so rare. I think that if someone read everything nowadays, that person would be overwhelmed because information is infinite” (Interviewee 12); and “we lose control of the ability to access and manage information flows” (Interviewee 14). Moreover, the interviewees raised fears concerning the levels of transparency provided by the rising amounts of data:
Think about the potential surveillance—like China. That is awful. With all the technology that we have at work, you can always know where you are and what you are doing. For me, that is beyond what I want to see happening. (Interviewee 5)
When managers considered how to cope with the information paradox, they stressed the organizational and managerial responsibility to manage the top-down information push to avoid needless information overload:
There is a link between the level of engagement and the digital transformation that is not only technical, but also informational: How do we give the right amount of information to different populations to make sense of . . . we need to deal with this function by function, based on job roles. (Interviewee 14)
Furthermore, the interviewees emphasized individuals’ responsibility to manage their information pull by focusing on their mission and the right level of detail each individual needs to know to excel in his or her job: “What do you really need to know to master a topic? Certainly, you do not need to know each and every detail” (Interviewee 8).
The interaction paradox
This paradox captures managers’ increased ability to improve efficiency by using digital means of communication and collaboration. On one hand, the interviewees showed appreciation for the efficiency gains owing to digital interaction, such as the reduction in travel costs and time and the consequent opportunities to involve more people: “You might be able to involve more people who could not join the call if they had to travel for this” (Interviewee 8); and “I need to say that we had it before as well, this culture of sharing—but with the digital workplace it becomes more efficient. It is not only by phone, in the corridor, and so on, but we can work remotely. The digital workplace gave a value to this culture of networking that we have in our genes” (Interviewee 12). On the other hand, the interviewees reported a number of challenges and complications resulting from digital interactions. They emphasized how difficult it is to handle sensitive or conflict-laden issues via digital channels: “There are also a number of sensitive topics, such as performance conversations. Is a telephone call the right solution for this?. . . Will people be as open as they should? Might there be unauthorized listeners?” (Interviewee 8). The interviewees also mentioned that more conflicts arise through digital interaction: “My impression is that we have more—or more intense—conflicts since we interact less face to face. Often, people hesitate to raise issues when using digital channels” (Interviewee 4). This also included the frustration of technology not supporting interviewees’ work to the degree it should:
It is true that the means whereby we use tools like Microsoft really impacted our work but in a more negative manner: certain functions are not integrated; there are problems of interconnectivity; problems based on the time of responses; and there is a reduced availability of the documents, which is worse than before. (Interviewee 14)
In response to the interaction paradox, the interviewees emphasized the necessity to define and implement rules and social etiquette of personal behavior when using digital means of interaction: “I think that there are individual and collective rules to be put in place to ensure that this engagement works. This is a new problem” (Interviewee 14). Often, these new rules emerge from the bottom up, leading the team to take care of adherence to their own agreements: “Sometimes, we tried something out, played around with it for a while, and then we decided how to use it. We defined rules for this—and I observed that people reminded each other of sticking to these rules” (Interviewee 2); and “I believe that the new technology has forced us to come up with new social mores. For example, in workshops you now need to remind people that they have to actively participate and turn off their phones and tablets” (Interviewee 5). However, the interviewees also mentioned “to make it work requires discipline. It implies that people stick to the rules of the game. Otherwise, it does not work. Then it often means working furtively” (Interviewee 7). Furthermore, the interviewees stressed that using digital technology as a means of interaction requires compensating for the lack of personal interaction: “You need to display a certain etiquette and still show empathy for the other person. Even though you are merely on the phone or only exchanging emails, you need to understand whether the other person is stressed, annoyed, in a hurry—maybe because of something else” (Interviewee 8); and “we have established a new tradition in our team. In the morning, we send each other messages via Skype; just a quick ‘hi’ or even a brief call or things like that. It is very simple, but you need to be disciplined to do it. It does not take much to forget about it. When you are in the office, you inevitably see the others” (Interviewee 4). Furthermore, the interviewees emphasized that despite all the means of digital interaction, there remains a need for physical, face-to-face interaction. They argued that becoming acquainted with one another and bonding within the team requires that people at least occasionally spend time together: “To have a good working team, you need to trust each other. . . you really need to understand each other within a team. To make this work, you simply need to spend some time together. You cannot use Skype for this” (Interviewee 5). Moreover, to avoid misunderstandings and solve complex challenges, managers still perceive the necessity for physical co-location:
You cannot solve complex challenges via email. Those challenges are more complex; they require various perspectives, such as the sales, marketing, and IT departments’ insights. This is not something that I can do by myself; I need to engage with everybody simultaneously. Those conversations have their own dynamics and require, whenever possible, physical co-location. (Interviewee 9)
Meta-Level Paradoxes
The opportunity paradox
This paradox summarizes the challenge managers face in balancing the advantages of having a growing number and variety of opportunities, thanks to digital technologies and the perceptions of raising pressure and stress to engage in those opportunities and choose the right ones. Managers appreciate the manifold options that digital technologies enable: “There is so much that could be done. Which ones shall we pick from all the options?” (Interviewee 4). Yet, it is becoming increasingly difficult to make the right choice. Managers also acknowledge that digital tools provide them with more data and help them connect to experts of whom they had not been aware within and outside their organizations: “It also helps us recognize people within the organization who were not known to us before” (Interviewee 13). By increasing the pace of development, the interviewees reflected upon how “Balancing topics that run in parallel would never have happened at the same time. . . You work with other people who face the same challenge—they may not give you their full attention. It is boon and bane at the same time” (Interviewee 1); and “it is boon and bane. . . You have a tightly packed schedule, which otherwise would not have been possible. If you did not aim for a virtual means of doing it, you could not handle that many meetings in a day. This means that everything happens faster, which is good and bad at the same time” (Interviewee 4). The increasing density of work makes it difficult to concentrate on any one thing: “Digital technologies help us become more efficient; . . . however, there is not really a net win in terms of time. What happens is that any time saved is eaten up by something else that comes in. Every step we take leads to an increase in the density of work. There has to be an end to this development at a certain point” (Interviewee 3); and “this means that you can spend less time on it, which comes at a price—the quality of the outcome suffers” (Interviewee 7). Consequently, “we have unlearned to concentrate on only one thing for a longer period of time” (Interviewee 9). Furthermore, people feel pressured to constantly make choices while being afraid of missing out in case they are not involved somewhere: “You constantly have to make choices—which meeting to go to and being available for calls on a certain topic during the meeting” (Interviewee 1); and “we do not want to miss something that is relevant. . . But you cannot be involved in everything. That is challenging” (Interviewee 9).
In dealing with the opportunity paradox, the interviewees raised the urgent necessity to constantly focus and prioritize:
I’m quite sensible about ignoring all topics that do not provide me with any added value. I try to withdraw myself from all of this. I have had such strange SharePoint solutions, which allowed everybody to add information and remarks to everything easily. I try to stay away from this. (Interviewee 6)
Furthermore, the interviewees emphasized focusing on doing less but doing what you do in greater depth and with more attention: “This would be my approach: to do less but to do it in depth instead of investigating everything superficially” (Interviewee 4).
The engagement paradox
Lastly, the engagement paradox describes managers’ struggles to balance the growing interest and pressure around engaging with digital technologies with handling the uncertainty that digital technologies bring to the workplace. On one hand, the interviewees showed optimism about their job situations: “I am not too worried. I am a bit more optimistic for myself. There will be opportunities coming up” (Interviewee 8). On the other hand, the interviewees generally expressed a more balanced view on workplace developments:
There are certain populations for whom it is easy to adopt digital tools; for others, such as operators, technicians, drivers, and so on, it is quite complex. They can feel excluded from the digital work environment. The question is how to integrate people who do not work in offices. This is something that cannot last—we face the risk of engagement for populations that benefit less from digital solutions, but that still have to use them since we need their data. The digital contract is not a win-win for all employees. (Interviewee 12)
The interviewees emphasized that it is, of course, challenging to engage people who fear the future: “There will be changes . . . for the company and the employees. This requires openness and a willingness to learn something else. However, people are afraid of what is happening. They are afraid of what it means for themselves, their tasks, and their roles. This makes it challenging to engage them” (Interviewee 10); and “learning about digital services is, of course, a lot more intuitive and less complex; however, people still do not engage in it with optimistic expectations about the technology’s impact” (Interviewee 5).
Discussion: Coping Strategies to Navigate through a Jungle of Paradoxes
Competing tensions and demands are omnipresent in today’s ambiguous and complex business environment—and the transformational potential of digital technologies is likely to increase the magnitude of these tensions in workplaces that will become more and more digitally driven. We have identified five paradox tensions that tend to occur as managers are increasingly exposed to digital technologies. Three—the autonomy, interaction, and information paradoxes—occur at the individual level. The opportunity and engagement paradoxes are of a meta-paradoxical nature (Figure 2).
Types of Paradoxes in the Digital Workplace.
Individual-level paradoxes refer to tensions that occur again and again in specific contexts. 80 Meta-paradoxes are less context-specific, less structured, and less similar to one another than individual-level paradoxes. Our data indicate that individual-level paradoxes arise when the appropriation of workplace technologies leads to immediate organizational changes, with individuals adjusting their behavior to deal with the tensions that result. Meta-paradoxes, however, occur when workplace technologies challenge the very nature and meaning of work. Furthermore, they tend to be more complex to understand and embrace. 81
Convergent Change: Individual-Level Paradoxes
When individual-level tensions occur, employees react with coping mechanisms at the individual and collective levels by establishing rules and mores (see Figure 3) that create “subjective solutions spaces.” These spaces result from the immediate reactions of individuals to overexposure to digital technologies. They emerge once managers start changing their own practices and when they implement rules and define expected behaviors for their teams. These coping strategies are similar across all three individual-level paradoxes identified in our data.
Coping Strategies.
First, the autonomy paradox occurs when individuals perceive increased autonomy and flexibility gains 82 but suffer from the challenge of being overly accessible to their organization and co-workers. Digital technologies create manifold benefits when it comes to establishing new connections between people, computers, and objects, along with the ever cheaper and faster availability of data and computation results. 83 As was widely experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic, digital modes of interaction offer any number of potential efficiency gains. In addition to the flexibility offered to individuals, communication between team members can occur across a range of digital channels. Digitally enabled tools and environments for collaboration enhance and can even replace the physical office space. Companies use tools such as Google Drive or Dropbox for interactive editing and sharing of documents, Zoom or Microsoft Teams for video calls, Trello for team planning and shared to-do lists, and Slack for instant messaging. These tools are beneficial when it comes to task-related activities and cognitive work. However, whereas virtual work increases our efficiency, 84 individuals are also suffering from increased accessibility and a loss of boundaries between the work and home environments. Our data reveal that managers experience the autonomy paradox personally and feel impelled to help their teams deal with this tension. The rules and mores established in companies with higher exposure to digital technologies help individuals deal with these tensions, such as the right to disconnect, tips on managing schedules, and having different devices for work and home purposes. These are particularly useful for task-related activities where rules and mores that managers propose guide teams in structuring their work activities.
Second, it is not simply the increased expectations of availability but also the increased level and number of interactions that result in individuals’ frustrations, 85 leading to inefficiencies when too many technological solutions are in place and implying the increasing necessity for a modular work design. 86 The interaction paradox describes the tensions teams experience between the benefits and challenges provided by digital modes of interaction. An increased amount of chatting and interaction with others through technology may be why this paradox occurs more frequently. Individuals tend to experience a reduced amount of direct, face-to-face interactions; working from home during COVID-19 was a perfect illustration of this development. As our data show, individuals receive less and less direct feedback, have fewer opportunities to learn from colleagues, and have reduced chances to perceive their peers’ emotional reactions, all of which result in a weakened ability to handle conflicts. They miss the relational aspects of work. 87 Here, the solutions proposed at the collective level include rules for digital interactions (i.e., sending and responding to emails at designated times, limiting meetings to 30 minutes, avoiding unnecessary meetings, and so on) and introducing the possibility of having in-person interactions in largely digital work environments, such as team-building activities and the possibility of introducing some physical meetings, even for staff working 100% remotely. Our data indicate that the effective involvement of technological opportunities vastly changes the ways in which individuals interact with one another and demonstrate the need to design work environments that reflect these changes.
Third, managers benefit from the increasing availability of data and the potential gains resulting from data-driven decision-making. However, managers constantly face the risks and challenges of information overload and transparency. We frame this situation as the information paradox, which encapsulates the tensions individuals experience between the benefits of having vastly more information at their fingertips—leading to higher levels of transparency and awareness—and the downsides of increasing levels of control and fatigue when exposed to large quantities of information. This paradox also captures the increased quantity of information and the impossibility of controlling the quality of the information that is accessed and used by employees. Furthermore, to access free information and services online, individuals often provide consciously or unconsciously personal data, with the potential downside that it becomes impossible for an individual to control the use and spread of his or her data and the data of the organization itself. Organizations have long been aware of the importance of handling and collecting data properly, but the challenge has now been extended to managing access and controlling information in the work-at-home environment. Managers in our data sample attempt to deal carefully with the information push while implementing changes to educate their employees about the evolving data culture.
Generally, we found high levels of awareness across our sample of the three individual-level paradoxes. Organizations with higher levels of exposure to digital technologies showed that they were better prepared to deal with the tensions by having coping strategies in place to help deal with tensions when they become salient or keeping them at bay with effective rules and mores.
Transforming Work: Meta-Level Paradoxes
Meta-level paradoxes address tensions that are not bound to a specific context and/or technology but recur across various situations. In this context, unintended and unexpected changes in the patterns and nature of work occur, leading to tensional knots that arise at different levels. These tensions are hard to anticipate and, in our data, only organizations with greater technological exposure experienced them. Meta-level paradoxes are difficult to deal with, independent of an organization’s readiness for digital technologies, as they challenge the nature of meaning and require us to configure new practices and learn new ways of working. In organizations with low exposure to digital technologies, we did not find any indications of the existence or even awareness of such meta-level paradoxes. When facing salient meta-level paradoxes, managers recognize the need to learn how to use technologies and create a work environment that takes them into account for both their employees and themselves. Furthermore, their coping mechanisms remain less prescriptive, seeking instead to guide and orient their teams to develop their coping mechanisms (Figure 3).
First, the opportunity paradox captures the tension emerging from the increasing variety of options and choices provided by digital technologies; it contrasts freedom of choice with the pressure to make the right choices. As we saw with the information paradox, the information individuals can access at their fingertips offers them a seemingly endless range of choices, irrespective of whether it concerns a major subject, a study program, or simply the next vacation destination. In the work context, this includes, for instance, the variety of new work arrangements like co-working or microwork and the endless variety of training programs and potential qualifications. However, despite the benefits of this variety, individuals may feel overwhelmed by the vast amounts of information with which they are confronted and the resulting pressure to make the right choices. Furthermore, individuals always fear missing an opportunity they have failed to identify and fear missing out in general. As a result, the need for individuals and organizations to constantly make choices is juxtaposed with multiple opportunities to observe, learn new things, and take advantage of a wide array of opportunities since many of these choices involve paradoxical tensions—whether of autonomy, information, or interaction—and the opportunity paradox is meta-paradoxical. The way managers cope with it—constant prioritization, learning to say “no” to opportunities, guiding their employees in establishing their own priorities, and following up on them—will influence their range of actions when coping with any of the specific paradoxes.
Second, the increasing engagement with technologies creates opportunities for individuals to delegate repetitive and less creative tasks to machines, but it can also lead to a fear of replacement. In line with recent discussions in the digital marketing literature, 88 we refer to digital engagement as the intention to use, interact, and collaborate with digital technologies in the workplace. A high level of digital engagement can offer several benefits to workers, such as increasing their efficiency or allowing them to concentrate on more interesting and important tasks. However, high levels of digital engagement can simultaneously accelerate technology expertise and competence building, which may eventually result in machine labor replacing humans. This leads to an engagement paradox—which captures individuals’ struggles between engaging in activities that drive the changes caused by digital technologies, including close collaboration with nonhuman, digital colleagues, and preventing any potential personal disadvantages that are the outcomes of change—notably being replaced by technology. Although we may not be conscious of this paradox, the intense debate over the threat that digital technologies pose for labor and the obvious benefits of digital tools in our private and professional lives are familiar to most of us. Like the other paradox tensions, this will not be solved with a single stroke: there is no magic bullet. Managers will have to constantly balance when and how to use digital technologies, which creates a special challenge. They need to learn how to deal with the challenge themselves and enable their teams to manage this paradox. The digital engagement paradox in the workplace introduced in here a meta-paradox tension. The opposing elements are the increasing use of digital technologies and efforts to avoid using digital technologies in the workplace. One’s general attitude toward the use of digital technologies in the workplace, and especially each decision to use a given digital technology, may involve a paradox tension that can address an opportunity, autonomy, interaction, or information paradox. These tensions are persistent and force us as individuals and the organizations where we work to balance the use and nonuse of digital technologies on an ongoing basis. The elements are interdependent—the nonuse of digital technologies can hinder a human worker from learning and keeping up with current developments, whereas the heavy use of digital technologies could so strengthen technology that the human worker will become redundant. Both elements are logical in isolation but inconsistent when juxtaposed. There is, moreover, continual progress in the advancement of digital workplace technologies. The fact that increasingly powerful digital technologies pose a constant, if initially low-level, threat to humans’ role in the workplace makes it difficult for managers to come up with specific coping mechanisms and forces organizations to learn about what is changing, anticipate the most relevant effects for their work, and gradually prepare for these changes at the individual and team levels. Managers play a key role in handling these processes, with collaborative work gaining even more importance for meta-level paradoxes.
The coping strategies outlined above can be further enhanced by organization-level responses. Organizational design choices can further enhance the coping strategies and perception of the paradoxes. For example, Smith and Berett 89 explored organizing for digital transformation through separation and integration and showed that by paying attention to the paradoxical nature of ambidextrous organizational designs, managers can be ready to deal with employees’ coping mechanisms regarding the tensions inherent in the design. Our study extends the discussion of the effects of organizational paradoxes to the individual level and depicts how the nature of technologies affects both paradoxes and the coping mechanisms adopted in response to them. Future work needs to examine the effect of organizational design choices on how managers and their teams experience paradoxes.
Implications for Managerial Practice
We are experiencing radical changes in how we work, the role technology will play, and thus the skills that humans will need to nurture. Digital technologies are likely to take over more and more tasks from human actors and grow into increasingly autonomous and potentially intelligent roles. The COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns made digitally enabled work not simply an option but a new norm of working that allows people to connect in new ways, to work more flexibly, and to establish new forms of leadership and work autonomy. 90 The COVID-19 situation has certainly intensified the scope and speed of the diffusion of digital technologies in the workplace. At the same time, the adoption of digital tools during the lockdown was necessarily intense and rapid. This left many managers without the opportunity to prepare, properly experiment and learn, and reflect on the kinds of tools and uses they would require and the type of digital work they would prefer to design in their organizations. This development has intensified the challenges of paradox tensions in the digital workplace. By examining the digitalization of the workplace from the paradox perspective, the present study offers important implications for managing teams and organizing work. We provide new avenues for dealing with paradoxes in which managers need to carefully design their coping strategies based on the nature of the transformation that occurs in the workplace: convergent change or transforming work. 91
Creating Awareness of Possible Paradoxical Tensions
To engage in the effective management of the tensions identified here, and their different levels (individual vs. meta), managers need to account for both the existing and potentially emerging tensions.
Prescriptive versus Guiding Coping Strategies
Managers and employees at all levels of an organization need to be able to sense the tensions in the workplace, seize them, and continuously learn to cope with them. Coping strategies must account for immediate responses to individual paradoxes and reflect the interdependent nature of paradoxes. To deal with meta-paradoxes, the very meaning of work should be constantly considered and revised; to achieve this admittedly difficult goal, managers need to create a culture of learning and exploration among their team members.
Importance of Dealing with Meta-Paradoxes
The opportunity and digital engagement paradoxes are meta-paradoxes, which provide managers with transparency about the interrelatedness of the tensions. This is relevant because coping mechanisms for the individual paradoxes may be interdependent. Concentrating solely on specific tensions and neglecting those interdependencies would run the risk of managers overlooking relevant connections that could lead to additional tensions. 92 Middle managers need to pay attention to emerging paradoxes and their interdependencies because managing individual paradoxes can have both positive and negative consequences for other paradoxes. Dealing with meta-paradoxes has a greater influence on these consequences than those at the individual level. Therefore, learning to deal effectively with the opportunity and digital engagement paradoxes might help individuals cope with the autonomy, interaction, and information paradoxes and prepare them for potential new tensions.
Account for a Meta-Paradoxical Mindset
With the increasing complexity of digital work and exposure to digital technologies, meta-paradoxical tensions will continue to rise. There is a need for managers to embrace meta-paradoxical thinking—they need to be better equipped to detect potential new tensions that digital technologies will create in the workplace and adjust the work environment to reflect these emerging tensions. Managers need to be open to adjusting and readjusting the design of their workplaces over time and help their teams develop a digital mindset that will help them navigate the jungle of paradoxes.
Conclusion
With increasing competition, changes in the global environment, and shifts to digital work environments, paradoxes have become a critical lens to understand and guide contemporary organizations. 93 The paradox perspective allowed us to investigate the nature of the contradictory demands 94 that can be attributed to digital technologies in the work context. As complexity is a core source of contradictory demands and thus a driver of paradox tensions, 95 these tensions intensify with rising complexity. 96 In the context of the digital workplace, our data indicate that with the increasing and more widespread use of digital technologies, not only will the occurrence of paradox tensions rise and the number of individuals confronted with those tensions increase, but the nature of the paradoxes will also become more complex and interwoven. Given the emergence of multiple nested meta-paradoxes, coping mechanisms shift from prescriptive rules, mores, and subjective solution spaces to ongoing guidance and orientation that allow individuals to question the meaning of their work and be ready to revise their work practices on a regular basis. Middle managers experience particularly high exposure to the paradox tensions caused by digital technologies because it is they who generally lead their teams through change processes, even as they may suffer from the changes themselves. 97
We have identified autonomy, interaction, information, opportunity, and engagement paradoxes. While the autonomy paradox has been previously discussed in the organizational literature, 98 the information and interaction paradoxes and the opportunity and engagement paradoxes are novel paradoxical tensions that managers face. Prior research has mostly focused on managing individual paradoxes. 99 However, managers and employees must often deal with multiple interrelated paradoxes. 100 We find empirical evidence for the existence and interrelatedness of meta-paradoxical tensions in the digital workplace. For both meta-level paradoxes—engagement and opportunity—multiple tensions occur simultaneously and interdependently within a nested, hierarchical structure, 101 and understanding the structure of specific, meta-level paradox tensions that exist in parallel and are interdependent is essential to developing effective coping strategies. To navigate through the jungle of paradoxes, not only tensions but also coping mechanisms should be interrelated.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Notes
Author Biographies
Olga Kokshagina is a Professor for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at EDHEC Business School, France (email:
Sabrina Schneider is a Professor for Strategy and Innovation at the Management Center Innsbruck (MCI), Austria (email: