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Paper Type
Completed
Paper Number
1993
Description
Digital technologies are omnipresent in our professional and personal lives. While they provide manifold potentials, digital technologies also cause tensions. Many of these tensions are of paradox nature – they confront individuals with conflicting, yet synergetic and interdependent, alternatives that persist over time. Coping with ten-sions by unlocking their potential through a paradox mindset has become an increas-ingly valuable capability. By using a qualitative research design and applying a par-adox lens to the interview data from middle managers, this study explores the ten-sions that managers perceive in the increasingly digital workplace. We find empirical support for a previously identified paradox (the autonomy paradox) and we identify additional paradoxical tensions, which increase with rising exposure to digital tech-nologies – the information, interaction, opportunity, and engagement paradoxes. Furthermore, our results indicate a nested, meta-paradoxical nature of the engage-ment and opportunity paradoxes that combine a wide variety of tensions in an over-arching theme.
Recommended Citation
Schneider, Sabrina and Kokshagina, Olga, "Digital Technologies in the Workplace: A Ne(s)t of Paradoxes" (2020). ICIS 2020 Proceedings. 11.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2020/is_workplace_fow/is_workplace_fow/11
Digital Technologies in the Workplace: A Ne(s)t of Paradoxes
Digital technologies are omnipresent in our professional and personal lives. While they provide manifold potentials, digital technologies also cause tensions. Many of these tensions are of paradox nature – they confront individuals with conflicting, yet synergetic and interdependent, alternatives that persist over time. Coping with ten-sions by unlocking their potential through a paradox mindset has become an increas-ingly valuable capability. By using a qualitative research design and applying a par-adox lens to the interview data from middle managers, this study explores the ten-sions that managers perceive in the increasingly digital workplace. We find empirical support for a previously identified paradox (the autonomy paradox) and we identify additional paradoxical tensions, which increase with rising exposure to digital tech-nologies – the information, interaction, opportunity, and engagement paradoxes. Furthermore, our results indicate a nested, meta-paradoxical nature of the engage-ment and opportunity paradoxes that combine a wide variety of tensions in an over-arching theme.
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