Browsing by Author "Smith, Wendy K."
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Item Conceiving opposites together: Cultivating paradoxical frames and epistemic motivation fosters team creativity(Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2022-05-10) Miron-Spektor, Ella; Emich, Kyle; Argote, Linda; Smith, Wendy K.To successfully generate creative solutions, teams must reconcile inconsistent perspectives and integrate competing task demands. We suggest that adopting a paradoxical frame - a mental template that promotes recognizing and embracing the simultaneous existence of seemingly contradictory elements - helps teams navigate this process to produce creative ideas, if team members are epistemically motivated. Our results from two laboratory studies (N = 950) suggest that teams that adopt paradoxical frames and have high epistemic motivation develop more creative solutions than teams with paradoxical frames and low epistemic motivation or epistemically motivated teams with frames that only encourage information sharing. Teams with paradoxical frames and high epistemic motivation are more creative because they engage in idea elaboration – they exchange, consider, and integrate diverse ideas and perspectives. By contrast, other teams settle on suboptimal middle-way solutions that do not address task demands. Our research advances knowledge of why and when paradoxical frames benefit team creativity, by unpacking the processes that enable teams to leverage task and team tensions. We show that when teams collectively work through their tensions and elaborate their diverse ideas they become more creative.Item Reflections on the 2021 Decade Award: Navigating Paradox is Paradoxical(Academy of Management Review, 2022-06-01) Lewis, Marianne W.; Smith, Wendy K.We are delighted at the explosion of research advancing and applying paradox theory in the past 10 years and deeply honored to receive the 2021 Academy of Management Review Decade Award for the publication “Toward a Theory of Paradox: A Dynamic Equilibrium Model of Organizing”. In this paper, we reflect on the background story to writing this article and suggest that the success of paradox theory, and this paper, may be due relevance, theoretical inclusivity along with targeted efforts for community building. We assess accumulated scholarship, noting both the convergence of key ideas and definitions, while recognizing the divergence of ontologies, methodologies, theories and phenomena. We integrate expanding insights into a framework that we label as the Paradox System, which highlights the breadth of research, depicts the interwoven and paradoxical relationships across categories, and surfaces a core insight that navigating paradox is paradoxical. Finally, we explore the possibility of paradox emerging as a paradigm in organizational studies.Item Today's Most Critical Leadership Skill: Navigating Paradoxes(Leader to Leader, 2022-12-07) Lewis, Marianne W.; Smith, Wendy K.The authors, well-known for their research into the concept of paradox, explain that “It is one thing to label challenges as paradoxical and another to know what to do about them. In our own research, we have explored that question in depth over the last 25 years. We bring that research together into an integrated model.” Within Figure 1, “The Language of Tensions,” they make the following observations: ‘‘Tensions include all types of situations where alternative expectations and demands are in opposition… Dilemmas present opposing alternatives, each option offering a logical solution on its own. Leadership problems and challenges often show up for us as a dilemma, where we feel pressure to choose between alternative options… Paradoxes are interdependent, persistent contradictions that lurk within our presenting dilemmas. They note that in their research, they “identify four organizational challenges associated with underlying paradoxes. We describe them as obligation (performing paradoxes), innovation (learning paradoxes), globalization (belonging paradoxes) and coordination (organizing paradoxes).” They also describe ‘‘The Paradox System. These integrated sets of tools enable both/and thinking. As memory aid, think ABCD: tools that shift how we think (assumptions) and how we feel (comfort), as we build static structures (boundaries), while enabling adaptive practices (dynamics).