How Paradoxes Shape Members and the Member–Organization Relationship: An Identity Threat Perspective

Abstract

Organizations and their members not only respond to paradoxes, but also can be shaped by paradoxes in potentially profound yet highly heterogeneous ways. In our study, we adopt an identity threat perspective to explicate how paradox dynamics can affect members’ sense of self as professionals and their organizational identification as a key facet of the member–organization relationship. The transformational change of a leading public university launching a for-profit business school in Europe in 2017 provides a particularly fertile setting for this purpose. Our in-depth, longitudinal case study spanning 75 months from January 2016 to March 2022 serves as the empirical basis for a novel process model that helps to explain why the same set of paradoxes may have vastly different identity and identification effects not only among members of the same organization, but also within individual members over time. We can trace some of these differences back to boundary conditions related to members’ identity and paradox perception, which jointly shape how members recognize, attribute, and respond to paradoxes as threats to their identity. Overall, our study provides a new lens into the multifaceted process through which paradoxes can shape members and member–organization relationships as exemplified by members’ organizational identification. Supplemental Material: The online supplement is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2020.14630 .