Paradox management delegation: inter and intra-individual variability

While paradox is increasingly presented in organisational literature as a normal, even advisable element, it is still seen as a problem by individuals who are confronted with it on a daily basis. Thus there is a clear gap between researchers' conclusions and real-life situations experienced by practitioners, or maybe a tension between two levels of analysis, organisational and individual levels. We have found that this tension has seldom been studied. In a nutshell, existing literature tends to be divided into two groups. Our research work therefore aims to study the positions of health sector professionals with respect to the paradox management that has been delegated to them, to analyse the extent to which this delegation might alter the pluralistic organisational management of paradoxes. To this end, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 14 of 16 new physician-managers working in a large teaching hospital where the reform was initiated. Our results show that individuals adopt four types of positions when faced with paradox : rejection, detachment, absorption, and transcendence.