Complexity, changes and resources scarcity are pervasive elements of today’s organizational life. Research on paradoxes have shown that such contexts are ripe for the experience of con-tradictions, inconsistencies or ambiguities. Managers are thus more and more confronted to paradoxical situations where they have to simultaneously deal with two contradictory and inter-related elements. Paradoxes are thus embedded in the everyday actions and decisions of manag-ers and the way they navigate these paradoxes have an impact on organization’s success and sometimes survival. Literature on paradoxes shows that to pretend to long term survival, organizations need to adopt proactive responses, which involves a capacity to identify and to embrace contradictory de-mands. However, research offers scant insight into practices elaborated by managers to be able to embrace tensions in turbulent contexts of important changes and limited resources. Our study is an attempt to fill this gap addressing the following question: when confronted to situations of much turbulence and resource scarcity, how managers can proactively navigate para-doxes and thus pretend to long term survival? More specifically we are interested in the pro-cess and the practices that allow managers to evolve toward a “both/and” rather than an “ei-ther/or” response to paradoxical tensions. To provide relevant insights, we rely on a deep case study of IBM Montpellier, a French local entity of IBM that has been confronted, in the early 90’s, to various decisions of top manage-ment that diverged from its local interests and even threatened its survival. By studying this specific period of tensions, where local interests and global expectations sometimes seem in-compatible, we aim at highlighting how local actors finally managed to recognize and embrace those tensions over time. This article develops an empirically grounded process model that shows how local managers’ response to paradoxes evolve overs time: a first defensive step where local managers struggled with suddenly salient paradoxical tensions and respond by splitting tension to finally obtain a reprieve. They thus gain the necessary slack to evolve toward a second proactive step where they are now able to recognize tensions, to embrace them and to finally gain a more long-term survival. The present paper contributes to the paradox’s literature in various way. We first show that con-trary to what the current literature asserts, defensive approaches are not systematically opposed to proactive ones. They may instead be complementary and even represent a first necessary step in a more global “stratification process” of learning to live and work with paradoxical tensions. Finally, this study also contributes to works on paradoxical cognition since it confirms that recognizing tensions is a first necessary step towards proactive approaches. However, this study goes further since it shows how this cognition may be acquired over time, as a learning heritage of a prior defensive experience of paradoxical tensions.
