The shift toward "post-bureaucratic" management, initially heralded for its promise of greater flexibility and employee empowerment, often leads to a hybridization of traditional and modern approaches, creating managerial complexity. Existing literature tends to dichotomize the consequences of this complexity—viewing it as either enabling innovation or inducing paralysis—overlooking the agency of individual actors. This paper addresses this gap by exploring how do employees engage with and potentially enact post-bureaucratic managerial practices within constrained organizational environments? The findings rely on an in-depth case study at Airbus, where two managerial logics—empowerment and industrial rationalization—were introduced in response to increased production demands. This study contributes to post-bureaucratic management literature by illustrating both enabling and constraining effects of managerial complexity. It also enriches the institutional logics framework by showing that different variants of the same logic can coexist, providing a more dynamic understanding of managerial complexity.
