Digital Technologies in the Workplace: A Ne(s)t of Paradoxes.

Digital technologies are omnipresent in our professional and personal lives. While they provide manifold potentials, digital technologies also cause tensions. Many of these tensions are of paradox nature – they confront individuals with conflicting, yet synergetic and interdependent, alternatives that persist over time. Coping with tensions by unlocking their potential through a paradox mindset has become an increasingly valuable capability. By using a qualitative research design and applying a paradox lens to the interview data from middle managers, this study explores the tensions that managers perceive in the increasingly digital workplace. We find empirical support for a previously identified paradox (the autonomy paradox) and we identify additional paradoxical tensions, which increase with rising exposure to digital technologies – the information, interaction, opportunity, and engagement paradoxes. Furthermore, our results indicate a nested, meta-paradoxical nature of the engagement and opportunity paradoxes that combine a wide variety of tensions in an overarching theme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]