Resourcing Under Tensions: How frontline employees create resources to balance paradoxical tensions

Abstract

Managing resources and tensions at the front line is crucial for organizational success. To advance our understanding of how frontline employees turn assets into useful resources under tensions, we draw on research on resourcing and practices of responding to paradoxical tensions. Our ethnographic study of employees in a multinational retail fashion company finds three resourcing practices – situational reframing, organizational preframing and institutional deframing – that enable frontline employees to balance tensions. We contribute to both the resourcing perspective and to research on individuals’ responses to paradoxical tensions, first, by identifying the varying scopes of meaning (situational, organizational or institutional) that employees infuse potential resources with; second, by extending the notion of framing to understand how resourcing is accomplished interactively in tension-laden situations; and third, by explaining how employees’ construction of tensions is related to their dynamic moves between resourcing practices.

The Lived Experience of Paradox: How Individuals Navigate Tensions during the Pandemic Crisis

“…During this pandemic, employees are asked to simultaneously strive to meet performance targets (e.g., sales targets, time-keeping) whilst applying novel hygiene directives (e.g., issued by health agencies or based on corporate rules) such as wearing masks, hand-sanitizing and maintaining as well as enforcing physical distance from coworkers and clients. In interactive service work (e.g., waiters, care workers, retail workers, actors), workers struggle to integrate competing requirements on a day-to-day base (Francis & Keegan, 2020; Schneider et al, 2020). They must be creative and learn from varied and often ambivalent customer views and feedback on their efforts.…”

“…Hence, in the COVID-19 era, it has become critical for leaders to consider whether their messages resonate with relevant audience (e.g., followers, general public, etc.). Resonance, or an "audience's experienced personal connection with a frame" (Giorgi, 2017) may be especially important in 'unlocking' the capabilities and resources of followers and in bolstering their commitment to work through paradoxical tensions alongside their leaders (Nielsen & Hansen, 2020;Schneider, Bullinger & Brandl, 2020). Resonant messages may reduce employees' anxiety, disengagement or avoidance (Nielsen & Hansen, 2020;Argyris, 1990;Lüscher & Lewis, 2008;Cheal, 2020, p. 52), and minimize the perception of leaders' efforts as manipulative (Grant & Wolfram Cox, 2017) or as superficial impression management (Gaim, Clegg, Cunha, 2019).…”

“…In interactive service work (e.g. waiters, care workers, retail workers, actors), workers struggle to integrate competing requirements on a day-to-day base (Schneider, Bullinger & Brandl, 2020;Francis and Keegan, 2020). They must be creative and learn from varied and often ambivalent customer views and feedback on their efforts.…”

Situating service work in action: A review and a pragmatist agenda for analysing interactive service work

“…In contrast, by scrutinizing daily interactions closely, pragmatist scholarship highlights the complexity of service interaction and is more attentive to the embeddedness and materiality of frontline workers' situated actions. We therefore offer a conceptual framework that foregrounds the pragmatist approach to interactive service work and emphasizes the key foundational concepts of sensemaking (Llewellyn & Hindmarsh, 2013;Weick, 1995) and resourcing (Feldman & Worline, 2012;Schneider et al, 2020) underpinning this approach. This enables us to account for contact employee agency in situated action in service organizations.…”

Interdependent HRM practices as active responses to paradox in Finnish growth enterprises

“…The paradox lens is gaining momentum and it is increasingly applied across organization and management research on, for example, artificial intelligence in organizations (Raisch and Krakowski, 2021), change management (Luger et al, 2018), identity construction (Dameron and Torset, 2014), flexible work (Putnam et al, 2014), innovation (Sheep et al, 2016) and corporate social responsibility (Hahn et al, 2018). Recently, research applying the paradox perspective has increased, deepened and shown results for taking the analysis of tensions further in HRM studies in different contexts (Aust et al, 2017;Keegan et al, 2018bCañibano, 2019Schneider et al, 2020). However, to our knowledge, there are no prior studies of paradox and HRM practices conducted in a growth SME context.…”