On opening Pandora’s boxes: The role of action research in revealing paradox

To disentangle the complexity of organizational paradoxes while helping organizational members navigating them, researchers are showing a renewed interest in action research. Action research is a method particularly equipped to study paradoxes because of its elasticity in responding to emergence, and its interpretative nature. These allow researchers to reveal latent or emerging tensions, making them salient. In this paper we highlight the role of action-researchers in enabling effective navigation of organizational paradoxes, drawing attention on the potential dangers of this activity. While exposing paradoxes might bring new theoretical and practical insights, it can also result in negative unintended consequences. Our model highlights that, when alerting practitioners of the paradoxical nature of requirements, it is also necessary to build adequate response capacities, so that the action research process can help making paradoxes generative (i.e., opportunities for learning and innovation), rather than pragmatic (i.e., pathological, inducing vicious circles). We further outline concrete strategies to mitigate negative unintended consequences. Our conceptualization contributes to a critical approach to action research to study paradoxes to mitigate its inherent risks of causing unintended consequences.