The Organizational Paradox: A Paradoxical Case Study of Managerial Decision and Organizational Management

Abstract

This paper attempt to describe some cases and causes of unanticipated side effects of managerial decisions and organizational management, known as the organizational paradox. We found that the task of balancing education and research creates a paradoxical effect. Another case is the difficulty of achieving ‘total benefits’ from all departments. Action taken to improve the quality of the ‘rich’ department will create a dis-improvement of quality in ‘poor’ department. The third case is the paradox of paper-based performance quality. A performance quality based on the paper report is ‘an administrative performance quality’; not real performance. Some causes to these cases are the difficulty of balancing between the vision achievement and the scarcity of resources, the existence of a practical point of view toward everything, the complexity of human action and its relation to the environment, human motivation, systemic causes and a tendency of disregarding the value of information.