Contradictions in Public Organisations: Analysis and Training of Public Managers` Paradox Mindset and Decision-making between Conflicting Values Behavioral Public Administration, Public Leadership, Training, Field Experiment, Discrete-Choice-Experiment

As the organisational environment becomes more dynamic, interconnected, and competitive, public managers face more and more contradictory situations, caused by organisational contradictions and conflicting values (Zhang et al., 2015). Previous research has shown that the way managers deal with contradictory situations has a positive impact on the organisation. This includes that the management accepts contradictions and tries to use them productively (Liu et al., 2020).

A paradox mindset is an important prerequisite for the management of contradictory situations, but little is known about how individuals decide in contradictory situations (Leung et al., 2018), how a paradox mindset is formed and to what extent it can be promoted through training (Bömelburg et al., 2020; Schad et al., 2016). Because research on training in public administration (Chen et al., 2019) and specifically causal effects of leadership training (Jacobsen et al., 2021) are missing, this dissertation tries to contribute to this gap by experimentally exploring the relationship between training, decision-making, and paradox mindset.