Paradoxes and management approaches of competing for work in creative professional service firms

•When competing for work, creative professional service firms face paradoxical challenges.•We address which paradoxes creative PSFs face when competing for work and they manage them.•A strategic intent paradox exists between winning the job and pursuing other strategic goals (such as exploration, diversification, reputation building and staff enjoyment).•A design intent paradox exists between developing an envisioning promise and remaining a credible provider.•Creative PSFs can cope with and manage these two paradoxes both through synthesis and separation.

Despite their business relevance, creative professional service firms are under-researched, in particular with regard to how they compete for work. Competing for work is key to survival, but also extremely challenging due to the complexity of the services offered. In this paper we use a paradox framework to investigate the opposing demands that creative professional service firms experience when competing for work. Based on a set of semi-structured interviews in the context of architectural competitions, we show that creative professional service firms face two interwoven paradoxes which relate to the strategic intent (why to compete) and the design intent (what to propose) of client propositions. We describe these paradoxes and explain how organizations manage and cope with them through both synthesis and separation management approaches. Contributions of this study can be found in theorizing paradoxes of competing for work from the professional service provider's perspective, and in fostering the firms' paradoxical mind-set, which facilitates the acceptance and resolution of complexity and different competing demands.