Saudade : how complex emotions shape the experience of paradox

Emotions and paradoxes permeate organizational life. The former shape how individuals interpret, respond to, and cope with the tensions that arise from the latter. While paradox theory has extensively explored the handling of these tensions through cognitive and structural mechanisms, the emotional dimensions remain largely underexplored. We discuss saudade, a paradoxical, culturally grounded emotion in Portuguese, an evocative state of being characterized by simultaneous longing for the past and aspiration for the future. Saudade serves a conceptual lens for understanding how paradoxical emotions shape organizational life. Drawing on linguistic relativism, we propose that rather than merely naming a universal experience, inscribing the word saudade in the organizational lexicon serves as a linguistic-emotional tool for connecting past and future and navigating organizational tensions.