Macquarie Business School, Macquarie U., Australia
Although previous research highlights subtle forms of resistance focusing on "covert" approaches, the manifestation of subtle resistance through discursive tactics remains underexplored. This literature has focused on discrete aspects of how compliance and resistance are executed simultaneously and has ignored "overt" resistance tactics hidden through discursive mechanisms, but not entirely concealed behind the scenes. This paper explores how employees present resistance subtly in a compliant discourse through the usage of discursive tactics, and how these tactics are connected to employees’ actual behavior. To conduct this analysis, we evaluated 79 individual interviews with members of an organization that implemented a flexible work policy. Findings reveal conditionality as a key discursive tactic of resistance, categorized into four types: non-adaptation, pragmatic, practical, and occasional. These tactics are driven by either personal or organizational discursive approaches. Additionally, the findings show a direct connection between different usage of conditionality and employees’ actual behaviors, challenging prior studies that reduced subtle resistance to cynicism without behavioral changes. The analysis extends the literature on compliance-gaining and subtle resistance, illustrating that conditionality is a rhetorical tool with which employees can negotiate personal and organizational priorities in varied forms. Furthermore, the study reveals shifts in power dynamics post-pandemic, as employees simultaneously position themselves as targets and agents of change within the implementation of the framework, challenging traditional approaches of organizational change.
