Until the 1980s, most corporations built up their competitive capabilities on the basis of efficiency, stability, and predictability, while other values such as innovation, flexibility, and change were relatively neglected. However, in responding to ever-increasing environmental changes of the recent times, firms all over the world are trying to accomplish various incompatible objectives simultaneously (e.g., stressing innovation and at the same time trying to improve efficiency by reducing cost). In this vein, a growing number of researchers have turned their attention to paradoxical issues in organizations. From the perspective of paradox, an organization must hold opposing, even mutually exclusive characteristics simultaneously and manage them constructively.This study is an attempt to bridge an important research gap in the extant literature on management of paradox: that is, what kind of psychological characteristics are required for employees to be successful in dealing with incompatible performance requirements. For that purpose, the study introduces a long-standing concept of psychology, cognitive complexity (CC), which is defined as the degree to which a multidimensional cognitive space is differentiated and integrated. Specifically, this study investigates the relationship between the individuals’ CC and two conceptually orthogonal indicators of job performance―efficiency and creativity. It is hypothesized that cognitively more complex employees will outperform cognitively less complex employees in both of the two performance dimensions(main effect). In addition, it is also postulated that as individuals’ tasks become more complex the