This study aims to reconceptualize value- and happiness-oriented management and performance-oriented management two approaches often portrayed in organizational behavior literature as alternatives or normative opposites through the lenses of duality and paradox. The study is grounded in the assumption that organizational phenomena cannot be adequately understood through linear, one-dimensional explanations; rather, they gain meaning through the dynamic tensions, simultaneous coexistence, and contextual interactions between seemingly opposing concepts. Accordingly, value, happiness, and performance are examined not as mutually exclusive managerial choices, but as interdependent components of a holistic organizational reality reflecting the economic, social, cultural, and psychological dimensions of organizations.

The study first establishes a theoretical foundation for the relationship between value–happiness and performance within the framework of organizational paradox and duality theory. It then draws on positive organizational behavior, New Public Management, symbolic formal decoupling, and psychological contract perspectives to analyze how this duality manifests at the organizational level. Particular attention is given to the ways in which performance-oriented practices such as measurement, target-setting, and quantification intersect with value and happiness discourses. The study critically examines the conditions under which these approaches generate synergistic outcomes and the circumstances in which they produce mutually erosive effects. The Turkish context, especially public organizations and universities, is considered as an illustrative setting in which performance regimes generate tensions affecting employees’ subjective well-being, sense of meaning, and organizational commitment.

The findings suggest that the relationship between measurement regimes and value–happiness discourses is not merely a technical management issue but is closely linked to organizational legitimacy, ethical responsibility, and employees’ psychological contract perceptions. The instrumental use of value and happiness narratives to support performance agendas may expose inconsistencies between organizational rhetoric and practice, thereby influencing trust, justice perceptions, and organizational cynicism. Conversely, reframing performance goals within a value-based and meaning-oriented framework may enable organizations to pursue both effectiveness and humane sustainability.

In conclusion, this study demonstrates that the tension between value- and happiness-oriented management and performance-oriented management is not a matter of managerial preference but a structural and enduring feature of organizational life. Rather than offering prescriptive solutions, the chapter contributes a critical, contextual, and pluralistic conceptual framework to the organizational behavior literature. This framework encourages viewing organizational tensions not as problems to be eliminated, but as productive dynamics to be understood and managed, thereby advancing a shift from one-dimensional managerial rationality toward a paradox-sensitive, multi-dimensional mode of organizational reasoning.