Guayakí Yerba Mate is a beverage company offering sustainably harvested and shade-grown Yerba Mate products from the Atlantic rainforest including Ready-To-Drink (RTD) Mate and loose-leaf Mate. It is a business aiming at fostering regeneration of degraded rainforest while operating profitably. Due to the synchronization of its business activities with natural cycles it can be characterized as a regenerative organization. Guayakí’s global vision brings tensions between continuously growing and maintaining a strong social and environmental mission. The goal of regeneration during Guayakí’s growth journey is both a challenge and an opportunity in dealing with these tensions.

This Case Study provides an in-depth analysis of Guayakí’s approach towards regeneration and how the organizational tensions are managed. The analysis is based on the Gioia Methodology, resulting in the development of a dynamic model of managing growth tensions. The model shows that Guayaki is acting in a dialectic way by turning the competing demands into a new form of synthesis that transcends the opposites. The regenerative mindset was the most essential tool when managing organizational tensions of growth as it bears the potential to lead to a dialectic answer of tensions. It helps to mitigate tensions, preventing them from becoming stronger as it is the case for businesses that do no act regeneratively because this characteristic leads to the harmonic alignment of practices with the environment. In the case of Guayakí, the effective resolution of the growth tensions leads to more regeneration along the way.

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