Whereas scholars have historically treated routines and creativity as contradictory concepts, I adopt a dynamic ontology of routines that recasts them as a duality. Using data from a case study at a ...midsize retail organization, I theorize that artifacts, auxiliary routines, and external comparisons shape the enactment of routines that accomplish seemingly contradictory patterns of novelty and familiarity. From this analysis, I theorize two mechanisms—personalizing and depersonalizing—to explain how enacting a routine can produce patterns that allow an organization to achieve recognizable creativity on an ongoing basis. The findings contribute to research by theorizing the routine as a central concept that explains the ongoing accomplishment of recognizable creativity. By theorizing routines as an inherent part of creativity, and creativity as an inherent part of routines, I shift the way that scholars have traditionally viewed how organizations foster creativity among employees. For routine dynamics research, this study elaborates on the agency of routine actors who skillfully integrate their idiosyncratic backgrounds and experiences with the routine in ways that create complex patterns. It also unpacks the pivotal role of broader contexts and nonroutine actors in shaping routines.
Proponents of a popular view of how individuals respond to ethical issues at work claim that individuals use deliberate and extensive moral reasoning under conditions that ignore equivocality and ...uncertainty. I discuss the limitations of these "rationalist approaches" and reconsider their empirical support using an alternative explanation from social psychological and sensemaking perspectives. I then introduce a new theoretical model composed of issue construction, intuitive judgment, and post hoc explanation and justification. I discuss the implications for management theory, methods, and practice.
When Karl Weick's seminal article, ‘Enacted Sensemaking in Crisis Situations’, was published in 1988, it caused the field to think very differently about how crises unfold in organizations, and how ...emergent crises might be more quickly curtailed. More than 20 years later, we offer insights inspired by the central ideas in that article. Beginning with an exploration of key sensemaking studies in the crisis and change literatures, we reflect on lessons learned about sensemaking in turbulent conditions since Weick (1988), and argue for two core themes that underlie sensemaking in such contexts: shared meanings and emotion. We examine when and how shared meanings and emotion are more and less likely to enable more helpful, or adaptive, sensemaking, and conclude with some suggestions for future research in the sensemaking field.
This research examines how identity claims constructed in narratives by borrowers influence lender decisions about unsecured personal loans. Specifically, do the number of identity claims and their ...content influence lending decisions, and can they predict the longer-term performance of funded loans? Using data from the peer-to-peer lending website Prosper.com, the authors find that unverifiable information affects lending decisions above and beyond the influence of objective, verifiable information. As the number of identity claims in narratives increases, so does loan funding, whereas loan performance suffers, because these borrowers are less likely to pay back the loan. In addition, identity content plays an important role. Identities focused on being trustworthy or successful are associated with increased loan funding but ironically are less predictive of loan performance than other identities (i.e., moral and economic hardship). Thus, some identity claims aim to mislead lenders, whereas others provide true representations of borrowers.
Using a multi-year qualitative study, I explain how employees at a fast-growing retail organization used creative resourcing—that is, the manipulation and recombination of objects in novel and useful ...ways to solve problems. I induce two core organizational processes (autonomous resourcing and directed resourcing) that explain how organizations foster ongoing creative activities in response to different perceived resource endowments. In doing so, I add clarity to a mixed literature that argues on the one hand that limited resources foster creativity, and on the other, that abundant resources foster creativity. Instead, I reorient the questions that scholars ask by shifting the conversation away from variance-explanation models and towards understanding organizational processes, specifically around how employees use resources in. dynamic ways and how managers enable them to do so. My study unpacks how the link between resources and creativity is rooted deeply in the actions of managers and employees embedded in organizations over time. In elaborating theory around these actions, I contribute to scholarly and practitioner understanding around how organizations foster creativity in a variety of resource environments.
Data from a Fortune 500 retailer suggest that managers tell strategically ambiguous, interwoven narratives about how an organization changes and how it remains the same, thereby attempting to both ...unfreeze and freeze the existing meanings employees attribute to the organization. Employees embellish these narratives to make sense of and narrate responses to change (resisting, championing, and accepting), something patterned by time period and context. This study revises conceptualizations of managerial and employee discourse in fostering and hampering the implementation of strategic change by broadening consideration of both the sources and the types of meanings used to "construct" change.
A Socially Embedded Model of Thriving at Work Spreitzer, Gretchen; Sutcliffe, Kathleen; Dutton, Jane ...
Organization science (Providence, R.I.),
09/2005, Volume:
16, Issue:
5
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Thriving describes an individuals experience of vitality and learning. The primary goal of this paper is to develop a model that illuminates the social embeddedness of employees thriving at work. ...First, we explain why thriving is a useful theoretical construct, define thriving, and compare it to related constructs, including resilience, flourishing, subjective well-being, flow, and self-actualization. Second, we describe how work contexts facilitate agentic work behaviors, which in turn produce resources in the doing of work and serve as the engine of thriving. Third, we describe how thriving serves as a gauge to facilitate self-adaptation at work. We conclude by highlighting key theoretical contributions of the model and suggesting directions for future research.
While corporations are increasingly being called on to improve social welfare, researchers have primarily focused their efforts on the role of external pressures and top managers in shaping a ...corporation's engagement with social issues. As an alternative, I consider the role of social change agents who work within corporations and direct their firms to address a social issue. I suggest two issue impediments obstructing these efforts—issue illegitimacy and issue equivocality—that are shaped by economic philosophies, institutional fields, firm missions, and social change agent beliefs. These impediments ground four types of issues that social change agents attempt to advance: convertible, blurry, safe, and risky. I propose meaning-making tactics best suited to address the type of social issue individuals seek to advance inside a firm: framing, labeling, maintaining, and importing. I argue that by matching the issue type and meaning-making tactic, social change agents will more likely influence top managers to support a social issue. This article contributes to the literature by explaining how meaning making serves at the heart of impediments to and potential solutions to firms' efforts to improve social welfare and by spotlighting the role of a firm's employees in encouraging the organization to improve social welfare.
Using a grounded theory study of two prominent performing arts organizations during the COVID-19 pandemic, we develop theory about how organizations respond to adversity over time. Building on ...research on resilience, resourcefulness, and crisis management, we induce a process model that unpacks the mechanisms and dynamics that enable organizations to act resiliently. We find that organizations approach adversity using two types of resourcefulness. Promotive resourcefulness focuses on opportunities from adversity, which leads to acting resiliently. We show how promotive resourcefulness becomes sustained over time by endogenously producing resources-crisis agency, trust, and hopefulness-which expands an organization's identity and leads to resilient acts. In contrast, preventative resourcefulness focuses on minimizing worst-case outcomes, which leads to a lost organizational identity and relatively weak adversity adjustment. We find that preventative resourcefulness becomes part of cycles that erode trust, limit crisis agency, and generate hopelessness. Additionally, we explain how financial, emotional, and operational updating can shift preventative to promotive resourcefulness, allowing organizations to act resiliently later in a crisis. Our findings unpack critical mechanisms and processes that explain whether and how organizations act resiliently over time.
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