Abstract
ABSTRACTThis paper studies the ways in which members of inter-organizational teams collectively make sense of unexpected events and how they decide upon engaging in action. Frequently, ambiguity dominates such change processes aimed to create common understanding. Using the notion of the duality of intrinsic and constructed ambiguity, a detailed analysis of the collective sensemaking efforts of an inter-organizational team of railway coordinators in the Operational Control Center Rail was conducted. Building on team meetings observations during the days preceding a large and potentially disruptive winter storm in December 2013, the case study describes the process of collectively making sense of the disruptiveness of the storm. The findings show that contextual and temporal factors determine whether collective sensemaking unfolds as either a shared or a negotiated process.
Highlights
This paper studies the ways in which members of inter-organizational teams collectively make sense of unexpected events and decide upon engaging in action
To answer this research question we present the temporal unfolding of the collective sensemaking efforts of an inter-organizational team of railway coordinators in the Operational Control Center Rail (OCCR) in the days preceding a large and potentially disruptive winter storm
During one IOM, we observed that, after a detailed analysis of a weather agency, coordinators still had numerous questions to base their decision on; questions that, to frustration of the coordinators, could not be answered by the weather agency. These questions (e.g. ‘What is the chance on temperature below −10°C?’ or ‘What is the chance that this weather report will change?’) were important for the coordinators’ sensemaking, as it was difficult to decide anything based on ambiguous information
Summary
This paper studies the ways in which members of inter-organizational teams collectively make sense of unexpected events and decide upon engaging in action. Recent literature reviews show that the dynamics of creating common understanding in an inter-organizational context remain unclear (Holt & Cornelissen, 2013; Maitlis & Christianson, 2014; Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2015) It is not yet clear how exactly team members collectively categorize unexpected events in order to engage in collective action While the respective home organizations make sense of unexpected events in diverging and contrasting ways, the team members have to reach a common understanding in order to engage in collective action Such tensions will increasingly occur as inter-organizational collaboration is a prominent feature of the contemporary networked society, which is characterized as complex, ambiguous, and sometimes even paradoxical (Koppenjan, 2005; Smith & Lewis, 2011)
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