Emotional Structuring of Practices and Intraorganizational Innovation Process

Abstract

We trace a longitudinal process of intraorganizational innovation that comprises the creation, evolution, and shutdown of an innovation unit in a large Western European corporation over three years. We show that while the execution of some innovation activities triggered positive emotions, the execution of others triggered negative ones. Our study reveals how organizational members’ collective effort to regulate the emotions that arise from daily activities influences the co-evolution of formal organizational structures, cognitive frames, and the innovation process. At the micro level, we unpack how and why innovating members alter a particular organizational activity. At the macro, organizational level, we show how over three years, patterns of collective emotion-regulation behavior and cumulative changes to activities shape the innovation process and its outcomes. Our primary contribution is to provide a novel, more holistic understanding of how collective emotions, cognition, and organizational structure co-evolve over time, and how their interplay influences the intraorganizational innovation process and its outcomes.