Abstract
Event interpretation and acknowledgement drive behaviour and identity formation in organisations. Extant studies exploring this link have focused on large, stable organisations. We extend these studies to entrepreneurial contexts where individual behaviour and organisational identity are especially fluid. We analyse narratives of success and failure in entrepreneurial firms to identify and explore acknowledgement practice, which is the ad-hoc action (or inaction) of organisational actors and groups responding to observed events. We explore how uncertainty affects event interpretation and acknowledgement. Within entrepreneurial contexts, we show that event interpretation and acknowledgement biases influence responses to success and failure. The combination of these biases reveals four broad emergent organisational characteristics, which have important implications for organisational identity.
Highlights
Functional, formalised mechanisms for interpreting, acknowledging and validating shared events have been studied as ceremony and ritual in large, established organisations (Dacin et al, 2010; Trice and Beyer, 1984)
We describe the characteristics of acknowledgement practice at entrepreneurial firms, discuss the influence of uncertainty on event interpretation and acknowledgement and explore how interpretation and acknowledgement biases leads to emergent organisational characteristics
This paper presents a novel picture of acknowledgement practice at entrepreneurial firms
Summary
Functional, formalised mechanisms for interpreting, acknowledging and validating shared events have been studied as ceremony and ritual in large, established organisations (Dacin et al, 2010; Trice and Beyer, 1984) Within this context, celebrations, such as company parties (Rosen, 1988) and award-giving events (Anand and Watson, 2004), commend success and legitimise practice, often leading to expressions of happiness and joy. Whilst the characteristics of event interpretation and acknowledgement in large, established institutions and organisations have been extensively studied through the enaction of ceremony and ritual (see Islam and Zyphur, 2009), we know little about how organisational actors, founders of entrepreneurial firms, interpret and acknowledge events when uncertainty is high. In entrepreneurial firms, behavioural norms are unformed and blurred by perceived environmental uncertainty (Milliken, 1987)
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