Sensemaking Approach Research Articles

Making sense of crisis: Charismatic, ideological, and pragmatic leadership in response to COVID-19.

The incursion of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) reached global scale in 2020, requiring a response from leaders worldwide. Although the virus is a ubiquitous problem, world leaders have varied appreciably in their responses resulting in substantially different outcomes in terms of virus mitigation, population health, and economic stability. One explanation for this inconsistency is that leaders have taken differential approaches to making sense of the crisis that, in turn, have driven their approaches to decision making and communication. The present article elaborates on the role of leaders as sensemakers and explains how a leader's sensemaking approach is a critical element in successful crisis management efforts. Through the charismatic, ideological, pragmatic (CIP) leadership model, a sensemaking-focused theory of leadership, it is explained how specific, relatively stable sensemaking approaches manifest and what actions leaders engaged in those styles are likely to take in times of crisis. These connections are then reinforced through case examples of 3 world leaders, framed through CIP, and demonstrate how their sensemaking approach has influenced their response to COVID-19. The article concludes with a discussion of the impacts that these differential approaches to COVID-19 may have on the global community, and recommendations for more explicit incorporation of sensemaking into our understanding of leadership. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

The ‘context’ of transport project cost performance: Insights from contract award to final construction costs

Despite the plethora of studies examining the cost performance of transport projects, we still do not fully understand why they exceed their agreed price for construction. A lack of an in-depth exploration of context has contributed to this lack of understanding. In this paper, we seek to provide a context as to why the construction costs of transport projects experience increases from their contract award. We adopt sense-making approach, which is qualitative in nature, to examine the performance and financial reviews for eight transport projects constructed by an Australian contractor. The reviews are checkpoints undertaken during the construction of projects to monitor actual costs and forecasted profits for the contractor. The reviews are performed at the 50% and 75% milestones of a project's forecasted schedule by a team independent from the contractor's organization. We look into context states of projects such as their programme, quality, safety, design, and management. We use a context breakdown structure to uncover the ‘contexts within contexts’ that significantly contribute increases to construction costs. We reveal that the mean forecasted contractor margin was almost 9%, which reinforces the belief that there is a lack of competition in the marketplace. Overall, the hierarchy of contexts within contexts we unravel provides further understanding as to why transport projects experience increases in their construction costs. Considering the nature of the recurring contexts that we identify, we recommend that governments re-calibrate their approaches to procuring their transport projects. We suggest that they embrace negotiated contracts, alliance contracting, leadership and resourcing strategy, and work toward establishing a generative culture in the projects they procure.

Triggering sustainability communication in a B2B context: combining action research and sensemaking

PurposeThe paper explores processes associated with the adoption of corporate sustainability communication in a B2B context. It employs a combined action research and sensemaking approach to document moments that precede the initiation of external sustainability communication.Design/methodology/approachThe paper is the outcome of an action research project, where we examine the case of one industrial company that was silent on its multiple sustainability-related practices, but recently decided to become more transparent to the outside world. A processual approach to sensemaking is adopted to show how organisational and non-organisational members actively participated in meaning co-construction.FindingsCorporate silence can be disrupted by triggering events that cause moments of sudden realisation for organisational members, eventually leading to the initiation of sensemaking processes inside the organisation. Once this occurs, the possibility of externally communicating sustainability appears a feasible and strategic approach to pursue. We document how different actors are involved in meaning co-construction and how the entire process of sensemaking unfolds.Practical implicationsA sensemaking approach sheds light on the complexity of sustainability communication, where multiple actors are involved. This is a useful approach to consider in order to couple sustainability with other organisational practices. Moreover, sensemaking opens a window of opportunity for various societal actors' interventions to shape the role and content of sustainability communication.Originality/valueThe paper offers an original, theoretically informed methodological contribution to the literature on sustainability communication by coupling a sensemaking approach with action research. The approach is employed to examine the role of internal organisational actors in sustainability reporting processes, an area that has received scant attention.

Health care ethics ECHO: Improving ethical response self-efficacy through sensemaking

In clinical practice, evidence suggests that teaching ethics using normative ethical theory has little influence on the ethical actions of providers in practice. Thus, new training methods are needed that improve clinician response to ethical problems. A sensemaking approach to ethics training has demonstrated promise as an evidence-based pedagogical method to improve ethical reasoning and response. Project ECHO (Extension for Community Health Outcomes) is theoretically linked to improved sensemaking. This study examines the effectiveness of ECHO and training in use of sensemaking approaches to ethical response by clinicians. A quasi-experimental design study using univariate linear regression was used to examine the effect of the three types of ethics training on ethical response self-efficacy scores, while controlling for participant characteristics of years in practice, discipline and sex. We found evidence that training in sensemaking through participation in ECHO promotes improved ethical response self-efficacy of clinicians. However, results also suggest that a traditional ECHO format that does not explicitly introduce sensemaking strategies into the training does not result in the same learning outcomes as measured through an ethical response self-efficacy survey. This study found important preliminary results to support use of sensemaking approaches in clinical ethics training.

Beyond the beaker: students’ use of a scaffold to connect observations with the particle level in the organic chemistry laboratory

Understanding ongoing chemical processes in the laboratory requires constant shifting between different representational levels—the macroscopic, submicroscopic, and symbolic levels—and analysis of the various mechanistic features of each of these levels. Thus, the ability to explain observations of chemical phenomena with regard to their submicroscopic levels in the laboratory is a key requirement. Research shows that students have difficulty in discerning and comprehending the meaning and visualization of the submicroscopic level. Traditional laboratory instruction often fails to help students discern the relationship between their observations and the corresponding chemical processes. Consequently, there is a high demand for new teaching strategies which address these issues. Therefore, we developed and implemented a scaffold for the organic laboratory and tested it in a research study using qualitative methods. The scaffold encourages students to purposefully separate and connect the macroscopic and submicroscopic representational levels. The implementation of the scaffold was accompanied by semi-structured pre- and post-interviews with students (N = 22) and an analysis of students’ work with the scaffold in the laboratory. We analysed students’ sense-making approach while reflecting on organic syntheses before and after working with the scaffold, and characterized changes in their approach. The findings emphasize the need to develop further resources to support students’ understanding of the submicroscopic level. Implications of these findings for research and teaching to foster meaningful learning in the organic laboratory are discussed.

Active vs intuitive sensemaking: Examination through the lens of generation, evaluation, and revision in ethical decision-making

ABSTRACT Research examining ethical decision-making (EDM) has focused on how people engage in EDM, leading many researchers to focus on sensemaking models of EDM. Although the merits of a sensemaking approach with respect to EDM are evident in the literature, less is known about the specific cognitive processes by which sensemaking impacts EDM. This study examines the impact of three late-cycle cognitive processes – idea generation, evaluation, and revision – as well as the timing of these processes on EDM. Results indicate that information gathering early on is critical to EDM; a finding which supports an active sensemaking model over an intuitive one.

Breaking Social Media Bubbles for Information Globalization: A Cross-Cultural and Cross-Language User-Centered Sense-Making Approach

With the globalization of data, online social media plays an active role in spreading information and classifying people, and thinking about how to break the solidification of algorithms becomes critical. Current algorithmic research in the social media space often focuses on a single service or language, mainly due to the lack of a way to connect the different bubbles. The panel speakers described their various research activities in which they presented different perspectives on how to break the bubble. This article provides a summary of this interactive panel.

Entrepreneurial implementation intention as a tool to moderate the stability of entrepreneurial goal intention: A sensemaking approach

This study evaluates how entrepreneurial implementation intention (EII) influences the stability of entrepreneurial goal intention (EGI). Two waves of data collection were conducted during and after entrepreneurship education (EE). The moderating role of EII on EGI after a period of approximately one year was tested. The results indicate significant variation between 412 participants of high and low EII during EE. The findings contribute to furthering the understanding of the factors that maintain EGI over time. They highlight the unconscious aspects of students’ behavioral processing that potentially cause controversial results regarding the impact of EE on EGI.

Social media and sensemaking patterns in new product development: demystifying the customer sentiment

Artificial intelligence by principle is developed to assist but also support decision making processes. In our study, we explore how information retrieved from social media can assist decision-making processes for new product development (NPD). We focus on consumers’ emotions that are expressed through social media and analyse the variations of their sentiments in all the stages of NPD. We collect data from Twitter that reveal consumers’ appreciation of aspects of the design of a newly launched model of an innovative automotive company. We adopt the sensemaking approach coupled with the use of fuzzy logic for text mining. This combinatory methodological approach enables us to retrieve consensus from the data and to explore the variations of sentiments of the customers about the product and define the polarity of these emotions for each of the NPD stages. The analysis identifies sensemaking patterns in Twitter data and explains the NPD process and the associated steps where the social interactions from customers can have an iterative role. We conclude the paper by outlining an agenda for future research in the NPD process and the role of the customer opinion through sensemaking mechanisms.

Quality, requisite imagination and resilience: Managing risk and uncertainty in construction

Measuring and determining the risks of rework is critical for determining the reliability of construction and ensuring peoples safety. In this paper we aim to addresses the following question: “How can we anticipate and mitigate the consequences of rework in construction?” We adopted a sense-making approach to tackle this question and in doing so acquired knowledge and an understanding of managerial practices and conditions that contributed to rework in a leading construction organization. Using non-conformances as a measure of quality we analyzed 9088 events that required rework in 210 projects to determine its costs and identify those subcontract trades where it was most prevalent. To garner an understanding of the conditions that hindered the organizations ability to ‘anticipate’ the presence and ‘respond’ to the occurrence of rework in its projects, we conducted a series of interviews and found three issues contributing to this situation: (1) the absence of a homogenous culture; (2) a misalignment of strategy; and (3) organizational amnesia. We develop a novel framework to manage the risk and uncertainty of rework based on the concepts of requisite imagination and resilience. The developed framework can be applied not only to construction, but also form part of an integrated preventative maintenance policy to manage an asset's quality during its operations.

Women CEOs in Mexico: gendered local/global divide and the diversity management discourse

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to add to the existing research on critical perspectives on diversity management (DM). Specifically, this study examines the narratives of women chief executive officers (CEOs) from different countries of origin to understand how they enact the DM discourse by drawing on their past and present experiences at US multinational corporations (MNCs) located in Mexico.Design/methodology/approachThis study, based on six open-ended interviews with local and expatriate women CEOs who work in MNCs situated in Mexico, used a sensemaking approach to analyze their narratives. The theoretical foundation of the study is based on decolonial feminist theory, which is used to analyze the hierarchical binary between Anglo-Saxon/European woman and the Mexican/Latin American woman with respect to the discourse of DM.FindingsThis study found that the dominant discourse used by women CEOs, expats and nationals was a business case for diversity. Female CEOs represent MNCs in favorable terms, compared to those of local companies, despite the nuances in the antagonistic representations in their narratives. This study also found that the women CEOs’ narratives perpetuated a discourse of “otherness” that created a hierarchy between Anglo-Saxons (US/MNCs’ culture) and Latin Americans (Mexican/local companies’ culture).Originality/valueThis study contributes to critical studies on DM by analyzing diverse forms of power involving gender, race/ethnicity and organizational hierarchy. The use of decolonial feminist theory to examine MNCs is a novel approach to understanding women’s identities and the power differences between local/foreign contexts and global/local businesses. This study also discusses the implications of its findings for women in business careers and concludes with a call for more research within the global South (Latin America).

Unraveling the Theoretical Traditions in the Field of Strategy-as- Practice

Strategy-as-practice (SAP) has become one of the most vibrant areas of contemporary strategy research in the past two decades. As the field has grown significantly, we have witnessed an emergence of various streams of research within the SAP research community. The present study uses data from 311 SAP articles to conduct a bibliometric analysis and a systematic review for the identified clusters. This study contributes to the SAP literature by recognizing its constitutive streams of research (clusters) and their characteristic features, identifying the various tensions emerging between them, as well as elucidating the research opportunities evolving from these tensions as well as from within the clusters themselves. By clustering studies cited in SAP research, we identify five clusters of SAP research and additionally a set of connections of SAP research: 1) social practice, 2) the sensemaking approach, 3) discursive perspectives, 4) sociomaterial practices 5) practice- driven institutionalism, and 6) connections of SAP with other fields of research. Building on our review of the identified clusters, we observe four key tensions between them, process vs. practice, practical vs. critical, micro vs. macro, and sociomaterial vs. discursive. We propose that addressing these four tensions provides a fertile agenda for future research in the field.

Organizational Discourse and Change in Japan: Practicing Between Generative and Dominant Discourses

The major objective of this article is to respond to Grant and Marshak’s (2011) call for a move towards change perspectives that emphasize the generative nature of discourses, narratives, and conversations and how change practitioners discursively facilitate the process in Japanese organizational culture. This paper attempts to investigate the question, “Can we specify the conditions and sources which make generative conversations emerge and may lead to a successful change effort in Japan?” The preliminary inquiry into the question indicates that the generative change process convinces change sponsors that changing the dominant discourses and welcoming alternative ones can lead to the long-term development of the organizations and themselves. With respect to the sources of alternative discourses, while psychological safety and trust in the external authority figure are generally required, the importance of the players’ survival anxiety and talent diversity may vary across the broad contexts on which organizations depend. The development of the discourse-based change framework with applications to the concepts of a political sensemaking approach and economic sociology is also emphasized in this context.

Sensemaking approach e comportamento informacional de arquivistas na gestão de documentos universitários

O artigo objetiva analisar como comportamento informacional de arquivistas interfere no processo de gestão de documentos produzidos em universidades, a partir da abordagem sensemaking. Os aportes metodológicos corresponderam ao método de procedimento monográfico (estudo de caso), inscrito na Coordenação de Arquivos e Documentação da Universidade Federal da Bahia (CAD/Ufba), com descrições das atividades dos arquivistas, assistentes e técnicos em arquivos no ambiente institucional. O instrumento de pesquisa conferiu à estruturação de questionário eletrônico, que procurou caracterizar as habilidades dos arquivistas no processo de representação e organização de documentos universitários, as estratégias de busca e recuperação de conteúdos em sistemas de informação formais/ informais e a rotina das atividades de gerenciamento, organização e atendimento aos usuários e supervisão de acervos arquivísticos. Os resultados evidenciaram que os servidores concordam com a relevância das estruturas do comportamento informacional direcionado ao desenvolvimento das atividades arquivísticas, mas reconhecem que fatores operacionais e burocráticos limitam as práticas de organização na Coordenação analisada. As considerações finais assinalam que a abordagem sensemaking dos profissionais da arquivologia interfere, positivamente, na gestão de documentos arquivísticos da Ufba, apesar dos recursos escassos destinados ao desenvolvimento das atividades de gestão.

Towards a process model of emotional sensemaking in post-merger integration: linking cognitive and affective dimensions

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to advance micro-level theorising of sociocultural post-merger integration (PMI) by merging insights from international business and management research on the cognitive and affective dimensions of PMI.Design/methodology/approachThe paper follows a narrative approach to review the previously separate literatures on cognition and emotion in PMI situations. It draws on insights from management research beyond the PMI context to integrate these literatures and as a result, develops a process model of emotional sensemaking in PMI.FindingsAn emotional sensemaking approach to PMI helps to explain when and why events might or might not motivate individuals to revisit their interpretation of a PMI and illustrates how and why similar PMI events can lead to opposite individual reactions and, thus, obtain heterogeneous integration outcomes.Research limitations/implicationsThe paper discusses how an emotional sensemaking approach can be applied to sociocultural PMI and points to new directions for future studies based on this application. As the model concentrates on the individual level, theoretical implications for sociocultural PMI at the meso- and macro-levels remain limited.Originality/valueThis paper brings forward the dynamics that underlie the processes and outcomes of individuals’ behaviour and reactions to PMI events. The proposed process model of emotional sensemaking in PMI responds to recent calls by sociocultural PMI scholars to promote a processual rather than event-based view of PMI, with a focus on individual actors and an emphasis on the multifaceted dynamics and outcomes of PMI.

What Are the Conflicting Tensions in an Italian Cooperative and How Do Members Manage Them? Business Goals’, Integrated Management, and Reduction of Waste within a Fruit and Vegetables Supply Chain

Social enterprise is a model of hybrid organization driven by the need to generate positive externalities by reinvesting their surplus for social and environmental objectives. One of the biggest problems arising from joining financial goals with social goals is the presence of increasing tensions between the members and stakeholders involved. Nevertheless, there has not been enough focus on how managers, employees, and stakeholders respond to the tensions caused by contradictions and how they try to reach a balance between financial, environmental, and social goals. Therefore, the present study is aimed at investigating how members of an agricultural cooperative in the Apulia region (Italy) try to join the organizational forms of business and social values, namely, the sustainable practices related to CO2 emission reduction, resource use efficiency, and food waste mitigation. Additionally, the study goes further and explores whether and how these contradictory pressures are solved. Starting from the sensemaking approach, the study carried out an inductive case study through the use of a multiple case study design and in-depth interviews. The findings highlight the following two novel aspects: (1) Managers prefer to adopt a cumulative mitigating hybridization approach and (2) a weak integration can be noticed between social and commercial dimensions, originating from a lack of holistic perspective and poor interorganizational communication.

Subsidiary Role Change During a Local Economic Crisis: A Sensemaking Approach

Using a sensemaking lens to examine the creation of subsidiary roles, this paper is built on three premises: (1) subsidiary managers often have different perceptions about their subsidiary role in the multinational enterprise, and (2) that such roles are not static and require continues re-interpretation and 3) that subsidiary roles are continually negotiated not assigned. Using data collected from 17 subsidiaries before and after the recent economic crisis in Brazil, we found support that subsidiary managers’ sense making processes plays an important part in the interpretation of the subsidiary’s roles and continual reinterpretation of these roles. Subsidiary roles were found to be negotiated between the HQ and the subsidiary and that subsidiaries with higher levels of innovativeness also evidenced when there exists what we call reinterpretation capabilities.

Finding Sense in Organization Studies: Assumptions and Features of K. Weick’s Sensemaking Approach

This article discusses some of the theoretical foundation of the sensemaking approach introduced by Karl Weick within the fields of organizational psychology and organizational theory. Weick, Sutcliffe, and Obstfeld wrote that “Sensemaking involves the ongoing retrospective development of plausible images that rationalize what people are doing” (2005: 409), or, in more general terms, making sense out of what is happening in order to reduce uncertainty and to act upon it. For this purpose, according to Weick, an individual deals with two questions: “What is going on? and, what should I do about it?” Answers to these questions and their following implications in the individual’s actions depend on the seven characteristics of the sensemaking: the individual’s identity, retrospective, enactment, social activity, ongoing [events and flux of experience], cues, and plausibility. Weick offers a “navigation of social space [of organization] with cultural maps in hand”, and draws inspiration from the analysis of jazz improvisation. His works, still lacking attention in Russia, offer an instrument for both crisis situations with dramatic “loss of sense” and quite common everyday events. Weick’s ideas were broadly developed within research on communication, identity, language, narratives, power, and other aspects of organizational activity. At the same time, sensemaking is believed to be one of the main theoretical inspirations for the processual approach in organization studies, which is focused on organizational becoming, or organizing.

Unveiling Internationalization Decision-Making of Burmese Managers: A Strategic Cognition Perspective

ABSTRACTBuilding on concepts from cognitive science, we explored how managers in the transitional economy of Myanmar undergo an international market entry strategic dilemma. We investigated potential framing effects and the thought process in making such decisions. Three-hundred-and-five Burmese managers participated in one of three separate studies. A two-by-two experimental design and the cognitive mapping were used to examine biases in the internationalization decision-making process. Data were analyzed using non-parametric tests and content analyses. Results reveal that strategic choice was not associated with framing bias, personal characteristics, or sense-making approach. However, different risk preferences were detected between different business contexts.

Perceptions of organization development in South Korea: the use of a sensemaking approach

ABSTRACTThis qualitative study explores how employees engage in sensemaking during Organization Development (OD) initiatives in chaebols, that is, large family-owned firms in South Korea. In adopting a case study approach, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 37 respondents drawn from different levels of a chaebol to address three research questions. First, what key contextual factors are associated with employees’ sensemaking at different levels of an organization? Second, how do individuals at different levels of the organization make sense of an OD initiative through the ‘searching for plausibility’ property of sensemaking? Third, what contextual cues are influential when employees engage in ‘identity construction’ in sensemaking in response to an OD initiative? The findings and implications of the study demonstrate multiple subjective realities, which employees from different levels construct, indicating that the prevailing norms and practice within the existing culture, which have been influential in constructing the identities of employees should be identified when attempting to implement OD to change the organizational culture.