"DANCING ON HOT COALS": HOW EMOTION WORK FACILITATES COLLECTIVE SENSEMAKING

• Published in: Academy of Management journal Vol. 60; no. 2; pp. 642 - 670
• Main Author: HEAPHY, EMILY D.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Briarcliff Manor Academy of Management 01-04-2017
• Subjects: Collaborative approach; Conflict; Consumers; Customers; Dancing; Emotions; Empathy; Occupational psychology; Qualitative research; Sensemaking; Social interaction
• ISSN: 0001-4273; 1948-0989
• DOI: 10.5465/amj.2014.0101

While organizations and researchers have traditionally conceptualized customers as consumers of their services and products, there is a growing recognition that organizations need to develop more collaborative relationships with clients. In this research, I explore one implication of this shift—how employees respond to client conflicts. In a multi-method qualitative study, I studied patient advocates, hospital employees who mediate conflicts between patients, families, and staff. I develop a process model that shows how mediators construct a web of discrete social interactions that, over time, enables them to develop an empathetic account of the conflict. They then selectively deploy the account to engage in sensegiving. The process model integrates research on emotions and sensemaking in novel ways. I identify how emotion work triggers emotion dynamics in interactions that facilitate or disrupt sensemaking and sensegiving. I show how plausible accounts are developed over the course of social interactions and that mediators pivoted from sensemaking to sensegiving when the account was characterized by empathy. Overall, this research shows how mediators actively generate, interpret, and influence their own and others' emotions, and that mediators' emotion work contributes to the success of collective sensemaking.