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- All Subjects: Organizational Behavior
- Creators: Ashforth, Blake
Description
This dissertation examines how teams experience and co-construct hope for one another through storytelling and shared imaginings of possible futures during facilitated, future-focused workshops. I conducted a total of 38 qualitative, semi-structured interviews and performed two observations of facilitated workshops. This study reveals how hope in teams is a shared, complex, and emergent state that motivates team members toward accomplishing future-oriented change through empowered action. Using a gestalt framework of emotions, findings suggest hope in teams is greater than the sum of its parts and is rife with tensions and contradictions. In fact, this study suggests that hope in its latent state may first present as jadedness in team members, wherein they are guarded and seek to protect themselves from re-experiencing past pains and failures. This study found teams engage in a five-step hope emergence process during facilitated, future-focused workshops and that teams who emerged from the workshop hope-filled were able to sustain that hope by accomplishing meaningful progress toward ideas they had created in the workshop. This research expands understanding of positive emotions in the workplace and, specifically, the understanding of hope in teams by: (a) elucidating hope in teams using a gestalt emotion framework, (b) uncovering jadedness as a latent state of hope, (c) highlighting how teams experience hope as an ebb-and-flow of organizational life, (d) identifying five steps in a co-construction process of hope emergence, (e) recognizing the need for meaningful progress to be made in order for hope to persist in the team, (f) illuminating the role of disempowerment and the potential darker sides of hope, and (g) surfacing practical implications for co-constructing and sustaining hope for teams, leaders, and facilitators in the workplace.
ContributorsLopez, Cary Jensine Sanden (Author) / Tracy, Sarah J (Thesis advisor) / Adame, Elissa (Committee member) / Zanin, Alaina (Committee member) / Waldron, Vince (Committee member) / Ashforth, Blake (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
Individuals have multiple identities, and several of them may be simultaneously driving enacted behavior in a given context. Scholars have suggested that intrapersonal identity networks – the combination of identities, relationships between identities, and identity characteristics – influence enactment. However, very little is known about the process by which several components of one’s identity network result in a single stream of enactment. This is important because different factors (e.g., leader actions) may impact this process and, in turn, change the way people act in organizations and interpret the actions of others. I examined a healthcare system designed to surgically treat cancer patients. Taking an inductive interpretivist approach, and using grounded theory methodology, I developed a process model of intrapersonal identity network enactment that also takes into account interpretations of other system members’ enactment. My findings contribute to the social identity literature by suggesting that a common, highly central identity is not enough to align behavior in organizations. Instead individuals may enact a common “higher-order” identity in combination with the rest of their identity network in ways that actually work against each other, even as they genuinely work toward the same purpose. I also extend the literature on multiple identities by explicating a process by which four different identities, and four characteristics of each identity, foster enactment toward the surgical system. Finally, I show how one’s intrapersonal identity network influences how they interpret the enacted behavior of others. In doing so, I extend the identity threat and opportunity literature by showing how one person’s identity threat is another’s identity opportunity, even when they share a common higher-order identity. In short, my study shows how individuals can work against each other, even when they are genuinely working toward the same purpose.
ContributorsFenters, Virgil (Author) / Ashforth, Blake (Thesis advisor) / Corley, Kevin (Committee member) / Luciano, Margaret (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020