Caroline A. Bartel

The Role of Narratives in Sustaining Organizational Innovation

Sustaining innovation is a vital yet difficult task. Innovation requires the coordinated efforts of many actors to facilitate (1) the recombination of ideas to generate novelty, (2) real-time problem solving, and (3) linkages between present innovation efforts with past experiences and future aspirations. We propose that innovation narratives are cultural mechanisms that address these coordination requirements by enabling translation. Specifically, innovation narratives are powerful mechanisms for translating ideas across the organization so that they are comprehensible and appear legitimate to others. Narratives also enable people to translate emergent situations that are ambiguous or equivocal so as to promote real-time problem solving. With their accumulation, innovation narratives provide a generative memory for organizations that enable people to translate ideas accumulated from particular instances of past innovation to inform current and future efforts.

Dealing with Unusual Experiences: A Narrative Perspective on Organizational Learning

Experiences that do not fit squarely into known categories pose a challenge to notions of organizational learning that rely primarily on scientific or experiential approaches. Making sense of, responding to, and learning from such unusual experiences requires reflection and novel action by organizational actors. We argue that narrative development processes make this organizational learning possible. By developing narratives, organizational actors create situated understandings of unusual experiences, negotiate consensual meanings, and engage in coordinated actions. Through the accumulation of narratives about unusual experiences, an organization builds a memory with generative qualities. Specifically, through narratives, actors evoke memories of prior unusual experiences and how they were dealt with, and this generates new options for dealing with emerging unusual experiences. We outline a framework detailing how narrative development processes enable organizational learning from unusual experiences and conclude by summarizing how this approach differs from and yet builds upon scientific and experiential approaches to learning.

PERCEPTIONS OF TIME IN WORK GROUPS: DO MEMBERS DEVELOP SHARED COGNITIONS ABOUT THEIR TEMPORAL DEMANDS?

Achieving temporal synchronization may require that work groups develop shared cognitions about the time-related demands they face. We investigated the extent to which group members developed shared cognitions with respect to the three temporal perceptions: time orientation (present vs. future), time compression, and time management (scheduling and time management). We argue that group members are more likely to align their perceptions to temporal characteristics of the group or organizational context (e.g. time compression, scheduling, proper time allocation) rather than to each other’s individual time orientations. Survey data collected from 104 work groups are largely consistent with these expectations. The implications of shared cognitions on time for work group functioning and performance are discussed.

I Love New York, More Than Ever: Changes in People’s Identities as New Yorkers Following the World Trade Center Terrorist Attacks

This article offers personal observations of the emotional, cognitive, and behavioral reactions of New Yorkers in the days immediately following the World Trade Center attacks. Social identity theory is used as an interpretive lens through which to understand how a group facing extreme adversity found ways to fortify themselves by marshaling socioemotional, informational, and physical resources. Emphasis is placed on how initial emotional reactions to perceptions of threat in the hours after the attacks prompted people to seek out others to mobilize information and manage emotional distress. This article takes the position that these social gatherings became arenas in which people redefined group boundaries, modified the group’s identity, erected new symbols, and transformed each other’s emotions in ways that triggered actions to protect and restore the group.

Assessing collective affect recognition via the Emotional Aperture Measure

Curiosity about collective affect is undergoing a revival in many fields. This literature, tracing back to Le Bons seminal work on crowd psychology, has established the veracity of collective affect and demonstrated its influence on a wide range of group dynamics. More recently, an interest in the perception of collective affect has emerged, revealing a need for a methodological approach for assessing collective emotion recognition to complement measures of individual emotion recognition. This article addresses this need by introducing the Emotional Aperture Measure (EAM). Three studies provide evidence that collective affect recognition requires a processing style distinct from individual emotion recognition and establishes the validity and reliability of the EAM. A sample of working managers further shows how the EAM provides unique insights into how individuals interact with collectives. We discuss how the EAM can advance several lines of research on collective affect.