Jane E. Dutton

Threat Rigidity Effects in Organizational Behavior: A Multilevel Analysis

The authors wish to thank Jeanne Brett, Larry Cummings, Joanne Martin, J. P. Miller, and the anonymousASQ reviewers for their insightful comments on an earlier version of this paper. This paper explores the case for a general threat-rigidity effect in individual, group, and organizational behavior. Evidence from multiple levels of analysis is summarized, showing a restriction in information processing and constriction of control under threat conditions. Possible mechanisms underlying such a multiple-level effect are explored, as are its possible functional and dysfunctional consequences.

Reading the wind: how middle managers assess the context for selling issues to top managers

Issue selling is an important mechanism for creating change initiatives in organizations. This paper presents two studies that examine what middle managers think about as they decide whether or not to sell strategic issues to top management. In Study 1 middle managers identify themes that indicate a favorable or unfavorable context for issue selling. Top management’s willingness to listen and a supportive culture were the most often named contributors to context favorability, while fear of negative consequences, downsizing conditions and uncertainty were thought to signal that a context was unfavorable for issue selling. Study 2 identifies factors that middle managers associate with image risk in the context of issue selling. Violating norms for issue selling, selling in a politically vulnerable way and having a distant relationship with top management were regarded as major contributors to a middle manager’s level of image risk. Both studies enrich our understanding of the social psychological mechanisms that undergird the strategic change process.© 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

INTERPERSONAL SENSEMAKING AND THE MEANING OF WORK

Abstract In this paper, we present a model of interpersonal sensemaking and describe how this process contributes to the meaning that employees make of their work. The cues employees receive from others in the course of their jobs speak directly to the value ascribed by others to the job, role, and employee. We assert that these cues are crucial inputs in a dynamic process through which employees make meaning of their own jobs, roles, and selves at work. We describe the process through which interpersonal cues and the acts of others inform the meaning of work, and present examples from organizational research to illustrate this process. Interpersonal sensemaking at work as a route to work meaning contributes to theories of job attitudes and meaning of work by elaborating the role of relational cues and interpretive processes in the creation of job, role and self-meaning.

Learning From Academia: The Importance Of Relationships In Professional Life

In-depth interviews with business school faculty members suggest that work relationships are more than strategically chosen means to career mobility. Relationships are career-defining ends as well, and negative relationships may be as consequential as helpful ties. Findings also showed significant gender differences: women, more than men, told stories about harm; men, more than women, told stories about help. Workplace relationships may play different roles for professionals and managers, and mens and womens different relational experiences may foster different career logics, or ways of striving for success.

Giving Commitment: Employee Support Programs and The Prosocial Sensemaking Process

Researchers have assumed that employee support programs cultivate affective organizational commitment by enabling employees to receive support. Using multimethod data from a Fortune 500 retail company, we propose that these programs also strengthen commitment by enabling employees to give support. We find that giving strengthens affective organizational commitment through a “prosocial sensemaking” process in which employees interpret personal and company actions and identities as caring. We discuss theoretical implications for organizational programs, commitment, sensemaking and identity, and citizenship behaviors. Changing employment landscapes have weakened employees’ physical, administrative, and temporal attachments to organizations (Cascio, 2003; Pfeffer & Baron, 1988). Employees are more mobile, more autonomous, and less dependent on their organizations for employment than ever before. To address these challenges, organizations are increasingly seeking to strengthen employees’ psychological attachments by cultivating affective

Compassion in Organizational Life

In this article, the authors explore compassion in work organizations. They discuss the prevalence and costs of pain in organizational life, and identify compassion as an important process that can occur in response to suffering. At the individual level, compassion takes place through three subprocesses: noticing another’s pain, experiencing an emotional reaction to the pain, and acting in response to the pain. The authors build on this framework to argue that organizational compassion exists when members of a system collectively notice, feel, and respond to pain experienced by members of that system. These processes become collective as features of an organization’s context legitimate them within the organization, propagate them among organizational members, and coordinate them across individuals.

Red Light, Green Light: Making Sense of the Organizational Context for Issue Selling

This paper analyzes the contextual cues female managers attend to when considering raising gender-equity issues at work. Study 1 provides a qualitative look at the range of cues indicating context favorability, including demographic patterns, top management qualities, and cultural exclusivity. Study 2 experimentally manipulates these cues and reveals that the exclusiveness of organizational culture is the most potent cue affecting willingness to sell a gender-equity issue. A discussion of mediators sheds lights on why cultural exclusivity affects issue selling.

Understanding compassion capability

We elaborate a theory of the foundations of a collective capability for compassion through a detailed analysis of everyday practices in an organizational unit. Our induced theory of compassion capability draws on the findings of an interview study to illustrate and explain how a specific set of everyday practices creates two relational conditions — high quality connections and a norm of dynamic boundary permeability — that enable employees of a collective unit to notice, feel and respond to members’ suffering. By articulating the mechanisms that connect everyday practices and a work unit’s compassion capability, we provide insight into the relational micro-foundations of a capability grounded in individual action and interaction.

Breathing Life Into Organizational Studies

As the title suggestions, this article asks two basic questions of organizational scholars: How do we come alive in how we do our research? What do we look for in organizational contexts to see life? Drawing on personal experience and an extraordinary example of a life-filled unit in a billing department of a community hospital, this essay engages these two questions.

Understanding strategic agenda building and its implications for managing change

Abstract This article develops a model of strategic agenda building describing the conditions under which strategic issues are likely to receive collective organizational attention. The model depicts how the issue and organizational contexts determine the issues that reach the agenda. Within the issue context, the salience of an issue (i.e., its perceived magnitude, its abstractness, simplicity and immediacy) and the level of issue sponsorship (i.e., issue attachment and strategic location) determine the force behind an issue and the likelihood that it will be placed on the strategic agenda. However, the effect of issue salience and sponsorship on an issues force is moderated by the size and variety of issues already under consideration (i.e., the agenda structure). The article concludes with consideration of the theoretical and practical implications of this dynamic, process-oriented approach to strategic issue identification and legitimation.