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This paper seeks to develop a mid-range theory of how change recipient sensemaking processes affect the realization of strategic flexibility during simultaneous change in professional service firms.

The research presented is based on an exploratory embedded case study adopting a qualitative interpretive methodology, conducted at a professional service organization. A sensemaking lens was adopted in order to study organizational change processes. Data was collected through semi-structured open-ended in-depth interviews, and analyzed using first and second order analysis, inspired by the methodology used by Corley and Gioia (2004).

We identified four determinants of change recipient sensemaking: professional identification, dominant organizational discourse, equivocality of expectations, and cross-understanding between thought worlds. Case findings indicate that cognitive and affective dimensions of change recipient sensemaking are strongly interwoven in their effect on realizing strategic flexibility.

We contribute to the competence-based strategic management literature by introducing the concept of change recipient sensemaking in understanding the realization of strategic flexibility; by identifying four major determinants in a context of simultaneous change in a professional service organization; and by highlighting the interwoven and mutually reinforcing cognitive and affective dimensions of professional’s process of constructing meaning.

Sensemaking is an integral element of human cognition. It is the activity whereby we find answers to questions that arise from experience. It is at the core of collaborative management research as researchers and practitioners work together to build a shared understanding of organizational phenomena and take action based on that understanding, thereby generating actionable knowledge. However, mutual understanding is a complex process which requires a great deal of effort by both researchers and practitioners. While research has described in great detail the consequences of collaborative research endeavors, the challenge of creating a shared sensemaking conducive to these results has been left partially explored. The chapter examines the nature of sensemaking in collaborative management research. A comprehensive framework is proposed and then utilized to examine a collaborative management research effort carried out with an Italian social cooperative.

Change management projects typically fail because they meet employee resistance created by emotional sensemaking processes. This paper aims to present an in-depth explanation for these failures and how change managers could avoid them.

This study presents an argument in the following three steps: it begins with an empirically well-established fact that attempts at change management often trigger negative emotional responses; the moral foundations theory is then used to identify the typical categories of emotional responses that may result in resistance to organizational change; and the ordonomic approach to business ethics is built upon to substantiate the diagnosis that, in many cases, emotional responses cause employees to behave in a way that is collectively self-damaging.

The core idea of the current study’s contribution is that emotionally driven processes of sensemaking can easily become dysfunctional, especially in situations that require extensive change. Consequently, it should be top priority for managers to engage in sensegiving, which comprises: narratives that explain what is going on against the background of relevant alternatives and appropriate discourses that guide how employees form their expectations. In a nutshell, sensegiving attempts to reframe sensemaking processes.

Even if a win–win potential already exists, it can still be misperceived. If employees are used to thinking within a trade-off framework, this might trigger trade-off intuitions and negative emotions, in effect leading to a situation that makes everyone worse off. Such mental models might become a self-fulfilling prophecy. To counter such a tendency, sensegiving aims at a professional management of sensemaking processes. The task of successful change management, properly understood, is to create and communicate win–win potentials, ensuring that all parties involved understand that they are not asked to sacrifice their self-interest, instead they are invited to participate in a process of mutual betterment.

The literature on sensemaking draws attention to the empirical fact that resistance to change is typically driven by emotions. The moral foundations theory helps in exactly identifying which emotional dimensions are relevant in times of organizational change. The ordonomic approach to business ethics points out that – owing to their emotional nature – processes of sensemaking might fail, that they may mislead employees into behavioral patterns that are collectively self-damaging. Therefore, a top priority for management is to engage in sensegiving, that is, in (re-)framing sensemaking processes.

The aim of this paper is to investigate how political activities and processes influence sensemaking and sensegiving among top management, middle management and employees and to examine its consequences for implementing new knowledge.

Data were collected in a Norwegian bank using in-depth interviews with middle managers and financial advisers. Observations of meetings, informal conversations and verbatim notes were also used in data collection among top managers. A practice-based approach was used as an analytical lens.

Top managers' political activities of excluding others from the decision process affect their sensemaking and resulted in sensegiving contradictions between spoken intent and how to change practice. Middle managers' political activities were to accept top managers' sensegiving instead of managing themselves in their own sensemaking to help financial advisers with how to change their role and practice. As a result, middle managers' sensemaking affects their engagement in sensegiving. For financial advisers, the political processes of top and middle managers resulted in resistance and not making sense of how to change and implement new knowledge.

A total of 30 in-depth interviews, observations of five meetings and informal conversations might call for further studies. In addition, a Norwegian study does not account for other countries' cultural differences concerning leadership style, openness in decisions and employee autonomy.

To the author's knowledge, no studies identify the three-way conceptual relationship between political activities, sensemaking and sensegiving. In addition, the author believes that the originality lies in investigating these relationships using a three-level hierarchy of top management, middle management and employees.

To prepare project managers for the human aspects of project work using a new classroom-based approach to foster abilities in collective sensemaking.

The authors developed an approach for fostering collective sensemaking abilities through three class sessions inspired by Merrill's First Principles of Instruction. The authors implemented the sessions in two cohorts of students, with a total of 57 participants, and evaluated its impact through a series of surveys.

Findings demonstrated how each component of the educational approach contributed to an increase in students' sensemaking understanding and ability. Through explanation, demonstration and application components, students reported increasing levels of confidence in their ability to facilitate collective sensemaking in practice.

The authors’ findings are based on a sample of 57 students in one university setting. Further studies are required to evaluate the educational approach; such studies could use larger numbers of students or other education settings. Triangulating students' reported understanding and abilities would increase confidence in the effectiveness of this approach.

By explaining the authors’ approach to sensemaking education and providing initial evidence of its success, they provide educators with an example of how to foster collective sensemaking through classroom-based project management education. The approach has potential for teaching other interpersonal skills.

This research provides a novel classroom-based approach to foster sensemaking awareness and skills, and for dispersing contemporary project management thinking and tools to practitioners.

Following various calls for research, the purpose of this paper is to adopt theories of emotion and action to understand the affective dimension of sensemaking processes in organizational change endeavors.

This paper is conceptual in nature, introducing theories from psychology, in particular dual processing theory and the somatic marker hypothesis, to the field of intra- and inter-personal sensemaking in change processes.

The author discusses how emotions shape sensemaking and thus the perception of change events and how four discrete emotions (anger, fear, anxiety, hope) shape content and motivational strength of sensemaking accounts, influence the likelihood that a person will engage in sensegiving activities and will be willing to accept inter-personal sensemaking outcomes. The author proposes that emotions are an input to as well as an outcome of sensemaking processes.

Although this research builds on a strong empirical basis, is conceptual in nature. Future research might test the relationships suggested in this paper empirically.

The findings suggest that the management of affective reactions of people subjected to change processes might be a field currently not sufficiently accounted for in change management. Active emotion management might be a way to steer change processes in a positive way for all the stakeholders involved.

The conceptualization presented here contributes to the often requested development of a conceptual model integrating emotions into the sensemaking perspective. The introduction of distinct emotions and the grounding in multi-disciplinary theory as well as the strong implications for change management theory and practice make this contribution valuable.

While conventional wisdom suggests that sensemaking is targeted towards consensual understanding of the organization's intent and action, the objective of this study is to explore a different angle of sensemaking, namely, a situation of change and crisis in which the sensemaking process focuses on presenting the organization's members with an alternative understanding of its worldview, norms, and values.

The paper is based on a three‐year ethnographic field study. Data collection was based on the principles of qualitative research: participant observation, induction, interpretation, close proximity and unmediated relationships with the subjects investigated. The ethnographic method enabled collection of rich data, mainly by viewing the organizational context from its members' perspective, essential for studying.

The paper presents multiple cultural sensemaking accounts and the varied ways that the subjects use their diverse cultural resources and repertoires – ranging from intense ideological commitment to pure science to opportunistic views of their scientific work – in promoting their own, as well as their organization's survival. The study indicates that variations of conflict‐oriented sensemaking accounts can serve management's strategic quest for hegemony.

Qualitative research approaches position the researcher to learn through participative observation. The researcher acts as a participant in the activities under study and instead of attempting to control procedures and measure qualities of outcomes, the researcher becomes part of the target of study itself.

This paper shows that conflict and power relations are ubiquitous to sensemaking, and that multiple accounts can be inherent in sensemaking work. We suggest that the study of sensemaking should also consider conflict as an alternative sensemaking mechanism.

Sensemaking is usually described as positive and consensual in nature. Yet, as our study shows, when evolving from conflicting viewpoints, accounts and actions sensemaking can support dissension.

This study explores the politics of ideology in the process of sensegiving and sensemaking at a Japanese retailer in Hong Kong. Studies on power and politics are scarce despite key role of power and politics in understanding the factors behind the conflict between the management's policy legitimization (sensegiving) and employees' policy interpretation (sensemaking). By using the three dimensions proposed in the critical sensemaking approach (discourse, rules and contexts), this paper explores the complex mechanism of power and politics in sensemaking and sensegiving.

Using 15 months of participant observation as a salesperson, this paper discusses how the Japan-centric customer service philosophy (dominant discourse), customer service policies and practices (organizational rules) and asymmetric power structure between the Japanese global headquarters and Hong Kong subsidiaries (formative contexts) are presented and perpetuated through the sensegiving–sensemaking process.

Dominant discourse was observed in the management's sensegiving, which placed the Japanese style of customer service over others. This ethnocentric dominant discourse informed the creation of customer service policies, although the realization of the discourse was determined by the employees' conflicting interpretations of the organizational rules. As a formative context, an asymmetric power structure was present that positioned the Hong Kong subsidiary as subservient to the global headquarters in Japan. This shows that the political process of sensegiving and sensemaking deeply implicates the dominant discourse, organizational rules and power structure as central forces that determine the level of perpetuating ideology.

This research illustrates the wider implications of power and politics in sensegiving–sensemaking studies and provides a complex picture of ethnocentric management.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the sensemaking processes leading to project managers' responses to an unexpected event in an international project setting. High uncertainty and unexpected events are prevalent in international projects conducted in challenging and complex environments. The paper analyzes how an unexpected event and the ways to cope with it were made sense of by a Finnish and a Chinese project manager in a system supplier's delivery project in China.

This paper builds on a qualitative case study of the two project managers' sensemaking processes in the face of a single unexpected event. Narrative interviews were used as the method for data collection. The actantial framework by Greimas was used in analyzing the interview narratives.

The paper shows how the project managers' sensemaking processes, even within the same project management team, are highly subjective, leading to the coexistence of multiple, and highly divergent responses to the unexpected event. The paper also highlights how these sensemaking processes create the coexistence of multiple, divergent systems of project structures and boundaries for coping with the unexpected event.

While the existing project management literature has distinguished various tactics used by project managers for responding to unexpected events, of lesser attention have been the actual sensemaking processes underlying and producing these responses. The paper especially stresses how the sensemaking processes between project managers coming from culturally different backgrounds can yield highly contrasting interpretations and responses to the same event.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how executives can rapidly gain employee acceptance for strategic change through reciprocal sensegiving. The author draw on a processual case study of a transformational European merger to study this question, highlighting the properties of reciprocity in making sense of urgent strategic change, then developing them through the lens of a gift exchange.

The author draws on several qualitative methods to study sensegiving and sensemaking processes in Alpha and Beta from 2011 to 2014: insider-outsider team meetings at the beginning, mid-way and at the end of the merger integration process, ethnographic field notes during a four-month research internship, one focus group meeting with Alpha and Beta managers after the announcement of the redistribution of managerial positions, interviews with a carefully selected sample of top and middle managers, participant observation in key sensegiving meetings with top managers and “custodians,” triangulation with secondary data from the database Factiva, and finally follow-up insider corroboration of the findings by the research intern who took up a management position at Alpha in 2014.

Likening executive and employee sensegiving to a gift-giving and gift-returning exchange, the author elucidates how executives induce employees to quickly “give in” to strategic change imperatives. the author single out the key third party role of custodians of reciprocity in the mechanism, using the metaphor of the Trojan horse to illustrate its executive use and point to the underexplored darker side of prosocial sensegiving dynamics.

Further research should clarify the long-term advantages and disadvantages of the mechanism. The Trojan horse mechanism possibly sacrifices long-term reciprocity for short-term purposes. Following the example of executives in this case study, use of the Trojan horse mechanism should be followed by attention to socio-political balance concerns, including new procedures that clarify the link between value creation aims and employees’ collective contribution. Without such a cohesion-building exercise, employees’ feelings of procedural injustice may build up, resulting in negative reciprocity in subsequent change projects.

The work indicates that a leader’s visionary credentials are not the main source of her norm-shaping power in a project of urgent strategic change. Visionary credentials are welcomed by the dominant group of employees as long as they are framed as a symbolic management exercise that will not substantially impact socio-political balance. Substantively, employees make sense of the justice of urgent strategic change primarily through the lens of custodians and their “power from the past.”

All in all, executives should use the Trojan horse mechanism sparingly, in contexts of urgent strategic change and institutionalized employee behavior. Working with sources and voices of resistance from lower levels of management is more likely to yield symbiotic integration benefits.

Applied to the problem of rapid strategic change in a non-crisis context, the Trojan horse mechanism is a solution to the question: how can executives avoid lengthy socio-political confrontations and quickly induce employee ownership of painful strategic changes?