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This study unpacks how organizational members construct a collective entrepreneurial identity within an organization and attempt to instill entrepreneurial features in the organization's existing identity.

The study draws on the cases of two venturing units, perceived as entrepreneurial groups within their respective parent companies. Semi-structured interviews and secondary data were collected and analyzed inductively and abductively.

The data revealed that organizational members co-constructed a “corporate entrepreneur” role identity to form a collective shared belief and communities of practice around what it meant to act as an entrepreneurial group within their local corporate context and how it differentiated them from others. Members also clustered around the emergent collective entrepreneurial identity through sensegiving efforts to instill entrepreneurial features in the organization's identity, despite the tensions this caused.

Previous studies in corporate entrepreneurship have theorized on the top-down dynamics instilling entrepreneurial features in an organization's identity, but have neglected the role of bottom-up dynamics. This study reveals two bottom-up dynamics that involve organizational members' agentic role in co-constructing and clustering around a collective entrepreneurial identity. This study contributes to the middle-management literature, uncovering champions' identity work in constructing a “corporate entrepreneur” role identity, with implications for followers' engagement in constructing a collective entrepreneurial identity. This study also contributes to the organizational identity literature, showing how tensions around the entrepreneurial group's distinctiveness may hinder the process of instilling entrepreneurial features in an organization's identity.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a framework that explains how individual organizational members' self‐construction processes motivate them to support or reject decoupling as a form of resistance to institutionally mandated change.

Most studies have looked at powerful organizational actors and top management teams that decide to decouple. This paper broadens the understanding through a micro‐level approach that focuses on the role of individual members within organizations. Specifically, it looks at what happens inside organizations after the decision to decouple has been taken.

This paper identifies three alternative self‐identity construction pathways that members may choose following the decision of an organization to decouple: strong identification with the organization; strong identification with the institutional pressure; and adoption of both organizational and institutional identities. The framework specifies how and under which conditions the way individuals identify and manage identity multiplicity impacts organizational resistance to change.

Future research could test the proposed framework particularly through case studies or qualitative designs that look deep into organizational processes and individual attitudes towards decoupling.

Practitioners, particularly top management teams, can adopt a moderating role in influencing the identification process of their employees. They can also communicate better why efficiency is more important than the mandated changes, and why decoupling must be supported to safeguard the organization's “efficient” identity.

The paper integrates institutional theory's macro‐perspectives with micro‐perspectives of individual members' identity and self‐construction processes within organizations. It contributes to existing institutional accounts of agentic change and resistance to change through a dynamic framework that prescribes individual interests and preferences based on identification processes.

Corporate venturing initiatives, which exemplify corporate entrepreneurial behavior, follow an evolutionary path of variation, selection, and retention. While their external selection is a consequence of their performance, their internal selection is subject to forces of complementarity and legitimacy, and how well competition from other initiatives is overcome. This chapter aims to unfold the dynamics of the internal selection process of initiatives, focusing on its emotional dimensions. Assuming that organizational agents have a deliberate role in guiding the internal selection process of initiatives, the chapter examines how organizational agents' emotional dynamics influence this process. The chapter draws its theoretical basis from the intraorganizational evolutionary perspective and the literature on emotions in organizations. The case of a corporate venturing initiative and the narratives of four managers involved directly and indirectly in the initiative are used to illustrate how the emotional dynamics of organizational members evoked envy toward a venturing initiative and directly impacted its degree of competition and complementarity with other interacting initiatives, ultimately hampering its selection.

David Ahlstrom is a professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He obtained his PhD in management and international business in 1996, after having spent several years in start-up firms in the data communications field. His research interests include management in Asia, entrepreneurship, and management and organizational history. He has published over 60 peer-reviewed articles in journals such as the Strategic Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of Business Venturing, and Asia Pacific Journal of Management. He also co-authored the textbook International management: Strategy and Culture in the Emerging World. He has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of International Business Studies and Journal of Small Business Management in addition to APJM. Professor Ahlstrom has guest edited two special issues of Entrepreneurship: Theory & Practice. At APJM, he has also guest edited two special issues (turnaround in Asia in 2004 and Managing in Ethnic Chinese Communities, forthcoming in 2010), and served as a senior editor during 2007–2009. He became editor-in-chief of the Asia Pacific Journal of Management in 2010.

The chapters in this volume are drawn from the best contributions to the 2008 International Conference on Emotion and Organizational Life held in Fontainebleau, France. (This bi-annual conference has come to be known as the “Emonet” conference, after the listserv of members). In addition, these referee-selected conference papers were complemented by additional, invited chapters. This volume contains six chapters selected from conference contributions for their quality, interest, and appropriateness to the theme of this volume, as well as seven invited chapters. We again acknowledge in particular the assistance of the conference paper reviewers (see appendix). In the year of publication of this volume, the 2010 Emonet conference will be held in Montreal, Canada, in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Academy of Management, and will be followed by Volumes 7 and 8 of Research on Emotions in Organizations. Readers interested in learning more about the conferences or the Emonet list should check the Emonet website http://www.emotionsnet.org.