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Employee engagement has been directly linked to organizational outcomes, and at present, improving employee engagement has increasingly been a main focus for organizations. However, studies evaluating the impact of storytelling interventions on increasing the level of employee engagement are limited. Storytelling is one of the intervention methods that can provide cognitive stimulus to employees, which in turn could change their attitudes toward work including employee engagement. The purpose of this study is to determine the effectiveness of storytelling as an intervention tool for increasing employee engagement in one of the state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in West Java, Indonesia.

This study uses a quantitative method. Employees from a West Java branch of large SOEs were randomly assigned into experimental and control groups. The research design used a pretest and a post-test with an expressive writing method to identify the extent of employee engagement by comparing participant groups and measuring the increase of employee engagement as a result of the storytelling intervention. The experimental group participated in three storytelling sessions that had been set up by panels of experts, while the control group was not given any treatment. The expressive writing analysis was conducted using software that has been developed and tested for validity and reliability. Furthermore, statistical analysis was used to test the results of expressive writing scoring to determine the impact of storytelling interventions.

Direct storytelling is proven to be one of the most effective methods of increasing employee engagement in one of the SOEs in the West Java region. The results of this study showed that there were differences between the experiment and control groups after experiencing a direct storytelling intervention where there was a significant increase in the dimensions of employee engagement. Participants in experimental group had higher scores than participants in control group in most of the employee engagement dimensions. Additionally, expressive writing methods are also proven to be able to provide a stimulus for employees in expressing thoughts, perceptions and motivations for employee engagement in the company.

As direct storytelling has not been frequently used, especially to improve employee engagement, more studies should be conducted in various settings, with different measurement tools, and in a more controlled environment to confirm the effects of the intervention.

This paper provides insight into how companies can use direct storytelling to improve the dimensions of employee engagement. Additionally, this research can also be used as a reference by companies in Indonesia, especially SOEs, for applying the same method in an effort to improve work-related attitudes, such as employee satisfaction and organizational commitment.

This study raises social implications in which employees enthusiasm increases in improving personal relationships between employees and storytellers, who are middle or upper management employees. In addition, employees also more appreciate their struggles when starting their careers, so they care more about increasing their role and involvement in the company.

This paper provides resources and information for companies and organizations to improve employee engagement through the implementation of direct storytelling. The focus of this paper is to gain information on the role of direct storytelling in improving employee engagement within a company or organization.

This study explores how a small minority of social entrepreneurs break free from third sector constraints to conceive, create and grow non-profit organisations that generate social value at scale in new and innovative ways.

Six narrative case histories of innovative social enterprises were developed based on documents and semi-structured interviews with founders and long serving executives. Data were coded “chrono-processually”, which involves locating thoughts, events and actions in distinct time periods (temporal bracketing) and identifying the processes at work in establishing new social ventures.

This study presents two core findings. First, the paper demonstrates how successful social entrepreneurs draw on their lived experiences, private and professional, in driving the development and implementation of social innovations, which are realised through application of their capabilities as analysts, strategists and resources mobilisers. These capabilities are bolstered by personal legitimacy and by their abilities as storytellers and rhetoricians. Second, the study unravels the complex processes of social entrepreneurship by revealing how sensemaking, theorising, strategizing and sensegiving underpin the core processes of problem specification, the formulation of theories of change, development of new business models and the implementation of social innovations.

The study demonstrates how social entrepreneurs use sensemaking and sensegiving strategies to understand and address complex social problems, revealing how successful social entrepreneurs devise and disseminate social innovations that substantially add value to society and bring about beneficial social change. A novel process-outcome model of social innovation is presented illustrating the interconnections between entrepreneurial cognition and strategic action.

This article explores memory work and storytelling as an organising tool through family histories, offering theoretical and methodological implications and extending existing conceptualisations of memory work as a feminist method. This approach is termed as impressionist memory work.

To illustrate impressionistic memory work in action, the article presents two family histories set during Second World War and invite the reader to engage in the “undoing” of these stories and dominant ways of knowing through storytelling. This method challenges the taken-for-granted roles, plots and detail of family histories to uncover the obscured or silenced stories within, together with feminine, affective and embodied subjectivities, marginalisation and social inequalities.

This study argues that impressionistic memory work as a feminist method can challenge the silencing and gendering of experiences in co-constructed and co-interpreted narratives (both formal and informal ones).

This study shows that engagement with impressionistic memory work can challenge taken-for-granted stories with prominent male actors and masculine narratives to reveal the female actors and feminine narratives within. This approach will offer a more inclusive perspective on family histories and deeper engagement with the marginalised or neglected actors and aspects of our histories.

To overcome change management challenges, organizations often rely on stories as means of communication. Storytelling has emerged as a leading change management tool to influence and bring people on sharing knowledge. Nevertheless, this study aims to suggest stories of change as a more effective tool that helps people in taking action toward transformation processes.

The authors apply design science research to develop and evaluate how writing a prospective story engages organizational actors in the transformation process. The authors test the story-making artifact in a field study with five companies and 115 employees who participated in 75 workshops.

Using the findings to discuss the role of story-making in facilitating the emergence of new behaviors in transformation processes, the authors link story-making with the opportunity to make change happen through knowledge dissemination rather than merely understanding it.

The authors illustrate the role of iterations, peers and self-criticism that help story-makers embrace sensemaking, developing a shared knowledge based that influence individual actions.

The authors propose the story-making approach that organizations can follow to nurture change to make transformation happen through knowledge cocreation.

The research explores story-making as an individual act of writing prospective stories to facilitate the emergence of new behaviors through shared knowledge.

To better understand the reality of living with the diseases and conditions that its drugs and therapies are developed to treat, the Novartis leadership determined a need for more meaningful insights into patients’ lives. They sought to develop a systematic, creative methodology – informed by the psychology of insightful rather than analytical thinking – to properly integrate and deploy the research commissioned into its day-to-day business decision-making. For it is well established that better understanding of the patient reality drives both compliance and adherence “beyond the pill”. The purpose of this paper is to bring the novel methodology of creativity to a wider audience and ensure that many others – notably in patient advocacy organizations – can benefit from this approach.

A core team of Insight and Analytics and Patient Engagement leads from various therapeutic area teams worked in partnership with a psychologist and practitioner in the field of insightful thinking, to develop an effective methodology that could reliably surface and articulate genuine patient insights. This methodology – the i4i Insights Discovery™ process – was developed, piloted, refined and codified in 2020 and implemented across the company in 2021–2022. It uses a combination of convergent and divergent thinking techniques – human rather than artificial intelligence, combining diverse research outputs – to understand patients’ lives better. With enhanced understanding, the insights then shape educational and behavioral strategies to drive adherence and compliance.

At a time of tightening budgets and demands to deliver enhanced impact from research budgets, i4i Insights Discovery™ has enabled Novartis teams to turn existing research outputs into profound and useful understandings of what it means to live with specific diseases and develop evidence-based patient engagement strategies; insight-driven decision-making around the lifecycle of any compound. i4i Insights Discovery™ has been applied across Novartis’s diverse areas of expertise, from heart disease to cancer, from organ transplantation to dermatology, from food allergy to ophthalmology.

The i4i Insights Discovery™ process enables Novartis teams to gain deeper understanding of patients’ lives without the need to commission additional research; to do more with less. These insights enable cross-functional Novartis teams to develop better-informed strategies that better address the needs of patients and their care partners, of health-care professionals and health-care systems. The team creating the process is looking to make the i4i Insights Discovery™ approach a gold standard of insight discovery, both for pharma and health care and in other categories, too.

The i4i Insights Discovery™ process is a practical, novel application of well-established principles in the psychology of insightful thinking to address a clear business imperative. By repurposing and reinterpreting existing research outputs using creative verbal and visual exercises, it delivers a more human and empathetic understanding of the patient reality. It moves teams from “So what?” – this is what the data mean – to “Now what?” – this is what we should do as a result.

Stories of employability are told in employment and educational settings, notably the selection interviews. A popular training approach guiding higher education students to construct employability stories has been the past-behaviour storytelling method. However, insufficient research exists regarding the method's effectiveness and optimisation. This study examines whether the method (1) increases the quantity and quality of interview narratives in story forms and (2) can be enhanced by image stimuli.

In a double-blind randomised control trial with repeated measures, participants submitted four weekly interview narratives. After receiving past-behaviour serious storytelling training in Week 3, they were randomly allocated to an exposure group using images and a control group using keywords as a placebo to continue producing interview narratives. The interview narratives were assessed based on the number of stories and quality ratings of narrative conformity, relevance and conciseness. Results before and after the training, and with and without the image stimuli, were analysed.

Training increased the number of stories. Training and repeated practice also increased narrative quality ratings. However, the image-based intervention was the strongest predictor of improved quality ratings (effect size 2.47 points on the observed scale of 0–10, p < 0.01, 95% CI [1.46, 3.47]).

A pre-existing ability to tell employability stories cannot be assumed. Training is necessary, and intervention is required for enhancement. Multi-sensory narrative interventions may be considered.

This study is the first known double-blind randomised control trial with repeated measures evaluating if storytelling training and image stimuli improve interview narratives.

Social media management is an emerging profession that is growing as companies increasingly adopt social media. The purpose of this paper is to analyze social media managers’ personal branding.

In-depth qualitative data is drawn from 20 semi-structured interviews with social media managers and supported by three years of orienting fieldwork in Toronto, Canada.

Social media managers are responsible for managing and executing organizations’ brands and presence on social media and digital platforms. As lead users of social media, social media managers provide critical insight into the emerging practices of personal branding on social media. “The future audience” is introduced to describe how individuals project a curated brand for all future unknown and unanticipated audiences, which emphasizes a professional identity. Due to workplace uncertainty, social media managers embody the mentality of being “always-on-the-job-market”, which is a driver for personal branding in their attempt to gain or maintain employment.

While personal branding is largely discussed by industry professionals, there is a need for empirical research on personal branding that examines how various employee groups experience personal branding. This research fills this gap by analyzing how people working in social media brand their identity and how their personal branding is used to market themselves to gain and maintain employment. The development of “the future audience” and “always-on-the-job-market” can be used to understand other professions and experiences of personal branding.

Little is known about the overall meaning of the Chernobyl exclusion zone (CEZ) from the visitors’ point of view. Conceptualizing the zone as a storyscape and its narratives as intangible heritage resources, this study aims to investigate the visitors’ engagement with these resources and the resulting articulations from the engagements as translated into verbal and visual storytelling.

Participant observation and participant generated images in combination with in-depth interviews with different types of tourists were conducted. This paper uses the photographs chosen by the interviewees themselves as a photo essay to explore the evocation of stories through narrative engagement.

Through participant-oriented research, this study identified three dominant storytelling themes through which visitors focus their understanding of the CEZ. Visitors’ narrative engagements and visual storytelling co-produce the site and entail fluid and even conflicting narrative articulations about the CEZ and its cultural significance.

The discoveries of this study stem from a unique developing heritage site. This study provided a more nuanced understanding of the different visitor categories in the CEZ and their group-specific ways to articulate, imagine and co-produce the storyscape of Chernobyl.

Gaining insight into the verbal and visual storytelling of tourists will contribute to the discussion of narrative consumption of different consumption profiles in tourism sites in addition to the mediation and construction of entangled memory spaces.

This paper investigates how two characteristics of language, abstractness vs concreteness and narrativity, influence user engagement in communication exercises on innovation targeted to the general audience. The proposed conceptual model suggests that innovation fits well with more abstract language because of the association of innovation with imagination and distal construal. Moreover, communication of innovation may benefit from greater adherence to the narrativity arc, that is, early staging, increasing plot progression and climax optimal point. These effects are moderated by content variety and emotional tone, respectively.

Based on a Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) application on a sample of 3225 TED Talks transcripts, the authors identify 287 TED Talks on innovation, and then applied econometric analyses to test the hypotheses on the effects of abstractness vs concreteness and narrativity on engagement, and on the moderation effects of content variety and emotional tone.

The authors found that abstractness (vs concreteness) and narrativity have positive effects on engagement. These two effects are stronger with higher content variety and more positive emotional tone, respectively.

This paper extends the literature on communication of innovation, linguistics and text analysis by evaluating the roles of abstractness vs concreteness and narrativity in shaping appreciation of innovation.

This paper reports conceptual and empirical analyses on innovation dissemination through a popular medium – TED Talks – and applies modern text analysis algorithms to test hypotheses on the effects of two pivotal dimensions of language on user engagement.