Title: Narratives of Thriving Seeing How Employees Construe Moments of Aliveness and Learning at Work
1Narratives of Thriving Seeing How Employees
Construe Moments of Aliveness and Learning at
Work
- Scott Sonenshein, Jane Dutton, Adam Grant,
Gretchen Spreitzer and Kathie Sutcliffe
2Thriving Research Overview
- Theoretical Work (Spreitzer et al., forthcoming)
a psychological state in which individuals
experience both a sense of vitality and a sense
of learning at work - Empirical Work
- Quantitative Study
- Survey data from National Survey of Midlife
Development in the United States (MIDUS)
(Christianson et al., 2005) - Narrative Project
- My focus today
3Why Narratives of Thriving?
- Why a narratives approach?
- Temporality
- Captures feelings
- Self-constructions
- Why Thriving Narratives?
- Constructions of developmental trajectories or
gauges of work - Opportunity to label and make sense of aliveness
and learning - Feeling side of work (Sandelands and Boudens,
2000)
4Research Question and Methods
- How do people constitute, narrate, and make sense
of their experiences of thriving at work? - What are narratives of thriving at work, and how
are they constructed? - Methods
- 55 narratives collecting using semi-structured
interviews - 3 Organizations (financial services, chemical
manufacturer, and social services agency) - Initially defined thriving for participants as
growing in a positive way. - Asked for stories of thriving and
enablers/disablers - Renderings of Thriving
5Renderings of Thriving
- Progressive Stories about forward movement
(Gergen and Gergen, 1997) - Growth/ learning
- Getting recognized / achieving
- Moving up / moving forward
- Surviving, getting by
- Connective Stories about interacting with
others, helping others - Individual level (a specific person) Collective
level (a group of people) Contributing level
(indirect) - Recognizes that other people play a central role
in how people narrate their work experiences
(Sandelands and Boudens , 2000) - Paradoxical Thriving in face of adversity
recognition of negative events.
6Cultural Embeddedness of Renderings of Thriving
Similar to identity construction? (Pratt et al,
2005) Constructions of well-being (Plaut et al.,
2002)?
7Cultural Resources
- Cultural Resources Pointers to self-knowledge
thats outside of the immediate situation that
help enact a schema (Feldman, 2004). - Allow you to do something, to act based on shared
understanding. - Levels work unit, organization, profession,
social institutions, etc. - Top-Down process
- Example Dont Listen to the noise.
8Agentic Moves
- Agentic Moves Individuals articulation of
agency in at least three ways - Linguistic form
- And during the 3 year tenure that I was in the
program I only got 1 hospitalization. (SW, 11) - Personal philosophies
- Well I'm stricken with what someone could call a
disease of having a very positive attitude. (FS,
37) - Narrations of taking action
- And a lot of those seniors, . . . they couldnt
do for themselves . . . So a lot of times me or
some other maintenance guys would go to the store
for them and get them things that they need, run
out pick up their prescriptions. And I just like
doing things for people that put a smile on their
face (SW, 7)
9Cultural Embeddedness of Renderings of Thriving
Renderings of Thriving
Renderings of Thr
Progressive Narratives
Connective Narratives
Paradoxical Narratives
Top
-
Down
Top
-
Down
Bottom
-
Up
Bottom
-
Up
Agentic Moves
Agentic Moves
Cultural Resources
Cultural Resources
Thinking
Microcommunity
Feeling
Organization
Profession
Doing
Family
Faith group
Education
10Ideas?
This story teaches you plural nouns, verbs,
adjectives, adverbs. Agentic moves and cultural
resources verb phrase, to construct renderings
of thriving.