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This study examines how highly disruptive issues cause profound dissonance in societal members that are cognitively and emotionally invested in existing institutions. The authors use PETA’s (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) entrepreneurial advocacy for animal rights to show how this highly disruptive issue interrupted and violated taken-for-granted interpretations of institutions and institutional life. The authors compare 30 YouTube videos of PETA’s advocacy to explore pathways to effective sensegiving and sensemaking of highly disruptive issues. The findings augment the analytical synergy that exists between sensemaking and institutional analysis by unpacking the micro-level dynamics that may facilitate transformational institutional change.

Describes an exploratory investigation conducted to examine factors affecting the initial and sustained transfer of interpersonal skills training to the workplace. Demonstrates the ongoing role of trainee motivation in the immediate and longer term transfer of learned skills to work. Suggests that initial transfer of skills is an important prerequisite of subsequent skill application in the workplace. Concludes that factors which promote initial transfer of training, such as the perceived relevance/usefulness of the course, appear to have an indirect effect on later use of trained skills. Also concludes that, in the long term, individuals with more autonomy in their jobs are more likely to apply learned skills, perhaps because they are more able to create opportunities for using trained skills at work. This may be especially true for those with high levels of motivation. Discusses the implications of these findings both for individuals learning new skills, and for organizations optimizing the utility of their training provision.

James March argued that irrational approaches to problem solving and foolishness can be useful for addressing complex problems. Grand challenges are complex problems that often involve “guarded societal institutions” – societal beliefs and practices guarded by political or commercial powers. To explain how organizations with impossible goals dismantle such institutions by mobilizing irrationality and foolishness, we develop a process model which is illustrated with the case of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Our main contribution is to expand James March’s ideas on logics of action and organizational intelligence to advance a novel perspective for tackling big societal problems. We argue that foolishness is not only a means for finding distant solutions to complex problems but also a means for generating sustained motivation, well-being, and ideas that spark debate and lead to the questioning of taken-for-granted societal beliefs.

Our research takes inspiration from stories of kindness in the context of the COVID-19 global pandemic and investigates what generational entrants, namely those entering the workforce in large numbers, dubbed emerging leaders (ages 19–39) think of the phenomenon of kindness and its potential role in organizations. Guiding the study is the question: “What can emerging leaders tell us about kindness and work?”

Adopting discourse analysis fused with kindness as research praxis, we conducted 66 qualitative interviews with young leaders (born between 1981 and 2001) across North America, Europe and Africa. Interviews were conducted in the summer and fall of 2020.

Our research sets out to expand theorizing related to kindness as a phenomenon, illustrates implications relevant to management and organizational studies and offers insights into the value of kindness as research praxis. This paper makes three related contributions and one methodological one: (1) it contributes to the literature on kindness and how it can be theorized in management and organizational studies, (2) it explores emerging leaders perceptions of kindness in a pandemic context, (3) it offers insights into how kindness might be leveraged as a model of moral and ethical behaviour valued in organizational environments, and (4) the paper promotes epistemic properties of kindness when fused with research praxis.

Authored during a rapidly unfolding scholarly conversation on the influences of the pandemic on organizational life, our research draws insights from experiences of kindness during COVID-19. This paper applies discourse analysis fused with kindness as research praxis to an understudied area of human behaviour (kindness) which has implications for management and organizational theory and practice. These implications include: (1) individual kindness capacity or inclination towards kindness behaviour that may be depleted by stressors such as the pandemic, (2) that kindness has socially contagious qualities, (3) and kindness as praxis has material benefits in the context of research methods, benefiting the research team and the research outputs.

The processes that underlie ability emotional intelligence (EI) are barely understood, despite decades of management research. Furthermore, the outcomes of these processes have been narrowly and prescriptively defined. To address this deficiency, I conducted a phenomenological study (n = 26). Findings from a public sector sample suggest that the underlying emotional processes of meaningful life events are – at least for now – better defined through the construct of emotion regulation. While it is part of the ability EI model, the emotional processing that occurs prior to emotion regulation being initiated is likely to be less consistent with current EI theory. Likewise, these processes lead to outcomes considerably more nuanced than currently appreciated in the EI literature. Consequently, what started as a gap-filling approach to research eventually turned into a problematization of what scholars seem to know about EI. I outline the theoretical and practical implications of this study for management, and offer suggestions for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to study teachers’ perspectives of social and emotional learning (SEL) in Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ) primary schools.

This research was a case study design investigating the phenomenon of SEL in primary schools (elementary school level) in Aotearoa NZ (Stake, 2005).

The SEL themes that were drawn from the data were: positive interdependence, empowerment, self-management, self-awareness restorative conversations and circle time.

The research challenges the field to work with teachers and community workers to create more in-depth qualitative research knowledge that is contextually relevant to SEL for researchers, educational policymakers and our children.

Based in Aotearoa NZ primary schools, this qualitative research provides a unique perspective of SEL from school-based practicing teachers.

Past studies of lean have failed to sufficiently address the importance of social factors for successful lean implementations. This paper aims to broaden and deepen the understanding of lean as a socio-technical paradigm by conceptualizing lean implementation as an organizational change process.

This study draws on the organizational sense-making literature to conceptualize and validate lean implementation as an organizational change process that necessitates a focus on the ability of organizational actors to construct a shared meaning of lean. This study posit that this shared understanding shapes the collective behaviour and attitudes of people towards a future desired organizational state such as a successful implementation of lean. Survey data were collected from various manufacturing and services firms to test the hypothesis derived from literature using a structural equation modelling approach.

The mutual social interactions of organizational actors contribute to an enabling lean organizational attitude that has a dominant effect on the lean practices of employee involvement, internal technical practices, supplier and customer management. This study also established boundary conditions for these relationships by identifying firm size as a moderating variable.

The findings establish a supportive organizational attitude as an antecedent for lean implementation, which goes beyond the current socio-technical characterization of lean management. This conceptualization draws the attention of researchers and practitioners towards the critical role of the cooperative behaviours of organizational actors in lean implementations.

The statistical results add a novel perspective to the discourse on the social dimension of lean implementation by conceptualizing and validating lean management as a combination of organizational attitude and the process facilitators comprising of employee empowerment, internal technical practices, supplier and customer management.