Transcript Narratives of Thriving: Seeing How Employees Construe Moments

Narratives of Thriving
Seeing How Employees Construe
Moments of Aliveness and
Learning at Work
Scott Sonenshein, Jane Dutton,
Adam Grant, Gretchen Spreitzer
and Kathie Sutcliffe
Thriving 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

Survey data from National Survey of Midlife
Development in the United States (MIDUS)
(Christianson et al., 2005)
 Narrative

Study
Project
My focus today
Why 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)
Research 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”
Renderings of Thriving

Progressive: Stories about forward movement
(Gergen and Gergen, 1997)
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



Connective: Stories about interacting with others,
helping others



Growth/ learning
Getting recognized / achieving
Moving up / moving forward
Surviving, getting by
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.
Cultural Embeddedness of
Renderings of Thriving
Similar to identity
construction? (Pratt
et al, 2005)
Renderings
Renderings
of Thr of Thriving
•Progressive Narratives
•Connective Narratives
•Paradoxical Narratives
Constructions of
well-being (Plaut et
al., 2002)?
Top-Down
Bottom-Up
Cultural Resources
Microcommunity
Organization
Profession
Family
Faith group
Education
Agentic Moves
Thinking
Feeling
Doing
Cultural Resources

Cultural Resources: Pointers to selfknowledge that’s 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: “Don’t Listen to the noise.”
Agentic Moves

Agentic Moves: Individuals’ articulation of agency in
at least three ways:
 Linguistic

“And during the 3 year tenure that I was in the program I only got
1 hospitalization.” (SW, #11)
 Personal

form
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 couldn’t 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)
Cultural Embeddedness of
Renderings of Thriving
Renderings
Renderings
of Thr of Thriving
•Progressive Narratives
•Connective Narratives
•Paradoxical Narratives
Top-Down
Bottom-Up
Cultural Resources
Microcommunity
Organization
Profession
Family
Faith group
Education
?
Agentic Moves
Thinking
Feeling
Doing
Ideas?
This story teaches you [plural
nouns, verbs, adjectives,
adverbs].
Agentic moves and cultural
resources [verb phrase], to
construct renderings of
thriving.