Search articles
Selected articles in top international publications
Middle Managers’ Regulation of the Emotions of Others in Strategy Implementation: A Process Perspective
This article develops a process model of how middle managers regulate the negative emotions of their team members to support strategy implementation. Based on a 9-month ethnographic study in a public broadcasting company, we examine how managers navigate emotionally charged resistance to top-down strategic themes during meetings. While prior research emphasizes individual techniques, we show that emotion regulation of others (ERO) unfolds as a sequenced process involving three interconnected phases: understanding emotional status, interpersonal tuning, and encouraging reappraisal. Our findings highlight that emotional influence is not achieved through isolated tactics, but through temporally coordinated and relationally attuned practices. In doing so, the study reconciles the tension between validating negative emotions and enabling emotional change. It advances research on middle managers by theorizing how they navigate emotional resistance in real time and contributes to ERO theory by demonstrating the importance of temporal coordination between validation and reappraisal.
Strategic decision-making at platform transitions: The case of Nokia (2010–2011)
Research Summary: We develop new theory on incumbent firms' strategic decision-making and the associated emotional dynamics at platform transitions. Based on in-depth interviews with Nokia's senior leaders about their decision to adopt the Windows platform in 2011, we suggest that highly capable platform companies' entry into the established phone industry invalidated senior leaders' long-held core assumptions about the industry, triggering existential anxiety and stunting self-regulation. Distinct mechanisms then influenced senior leaders' emotions toward external platform options—myopic appraisals of firm competitiveness inside a platform (vs. platform competitiveness against other platforms), appraisals of changing firm boundaries, and emotional resonance of potential partners. These emotions contributed to emotional drift, with top managers ultimately favoring the emotionally attractive option. Our theorizing extends theory on platforms, strategy, and emotion.
Managerial Summary: This research provides fresh insights into how emotions play a crucial role in incumbent firms' strategic choices, especially in the context of evolving technology platforms and major industry shifts. Our research focused on Nokia's 2011 decision to adopt the Windows platform. We discovered that when new players, like platform companies, enter a market, they can unsettle longstanding beliefs, causing anxiety and decision-making challenges among top management. Specifically, we found that executives often focus too narrowly on their firm's ability to compete within a new platform rather than the platform's overall competitiveness. Additionally, changes in company boundaries and the emotional appeal of potential partners significantly influence these decisions. Executives' analyses emotionally drift such that they start favoring the emotionally attractive options.
Emotions and attentional engagement in the attention-based view of the firm
This essay integrates emotions into the attention-based view of the firm to enhance the theory’s explanatory power and open a generative path for future research. Organizational structures and communicative practices shape organization leaders’ and members’ emotions. These emotions influence their attentional engagement. Structures and communicative practices shape emotions via two main paths: (1) perceived issue or initiative characteristics, which influence organization leaders’ and members’ specific emotions toward the issue and initiative, and (2) the socially constructed context for interaction about the issue or initiative, which influences the emotional energy leaders and members associate with the issue or initiative. The resulting emotions influence attentional engagement over three time horizons: immediately in the triggering situation, recurringly after the triggering situation, and through the creation of additional structures and practices that influence attentional engagement.
Regulating Top Managers’ Emotions during Strategy Making: Nokia’s Socially Distributed Approach Enabling Radical Change from Mobile Phones to Networks in 2007–2013
Strategy making can be emotional for decision makers, especially when facing a major threat or a disruptive change. Yet, we know little about whether and how strategic decision makers’ emotions are regulated and how such regulation influences strategy making. Based on a longitudinal study of Nokia from 2007 to 2013, we develop a process model of socially distributed emotion regulation. This model shows how various organizational groups help regulate top managers’ emotions. Top managers contain their initial emotional reactions to strategic options thanks to activities performed by groups with power over top managers. This enables top managers to form data-informed reappraisals of strategic options, contributing to gradual changes in their emotions. The reappraisal process is aided by diverse groups performing distinct roles. Top managers’ revised emotions, in turn, enable them to form new, iterative data-informed reappraisals and ultimately enable radical strategic change. Our study contributes to research on emotions and strategy making by showing how socially distributed emotion regulation operates during strategy making and influences its outcomes. We contribute to the cognitive perspective on strategy by showing how cognition and emotion interact over time during strategy making.
Emotional Practices: How Masking Negative Emotions Impacts Post-Acquisition Integration
Research Summary: We conducted a real-time field study of a post-acquisition integration process. We identified two practices that contributed to integration failure. First, the practice of masking negative emotions caused members of both firms to perceive that the partner firm's members were satisfied with the integration process, even though they were not. These false perceptions of satisfaction resulted in minimal corrective actions, the escalation of the situation, and ultimately, integration failure. Second, efficiency-driven communication practices used in inter-firm communication exacerbated the effect of masking negative emotions on false perceptions of satisfaction by shielding both firms’ members from the other firm's members’ spontaneous emotional reactions. Our research invites scholars to consider more deeply the emotional consequences of various common organizational practices.
Managerial Summary: Do you disagree with your employee, manager, or business partner? Does this disagreement make you annoyed or even angry? Yet, you decide to mask your negative emotions and discuss the disagreement with a neutral or happy face. Wrong. We find that masking negative emotions in the work environment can prevent corrective actions, escalate disagreement, and make people to develop long-lasting negative sentiments toward the counterpart that ultimately result in dysfunctional behaviors. Our findings further reveal that commonly used organizational practices such as communicating via email may contribute to the deliberate masking of negative emotions. We suggest that managers should carefully review if and how their organization's practices prevent or enable people to share their emotions authentically to ensure timely corrective actions and proactive development of business operations.
Distributed Attention and Shared Emotions in the Innovation Process: How Nokia Lost the Smartphone Battle
We conducted a qualitative study of Nokia to understand its rapid downfall over the 2005–2010 period from its position as a world-dominant and innovative technology organization. We found that top and middle managers’ shared emotions during the smartphone innovation process caused cycles of behaviors that harmed both the process and its outcome. Together, organizational attention structures and historical factors generated various types of shared fear among top and middle managers. Top managers were afraid of external competitors and shareholders, while middle managers were mainly afraid of internal groups, including superiors and peers. Top managers’ externally focused fear led them to exert pressure on middle managers without fully revealing the severity of the external threats and to interpret middle managers’ communications in biased ways. Middle managers’ internally focused fear reduced their tendency to share negative information with top managers, leading top managers to develop an overly optimistic perception of their organization’s technological capabilities and neglect long-term investments in developing innovation. Our study contributes to the attention-based view of the firm by describing how distributed attention structures influence shared emotions and how such shared emotions can hinder the subsequent integration of attention, influencing innovation processes and outcomes and resulting in temporal myopia—a focus on short-term product innovation at the expense of long-term innovation development.
When Teams Agree while Disagreeing: Reflexion and Reflection in Shared Cognition
Drawing on dual-systems theory, we propose a new typology for analyzing shared cognition in workgroups and teams that differentiates reflective (i.e., C-system) mental models formed through reasoning and deliberation from reflexive (i.e., X-system) representations that are more automatic, intuitive, and affective in nature. Our analysis demonstrates how team members’ X-system representations pertaining to the team’s task and its members can compete with shared C-system mental models of the task and team in terms of their respective effects on team functioning. We highlight the consequences for intrateam coordination when team members have similar C-system mental models but dissimilar X-system representations (illusory concordance) and when team members have similar X-system representations but dissimilar C-system mental models (surface discordance). Finally, we consider the implications of our arguments for extending current team cognition theory predicated on reflective cognition and suggest new directions for research on group cognition in organizations more generally.