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 Study Survey data from National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States (MIDUS) (Christianson et al., 2005)  Narrative 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)  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.

Cultural Embeddedness of Renderings of Thriving Agentic Moves Thinking Feeling Doing Cultural Resources Microcommunity Organization Profession Family Faith group Education Renderings of Thr Progressive Narratives Connective Narratives Paradoxical Narratives Top-Down Bottom-Up Agentic Moves Cultural Resources Renderings of Thriving Top-Down Bottom-Up Similar to identity construction? (Pratt et al, 2005) Constructions of well-being (Plaut et al., 2002)?

Cultural Resources Cultural Resources: Pointers to self- knowledge 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 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 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 Agentic Moves Thinking Feeling Doing Cultural Resources Microcommunity Organization Profession Family Faith group Education Renderings of Thr Progressive Narratives Connective Narratives Paradoxical Narratives Top-Down Bottom-Up Agentic Moves Cultural Resources Renderings of Thriving Top-Down Bottom-Up ?

Ideas? This story teaches you [plural nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs]. Agentic moves and cultural resources [verb phrase], to construct renderings of thriving.