Summary: Events that encourage emotion sharing are key to team building and generating a positive collective identity.
Source: University of Colorado
In a new study published in Organization Science, researchers found organizations can unite members from different backgrounds behind a collective identity by organizing events that foster positive emotions and empathy.
University of Colorado Denver Assistant Professor Cyrus Dioun conducted the research to investigate how shared emotions can help align diverse groups.
While attending Maker Faire, an event celebrating “Do-It-Yourself” (DIY) activities across a wide range of domains, researchers found that through hands-on workshops and demonstrations, attendees experienced positive emotions and passion that individuals feel toward their work. This event also features large spectacles such as fire-breathing dragon cars, which creates a collective feeling of excitement, similar to what you would experience at a live sporting event.
“Maker Faire attendees feel their shared connection to one another, even when intellectually they may feel far apart,” said Dioun. “For example, mathematicians and computer hackers find their shared connection with aerial artists, gardeners, and hula-hoop aficionados.”
The research focuses on how a growing sector or industry, whether it be organic food or DIY projects, can maintain a consistent identity even as it grows to include a wider range of participants. The identity of an industry may be easy to understand when it’s smaller and there are companies with similar backgrounds and products. As the field grows, it attracts newcomers with different backgrounds and practices, leading to internal conflict about what defines the industry.
By leveraging fieldwork, natural language processing of text data, and statistical analysis, researchers examined how an industry’s identity became harder to consistently define as it grew larger and more legitimate.
They also examined how organizations can strategically arrange events that encouraged the sharing of positive emotions and empathy, helping members from different backgrounds feel their shared connection to one another and the industry’s identity.
“We show that as an organization, industry, or sector gets more popular, it attracts a wider variety of participants which makes it difficult to specify the overall message of the company,” said Dioun. “We also show that collective events that involve these emotional interactions helped clarify the aspects of the organization, industry, or sector that unite these increasingly diverse actors.”
This study was conducted in collaboration with scholars at the University of California Berkeley and University of Virginia McIntire School of Commerce.
About this psychology research news
Source: University of Colorado
Contact: Meghan Azralon – University of Colorado
Image: The image is in the public domain
Original Research: Closed access.
“Making Space for Emotions: Empathy, Contagion, and Legitimacy’s Double-Edged Sword” by Cyrus Dioun et al. Organization Science
Abstract
Making Space for Emotions: Empathy, Contagion, and Legitimacy’s Double-Edged Sword
Legitimacy is critical to the formation and expansion of nascent fields because it lends credibility and recognizability to once overlooked actors and practices. At the same time, legitimacy can be a double-edged sword precisely because it facilitates field growth, attracting actors with discrepant practices that may lead to factionalization and undermine the coherence of the field’s collective identity.
In this paper, we investigate how organizations can mitigate the downside of legitimation by eliciting emotions that align increasingly discrepant actors and celebrate an inclusive collective identity. We leverage fieldwork and computational text analysis to examine the relationship between legitimation, collective identity coherence, and emotions in the context of the Makers, a nascent field of do-it-yourself hobbyists and technology hackers.
In our quantitative analysis we show that legitimation was associated with increased field heterogeneity, but that collective events countered the diluting effects of legitimation. In the qualitative analysis of our interview data we demonstrate that activities at these events—demonstrations and hands-on experiences—elicited emotional contagion and empathy among actors. These emotions reconciled tensions among increasingly heterogeneous actors and bolstered the coherence of the Maker collective identity.
We conclude by discussing our contribution to research on legitimacy, collective identity, and field-configuring events.
