This study explores group dynamics in identity work following a corporate merger, examining how employees navigate their historical corporate identities alongside the new organizational identity proposed by management. Focusing on Telecompany-X, a telecommunications firm in Austria that began implementing its merger one year prior, the study analyzes how employees relate to their former identities and how managerial efforts to impose a unified brand and identity shape their sensemaking. While management sought to foster cohesion through identity regulation, employees' pre-existing identities and everyday work practices significantly influenced their adaptation. Using a practice-theoretical framework, this interpretative case study investigates both employee narratives and the everyday work practices that shape responses to the merger. The findings challenge the assumption that corporate identity can be fully managed from the top down, instead highlighting the enduring influence of historical identities. The research contributes to merger and identity studies by demonstrating how identity work unfolds in response to managerial regulation, emphasizing the integrative potential of former corporate identities as shared reference points. In doing so, the study offers valuable insights into managing distinct group identities in post-merger organizations.
Actors establish decision routines to simplify and speed up decision-making in repeated tasks. The notion of stable decision routines is implicit in many strands of behavioral research on managerial decision-making, notably tasks involving the aggregation of information. It is presumed that actors adhere to their decision routines, particularly in the short run. However, the validity of this assumption has not been tested. Using performance evaluation as an example and statistical models to reconstruct actors' decision routines, this paper investigates how such routines are established, what they look like, and how persistent they are. We also inquire into the relevance of personal features of the evaluator in this process. Our findings offer insight into a contradiction underlying research on managerial decision routines. Prima facie, evidence indicates that decisions can seemingly be successfully reconstructed using simple routines-often oriented toward the linear-additive evaluation model underlying school grades. This is indicative of stable routines, which form the basis of meaningful research, for example on biases in decision-making, as well as of managerial practices such as indicator-based performance evaluations. However, contrary to the implicit assumption of stable routines, we find that despite the high explanatory power of decision models, decision routines are not stable, even when performing a task such as performance evaluation repeatedly. Implications for managerial decision-making and research on biases in recurrent decisions are discussed.
Research on employee green behavior (EGB) has garnered increasing attention as scholars seek to understand how employees can contribute to organizational greening. Despite considerable interest in the antecedents of EGB, the challenges and tensions that emerge as individuals engage in voluntary EGB remain underexplored. Drawing on survey data from 388 respondents across 74 teams, the results indicate that voluntary EGB is a major driver of tension salience within teams. Furthermore, we find that this relationship is moderated by the extent to which team colleagues encourage one another to engage in green behavior. These findings highlight the critical role of teams as the social context in which voluntary EGB occurs and suggest a task-conflict nature of sustainability-related tensions within teams. The pertinent question thus appears to be no longer whether employees are willing to engage but rather which green activities they should prioritize as they face resource constraints while striving toward a common goal.
The aim of this study is to enhance understanding of how social robots affect the emotional labour of frontline employees in the service sector. It employs a qualitative case study approach, using semi-structured interviews, observations, and document analysis. The study participants include frontline employees, managers, and HR officers at an amusement park in Sweden. Our findings demonstrate that the introduction of robots changed the conditions for emotional labour by facilitating work in some cases, complicating it in others, and in some instances fundamentally transforming it. A key finding is the increased theatricalisation of labour, whereby frontline employees bring robots to life through performance and role-playing. This behaviour was shaped by overarching organizational expectations rather than direct managerial instructions. The robots also shifted the balance between onstage and backstage roles, as employees spent more time performing in customer-facing roles and less time recovering backstage. This study contributes to the development of emotional labour theory by cross-fertilizing it with Goffman's dramaturgical perspective, which adds dimensions related to self-presentation and the adaptation of emotions and behaviour. By focusing on employees with experience working alongside robots, the study offers new insights into how robots reshape the emotional and social interactions of frontline service work.
This study employs small story positioning analysis to illustrate how highly qualified migrants experience subtle workplace discrimination, particularly when such experiences are reported through corporate whistleblowing mechanisms. Drawing on Gerald W. Sue and coauthors' conceptualization of microaggressions and reporting dilemmas, the article examines a single narrative from a former employee of a Danish company. Combining content and positioning analysis, the study investigates how the employee constructs her identity and positions other organizational actors in her account of repeated microaggressions and the subsequent escalation following her whistleblowing. The analysis reveals that reporting microaggressions carries severe psychological and professional consequences. The former employee experienced four reporting dilemmas: invisibility, clash of realities, perceived minimal harm, and the reporting trap. Notably, the whistleblowing function-intended as a protective mechanism-exacerbated her marginalization, resulting in what we term double victimization. The findings show that corporate whistleblowing measures are largely symbolic and fail to foster structural change. The study contributes a theoretical approach to identity-oriented organizational research by demonstrating how everyday communication performs exclusionary boundary work and how individual discrimination can escalate into institutional discrimination. It also contributes to practice by emphasizing the need to improve organizational whistleblowing processes and enhance employee training on recognizing discrimination.
