Narratives at Work
Moral Sensemaking, Identity, and Personhood
Compassion fatigue as a self-fulfilling prophecy: Believing compassion is limited increases fatigue and decreases compassion (Psychological Science, 2023)
People’s compassion responses often weaken with repeated exposure to suffering, a phenomenon known as compassion fatigue. Why is it so difficult to continue feeling compassion in response to others’ suffering? We propose that people’s limited-compassion mindsets—beliefs about compassion as a limited resource and a fatiguing experience—can result in a self-fulfilling prophecy that reinforces compassion fatigue. Across four studies of adults sampled from university students and online participant pools in the United States, we show that there is variability in people’s compassion mindsets, that these mindsets can be changed with convincing information, and that limited-compassion mindsets predict lower feelings of compassion, lower-quality social support, and more fatigue. This contributes to our understanding of factors that underlie compassion fatigue and supports the broader idea that people’s beliefs about the nature of emotions affect how emotions are experienced. Together, this research contributes to developing a strategy for increasing people’s capacity to feel compassion and their social support.
Do I dare? The psychodynamics of anticipated image risk, leader identity endorsement, and leader emergence (Academy of Management Journal, 2023)
Although organizations value leadership and express a desire for more leaders, many individuals are reticent to see themselves that way. We explore psychological factors that hinder the affirmation of a leader identity across four studies (N=1,425). We study these relationships in MBA consulting teams, military cadets in training, virtual workers, and employee-supervisor dyads. In Study 1 we find that i) anticipated image risk in leadership (i.e., individuals’ beliefs that the act of leading might harm the way that they are seen by others) decreases leader-identity affirmation and leadership and ii) lay theories about leadership ability (i.e., the belief that this ability is fixed versus malleable) moderate that relationship. In Study 2, we experimentally manipulate lay theories of leadership ability and replicate the results of Study 1. We qualitatively explore the specific image concerns associated with leading (Study 3) and develop a new measure of those specific image risks. Individuals associate being a leader with seeming bossy, unqualified, and different from one’s peers. Tested quantitatively, leader identity mediates the negative relationship between all three image concerns and supervisor-rated leadership (Study 4).
Crafting public narrative to enable collective action: A pedagogy for leadership development (Academy of Management Learning & Education, 2023)
We propose a new theory of public narrative, its practice, and its pedagogy that can prepare leaders to mobilize collective action towards tackling grand challenges and responds to the call for humanizing leadership development. We define public narrative as a process of accessing, articulating, and communicating shared values. We argue that, through crafting their public narratives, leaders can enact their moral resources to motivate others to choose collective action. By conceptualizing values as affective commitments, we propose that public narrative is constructed through the articulation of specific narrative moments (stories of hurt (why I care) and hope (why I can act)) that communicate one’s moral resources. We then argue that our pedagogy can be used in leadership development by enabling leaders to articulate a story of self, a story of us, and a story of now: the experiential communication of one’s values that have called one to leadership, of overlapping values shared by one’s constituency, and of challenges to those values that require urgent collective action. Last, we describe our core pedagogical principles and discuss the implications of our pedagogy.
Seeing oneself as a valued contributor: Social worth affirmation improves information sharing in teams (Academy of Management Journal, 2021)
Teams often fail to reach their potential because members’ concerns about being socially accepted prevent them from offering their unique perspectives to the team. Drawing on relational self and self-affirmation theory, we argue that affirmation of team members’ social worth by trusted people outside the team helps them internalize an identity as a valued contributor, thereby reducing social acceptance concerns and facilitating information sharing in teams. We devised three intervention studies to demonstrate the causal effect of social worth affirmation in teams. In Study 1, senior executive teams in which members experienced social worth affirmation performed better on a crisis simulation that required information sharing in teams (compared to control teams). In Study 2, with U.S. military cadets, we examined social acceptance concerns as a mechanism by which social worth affirmation influences information sharing. In Study 3, we showed that social worth affirmation improves virtual teams’ ability to share information by exchanging unique information cues. Our results suggest that affirmation of the social worth of team members through their personal relationships broadens their sense of self, thereby reducing their social concerns about being accepted by other members. This, in turn, leads to better information sharing in teams.