The Message is on the Wall? Emotions, Social Media and the Dynamics of Institutional Complexity

Abstract

In this paper we explore how emotions influence organizations in situations of institutional complexity. In particular we study members' and leaders' emotive responses and influence activities in response to a disruptive event that led to a violation of expectations. Our findings show that when people's expectations of an organization's actions are violated it can trigger a process of emotional escalation that leads to the destabilization of the organization through the emotional-laden influence activities of shaming and shunning. The violation in our case resulted in strong negative emotions expressed on Facebook. Facebook acted as an emotional echo chamber where negative emotions were amplified and led to members' emotion-driven influence activities eventually triggering regret and adaptation by the organization. We discuss implications for the study of emotions in institutional dynamics.

Tweeting and Retweeting for Fight for $15: Unions as Dinosaur Opinion Leaders?

“…Finally, and more importantly, achieving opinion leadership without nurturing relationships beyond union offline institutional links inflates the risk of union isolation and parochialism. Social media can easily amplify negative events and push users to distrust an institution (Cappella ; Toubiana and Zietsma ), and the Twitter universe support we found may be ephemeral. As union communication executives pinpointed in our interviews, the challenge is to develop a social media communication strategy able to reach out and consolidate a wider range of online supporters beyond members and well‐known users to defend their institutional reputation from possible social media backlash and attack.…”

The Art of the Pivot: How New Ventures Manage Identification Relationships with Stakeholders as They Change Direction

“…This alerted us to different reactions to Impossible's pivot. As many community members exhibited strong affective reactions, we coded separately for emotions, following Toubiana and Zietsma's (2017) approach. This involved (1) identifying the main emotive responses (betrayal and anxiety) based on a subset of the data, (2) selecting keywords for these based on our data and current research and (3) coding for these emotions.…”

Introduction: Into the Fourth Decade

“…Much can be anticipated as empirical work builds upon the theoretical groundwork provided by Creed et al (2014), Massa, Helms, Voronov and Wang (2016), Toubiana and Zietsma (2016), Voronov and Vince (2012) and Voronov and Weber (2016). Indeed, while this area remains relatively nascent it has exciting possibilities for illuminating the microand group-level foundations of institutional expectations and behaviour.…”