EXPRESS: STRUGGLING TO MAKE SENSE OF IT ALL: THE EMOTIONAL PROCESS OF SENSEMAKING FOLLOWING AN EXTREME INCIDENT

Organizations operating in extreme contexts regularly face dangerous incidents they can neither prevent nor easily control. In such circumstances, successful sensemaking can mean the difference between life and death. But what happens afterwards? Our study of emergency management practitioners following a major bushfire reveals a process of post-incident sensemaking during which practitioners continue to make sense of the incident after it ends, during the subsequent public inquiry, and as they try to implement the inquiry’s recommendations. Different varieties of sensemaking arise during this process as practitioners rely on different forms of coping to develop and share new understandings, which not only make sense of the original incident, but also enable changes to help the organization deal with future incidents. Our study also shows that practitioners experience a range of emotions during this process, some of which inhibit sensemaking while others – particularly different forms of anxiety – can facilitate it. Our study makes an important empirical contribution to recent theoretical work on varieties of sensemaking and provides new insights into the complex role of emotions in sensemaking in extreme contexts.

Transformational Leadership in Extreme Contexts: Associations with Posttraumatic Growth and Self-Efficacy Among Combat Veterans

Decades of research have established transformational leadership as an encompassing leadership approach with broad applications across organizational contexts. Despite dozens of meta-analyses and many empirical studies demonstrating the direct performance effects of transformational leadership, ways in which transformational leaders shape follower personal development and well-being remain largely unexplored, particularly in extreme contexts such as military combat. Based on a sample of 130 combat veterans of multiple conflicts, we examined the impact of transformational leadership in combat on follower posttraumatic growth and follower self-efficacy after deployment, including the moderating effects of the duration and intensity of combat. Moderated regression modeling and analyses demonstrated that transformational leadership was associated with follower posttraumatic growth among lengthier combat deployments, as well as with follower self-efficacy independent of combat duration and intensity. Our findings suggest that transformational leaders frame extreme contexts as opportunities for growth, and further implications for research and practice are discussed.

EXPRESS: Exploring the dynamics of slack in extreme contexts: A practice-based view

Organizations that operate in extreme contexts have to develop resilience to ensure the reliability of their operations. While the organizational literature underlines the crucial role of slack when facing unanticipated events, a structural approach to slack says little about the concrete ways in which organizational actors produce and use this slack. Adopting a practice-based perspective during a 14-month ethnographic study in a French critical care unit, we study the slack practices, which consist in gathering, arranging and rearranging resources from both inside and outside the medical unit. This permanent process is captured in a dynamic model connecting situations, their evolutions and slack practices. Our research highlights the importance of situational slack production practices to ensure resilience. We also argue that these micro-practices are constitutive of the context in which actors are evolving. Finally, we discuss why these slack practices, although essential for ensuring resilience, can be endangered by the New Public Management context.

Environmental Perception and Activism through Performance:

As is argued in this article, a deeper understanding of the relationship between music and performance and environmental aspects in extreme contexts, such as the North and Alpine regions, provides insights into the constantly shifting human concepts of nature. By analyzing historical and modern accounts of nature-related music and performances in the Swiss Alpes, this article discusses the interconnectedness between local traditional performing practices, particularly yodeling, and landscape. It hereby aims at adding a critical and nuanced perspective on the often romanticized interconnectedness between nature and local cultural identity, as expressed by Alpine yodeling and extreme nature. While Alpine Switzerland is indeed exemplary of the process of landscaping through music and sound, it is actually a patchwork of a variety of musical articulations that each reflect environmental concerns and is shaped by the experience of extreme natural surroundings.