Emotions are Contagious: The Role of Emotions in Navigating Paradoxical Demands in the Context of Corporate Sustainability

Carina Keller who is currently wrapping up her PhD at EBS  Business School (Germany) will present her research on emotions in the context of climate change mitigation behaviors.

Emotions are inherent to collectively navigating the persistent paradoxical demands in organizational actors’ everyday work and relational practices. We conducted a three-year ethnographic case study of an Energy Company in Germany undergoing a sustainability transformation to elucidate how and why organizational actors across hierarchies emotionally respond to paradoxical demands and how this influences their collective paradox (dis)engagement. Our analysis of observational, interview, and documentary data explores the (endogenous) nature and consequentiality of emotional paradox navigation by disentangling emotional responses, displays, and their broader appraisals across hierarchical levels. Our conceptual model outlines how leaders’ and followers’ emotional responses to paradox are bidirectional, i.e., both bottom-down and -up, and mutually constitutive, i.e., affecting their collective paradox (dis)engagement over time. The paper contributes to the literature on paradox theory and emotions in leader-follower-interactions.