We conducted a qualitative study of Nokia to understand its rapid downfall over the 2005-2010 period from its position as a world-dominant and innovative technology organization. We found that top and middle managers' shared emotions during the smartphone innovation process caused cycles of behaviors that harmed both the process and its outcome. Together, organizational attention structures and historical factors generated various types of shared fear among top and middle managers. Top managers were afraid of external competitors and shareholders, while middle managers were mainly afraid of internal groups, including superiors and peers. Top managers' externally focused fear led them to exert pressure on middle managers without fully revealing the severity of the external threats and to interpret middle managers' communications in biased ways. Middle managers' internally focused fear reduced their tendency to share negative information with top managers, leading top managers to develop an overly optimistic perception of their organization's technological capabilities and neglect long-term investments in developing innovation. Our study contributes to the attention-based view of the firm by describing how distributed attention structures influence shared emotions and how such shared emotions can hinder the subsequent integration of attention, influencing innovation processes and outcomes and resulting in temporal myopia-a focus on short-term product innovation at the expense of long-term innovation development.
Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to increase understanding of the ways workers can actively make their own work experiences more meaningful. Design/methodology/approach -The data consist of 29 interviews with people from three professions. The authors analyzed the interviews by coding the statements into first-and second-order categories, and then aggregating them into theoretical constructs; and by recognizing relations between the constructs. Findings -Workers try to increase the proportion of positive cues extracted from work to make their work more meaningful. The three main tactics for increasing the proportion of positive cues are cognitively emphasizing the positive qualities of work, developing competencies to be better able to produce positive outcomes and positive reactions from others, and influencing the work content. Research limitations/implications -This model provides a preliminary understanding of meaningfulness-making, based on cross-sectional interview data. Future research should use alternative methods, and verify and elaborate the findings. Practical implications -Managers can promote workers' sense of meaningfulness by coaching and enabling meaningfulness-making tactics identified in this paper. Originality/value -This paper presents alternative ways to achieve work meaningfulness that complement the previously recognized job crafting and sensemaking routes.
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