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This article explores the role of griping and joking behaviors in cross-boundary teams. Those socio-emotional behaviors often go unnoticed in studies of team communication, as does more broadly the work of building relationships. Given the growing recognition that the quality of connections among team members significantly influences the quality of coordinating and knowledge-sharing practices in cross-boundary teams, this seems an important lacuna to address. Drawing on a qualitative study of a crossoccupational team responsible for palliative care and oncology patients, I illustrate how those mundane, recurrent communicative activities, which may appear tangential to the task at hand, have important relational and emotional consequences for the functioning of crossboundary teams. Based on the observed characteristics and effects of a variety of griping and joking behaviors, I propose to conceptualize those communicative activities as identification rituals. I discuss the implications of this work for both research on the production of positive relational realities in cross-boundary teams and the study of organizational griping and humor.

We explore organizational members' affective experiences to elucidate how and when the reproduction of oppressive bodily norms can be interrupted. We leverage the exceptional access to hitherto overlooked affective dynamics in one organizational context made possible by the introduction of a video art installation in a commercial art gallery. The artwork enabled both the all-female staff and the researchers to observe, feel and reflect on both the invisible force of body shame and the empowering forces of communal laughter and reciprocal generosity. Our analysis reveals how the repetition of loving encounters around the artwork moved the staff away from crippling individualized anxiety and shame and towards more joyful and carefree possibilities. It further suggests that the organization's feminist culture and climate of psychological safety facilitated the trajectory from shame to joy through love. By surfacing and explaining such affective pathways to freedom as an important form of emancipatory politics in the context of injurious, discriminatory bodily norms, we contribute to both scholarship on bodily discipline in the workplace and recent work on the critical potential of affect.

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