Triggers and Enablers of Sensegiving in Organizations

Drawing on a longitudinal study of sensegiving in organizations, we investigate the conditions associated with sensegiving by stakeholder and by leaders: for each group, we identify sets of conditions that trigger sensegiving and sets of conditions that enable sensegiving. We then integrate these analyses across organizational actors to show that, more generally, sensegiving is triggered by the perception or anticipation of a gap in organizational sensemaking processes, and enabled by the possession of discursive ability, which allows leaders and stakeholders to construct and articulate persuasive accounts, and the presence of process facilitators, which are routines, practices and structures that provide the time and opportunity for organizational actors to engage in sensegiving. 3 Organizational life is full of attempts to affect how others perceive and understand the world. Gioia and Chittipeddi (1991: 442) coined the term “sensegiving ” to describe this “process of attempting to influence the sensemaking and meaning construction of others toward a preferred redefinition of organizational reality”. Sensegiving is an interpretive process (Bartunek, Krim, Necochea & Humphries, 1999; Gioia & Chittipeddi, 1991) in which actors influence each other through persuasive or evocative language (Dunford & Jones, 2000; Snell, 2002), and is used both by organizational leaders (Bartunek et al., 1999; Corley & Gioia, 2004; Gioia &amp