Employees’ emotions and sensemaking on the importance of sustainability at workplace

Sustainability in business life is inherently an emotionally laden phenomenon, but research on employees’ emotions related with sustainability is limited. In this study, we apply sensemaking approach to a company with a long background on sustainability management, but bad public image related with sustainability. We ask how employees make sense of the importance of sustainability at their employing firm and what role emotions play in this sense making process? We studied sense making in the interviews with 25 employees in the energy company. In our preliminary results, we have identified three themes: external notion of negativity, internally spread pride and expert culture based satisfaction. The results contribute the prior literature by identifying internally experienced pride and satisfaction can overrule the external suspicious and lead to positive sense making among employees.