Griping and Joking as Identification Rituals and Tools for Engagement in Cross-Boundary Team Meetings
研究跨边界团队中抱怨和玩笑等社交情绪行为如何作为认同仪式促进成员关系与协作，对管理者和团队研究者有参考价值。
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 cross-occupational 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 cross-boundary 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.