Hope Cultures in Organizations: Tackling the Grand Challenge of Commercial Sex Exploitation
通过对一个应对商业性剥削组织的两年叙事民族志研究，揭示了希望文化如何影响组织应对重大挑战的活力、成员福祉和目标追求，并分析了其核心机制与双刃剑效应。
Many organizations struggle with tackling grand challenges. Research has shown that coordinating and collaborating are central to these endeavors, but the emotions inherent in doing so have been overlooked. From a two-year narrative ethnographic study of an organization tackling the grand challenge of commercial sex exploitation, we build a key theoretical insight about the role of hope culture in the pursuit of grand challenges. We define hope culture as a set of assumptions, beliefs, norms, and practices that propagate hopeful thoughts and behaviors in pursuit of an organization’s goals. We show that when a hope culture is stronger, organizations more vibrantly engage with the grand challenge—the well-being of organizational members flourishes, and organizations ambitiously pursue their goals. When the strength of a hope culture flags, the opposite occurs. Two core mechanisms appear to drive the strength of a hope culture in these contexts: (1) narrative sensemaking of “triggering” organizational events and (2) emotional contagion. Our results demonstrate how hope cultures wax and wane in strength over time, operating as double-edged swords in organizations seeking to tackle grand challenges, with both positive and negative downstream implications. We offer rich, much-needed theory about the emotional realities of tackling grand challenges, as well as necessary guidance on how organizations might hope for a brighter future in the face of adversity.