Chasing Storms: Temporal Work to Foster Group Engagement under Uncertainty
通过对龙卷风走廊追风团队的民族志研究，揭示了群体如何在不可预测的空闲与忙碌交替中，通过调整时间焦点和时长来营造投入感，为管理不确定性下的团队投入提供了新视角。
Experiences of group engagement have a significant impact on members’ performance and satisfaction with work. In temporally uncertain settings, however, unpredictable transitions between idle and busy periods disrupt engagement. Through an ethnographic study of storm chasing teams in Tornado Alley, we investigate how groups foster engagement under uncertainty. We found that while efficient coordination helped teams get to storms, it could frustrate members’ engagement with tasks across unpredictable transitions. We develop a process model explaining how groups use temporal work to foster immersive episodes of engagement across transitions that are hard to control or predict. We show that broadening focus and compressing duration foster experiences of temporal control that enable engaging transitions into busy periods of work, whereas narrowing focus and extending duration foster experiences of immersive duration that enable satisfying transitions into idle periods. We develop a temporal perspective to engagement at work, showing how groups set the temporal context within which they encounter work episodes and how this context enables or constrains engagement. We also advance a durational perspective for organizational temporality research, elucidating how experiences of duration represent a key issue to be managed in organizations.