Sensemaking and sensegiving: A concept for successful change management that brings together moral foundations theory and the ordonomic approach

Change management projects typically fail because they meet employee resistance created by emotional sensemaking processes. This paper aims to present an in-depth explanation for these failures and how change managers could avoid them.

This study presents an argument in the following three steps: it begins with an empirically well-established fact that attempts at change management often trigger negative emotional responses; the moral foundations theory is then used to identify the typical categories of emotional responses that may result in resistance to organizational change; and the ordonomic approach to business ethics is built upon to substantiate the diagnosis that, in many cases, emotional responses cause employees to behave in a way that is collectively self-damaging.

The core idea of the current study’s contribution is that emotionally driven processes of sensemaking can easily become dysfunctional, especially in situations that require extensive change. Consequently, it should be top priority for managers to engage in sensegiving, which comprises: narratives that explain what is going on against the background of relevant alternatives and appropriate discourses that guide how employees form their expectations. In a nutshell, sensegiving attempts to reframe sensemaking processes.

Even if a win–win potential already exists, it can still be misperceived. If employees are used to thinking within a trade-off framework, this might trigger trade-off intuitions and negative emotions, in effect leading to a situation that makes everyone worse off. Such mental models might become a self-fulfilling prophecy. To counter such a tendency, sensegiving aims at a professional management of sensemaking processes. The task of successful change management, properly understood, is to create and communicate win–win potentials, ensuring that all parties involved understand that they are not asked to sacrifice their self-interest, instead they are invited to participate in a process of mutual betterment.

The literature on sensemaking draws attention to the empirical fact that resistance to change is typically driven by emotions. The moral foundations theory helps in exactly identifying which emotional dimensions are relevant in times of organizational change. The ordonomic approach to business ethics points out that – owing to their emotional nature – processes of sensemaking might fail, that they may mislead employees into behavioral patterns that are collectively self-damaging. Therefore, a top priority for management is to engage in sensegiving, that is, in (re-)framing sensemaking processes.