To understand how personal sensemaking has evolved in response to the changing conditions where complexity and uncertainty become the norm, the study conceptually explores the emotion-sensemaking relationship at the individual level for entrepreneurs by adding the “duration” dimension to emotion along with its valence and intensity dimensions.
The authors conceptually built and extended the existing understanding of the emotion-sensemaking model. Specifically, we employed an integrative literature synthesis method by drawing insights from multiple literature streams, including entrepreneurship, individual sensemaking, emotion and decision-making.
Our theoretical synthesis yielded seven propositions. We propose a novel understanding that sensemaking is often a proactively initiated process by entrepreneurs experiencing positive emotion. We also propose that although the negative emotions of moderate intensity elicited by a disruption put one’s focus on an issue, it is the duration of the felt negative emotion and its subsequent shift to a positive emotion that triggers sensemaking rather than the negative emotion itself. Our arguments also lead to propositions linking entrepreneurs’ internal emotion-sensemaking process to tangible outcomes such as temporal ambidexterity and pivot decisions. We also provide future research directions to test our propositions and the potential theoretical and practical implications.
We introduce a proactive form of sensemaking and its triggers in the context of entrepreneurship. We also add nuance to the current emotion-sensemaking model by adding another dimension (time duration) to emotion. Finally, our study explores the practical implications of linking the influence of emotion and sensemaking to more observable outcomes in entrepreneurship.
