2023

Sajasalo, Pasi; Poudel, Dinesh; Auvinen, Tommi

Fear is a ubiquitous emotion that motivates strategy work and has implications for practice, yet we know little about this important emotion because strategy literature has rarely studied it. To understand how fear emerges in strategy work and how it affects strategists and other organizational members in the process of strategizing, we studied a large financial organization facing the threat of digital disruption. We analyzed seven years of annual reports and media content to track the evolution of the threat landscape the organization faced, and to identify which issues the organization’s top management conceived as anxiety-evoking and fearful. We also interviewed members of the organization at all levels over three years to identify how the subjective process of fearing in strategy work, internal to the organization, unfolded in the discursive organizational reality. We found that fear is a highly contagious emotion that infects organizational members and influences their decision-making—much more than the strategy literature would suggest. We also found that organizational narration fueled by emotional expressions is the mechanism through which fearing narration manifested and spread rapidly through the entire organization to affect strategizing. We argue that the negative emotion of fear has far-broader implications for industry and practice than previously acknowledged because fear/fearing can be an important driver for strategy-related decision-making. The current emphasis on “positive” emotions in strategy literature may restrict the contribution this literature can make, and by broadening the range of emotions studied in strategy work, researchers’ understanding of strategy-related decision-making will more closely reflect practice.