How Teams Navigate the Ebbs and Flows of Hope in Organizational Life

This dissertation examines how teams experience and co-construct hope for one another through storytelling and shared imaginings of possible futures during facilitated, future-focused workshops. I conducted a total of 38 qualitative, semi-structured interviews and performed two observations of facilitated workshops. This study reveals how hope in teams is a shared, complex, and emergent state that motivates team members toward accomplishing future-oriented change through empowered action. Using a gestalt framework of emotions, findings suggest hope in teams is greater than the sum of its parts and is rife with tensions and contradictions. In fact, this study suggests that hope in its latent state may first present as jadedness in team members, wherein they are guarded and seek to protect themselves from re-experiencing past pains and failures. This study found teams engage in a five-step hope emergence process during facilitated, future-focused workshops and that teams who emerged from the workshop hope-filled were able to sustain that hope by accomplishing meaningful progress toward ideas they had created in the workshop. This research expands understanding of positive emotions in the workplace and, specifically, the understanding of hope in teams by: (a) elucidating hope in teams using a gestalt emotion framework, (b) uncovering jadedness as a latent state of hope, (c) highlighting how teams experience hope as an ebb-and-flow of organizational life, (d) identifying five steps in a co-construction process of hope emergence, (e) recognizing the need for meaningful progress to be made in order for hope to persist in the team, (f) illuminating the role of disempowerment and the potential darker sides of hope, and (g) surfacing practical implications for co-constructing and sustaining hope for teams, leaders, and facilitators in the workplace.