| How can organizational members maintain and sustain their personal energy resources? Whereas the prevailing research on energy in organizations has focused on various subjective sources of human energy, I engage in a relational approach to understand how energy can be a component of and generated from interdependent work. I argue that an inductive and context-based approach to studying energy may question assumptions which currently exist in organizational literature, such as that positively-charged or high-intensity forms of energy are consistently functional. In particular, my dissertation integrates sociological and psychological theories to build theory regarding cognitive and social dimensions of energy. I also introduce the notion of cultural differences in energy expression and relational energy processes. A series of identified research questions structures this line of inquiry, and emergent research questions which arose from the data are also addressed.;I investigate these research questions with a multi-method approach. Study 1 involves data collected from nine surf and boardsport organizations in the U.S. and Australia, including 26 semi-structured interviews and 125 hours of ethnographic observation. Study 2 surveyed 521 participants regarding various forms of energy, relational energy, related existing concepts, social effectiveness measures, and cultural variables.;My dissertation advances theory in two major ways. First, my research brings a novel perspective to how energy is conceptualized by organizational members. I do so in Study 1 by engaging in an inductive, field-based approach to investigating energy in situ, and in Study 2, by discovering a "social" dimension to the concept of energy which suggests utility for the study of relational energy. These findings intimate that forms of energy which have previously been considered to be dysfunctional can, under some circumstances, be functional. They also introduce new conceptualizations of relational energy, such as the degree of "focus" involved in an interpersonal interaction. Second, I test and demonstrate validity for a relational energy scale, situating it within existing related constructs and providing an empirical tool for future research. These findings have important theoretical implications for theory and research on energy in organizations, motivation, social coordination processes, and cross-cultural management. |
