Research On The Middle Manager’s Sensemaking And Sensegiving Process And Its Impact On The Results Of Change

The implementation of organizational change is inseparable from the participation of all members. When confronted with abstract change goals and complex environment, Organization members often fall into "absence of meaning" state, it requires managers to gather information through various channels to construct the framework of organizational change, namely "sensemaking" process, to understand the change theme precisely. There are great differences between organization members in their attitudes to change because of their different cognition, at this time, Managers are more important to effectively guide them. And managers also may have cognitive differences in face of the changing environment, they construct framework to understand organizational context in use of all kinds of information. Firstly, they use conscious sensemaking model, and communicate, interact with each other to understand matters. Based on their sensemaking processes, managers take various measures which include narrative, communication, behavior demonstration, description of past experience, training, symbolic conduct or activity, etc., to give change task and context particular meaning, and give sense to employees. Through these social processes, managers affect the employees’ cognition, and make them set up new understanding and cognitive framework, and obtain their support.The processes of sensemaking and sensegiving are mainly caused by the managers’ conscious activities, so their tacit knowledge is very important. Managers need to obtain and communicate information from external environment constantly to make and give sense, so the sensemaking and sensegiving are not independent but a socialized process. In recent years there is a new research view, the success or failure of organizational change depends on how managers explain new change orientation or direction in mutual communication and conversation. Enlightened by this new research view, This paper takes a research on the ways of middle managers interpret and promote change as well as their influences on change results. Take the case of Yankuang Cathay Chemical CO., Ltd for example, this paper studies the middle manager’s sensemaking and sensegiving process and its influence on change results during the Total Quality Management activities. In this study, sensemaking and sensegiving are taken as a systematic process. Based on the review of domestic and abroad studies on sensemaking and sensegiving, this paper uses the case study of qualitative research method and data-collection method which concludes interview, files and meeting records to investigate the depth of the process of manager’s sensemaking and sensegiving as well as the effects of sensegiving. This paper consists of five parts. The first is the introduction part, which points out the research question, significance, purpose, the innovative points and the content of this study. The second part is mainly to review the study of sensemaking and sensegiving, and introduces their research progress on the basis of their definitions. The third part describes the research method, object, the method of data collection and analysis, and builds a theoretical model. The fourth part is the main part of the article, it makes a concrete analysis of the sensemaking and sensegiving process. First it uses a first-order analysis to extract the main concepts of the change, and then it uses the second-order analysis to build the theoretical model, and analyzes the effects of the process on employees. The fifth part is to do a comprehensive conclusion and points out the lack of the researching and future research.Based on the research, we obtain the main core of the conclusions as follows.1. On the basis of the original cognition, middle managers do the information structure processing through collecting and sorting information. Combined with the cognition of the organizational context and organizational goals, they set a new meaning framework to interpret change activities and conduct sensemaking process.2. Middle managers take measures from the language, ideology and behavior view to give sense and affect the employee’s cognition, emotion and behavior. The employee’s behavior and other information give back to middle managers, and according to the feedback, middle managers improve their measures and continue to affect employee’s cognition and behavior, which forms a cycle process of sensegiving.3. Sensemaking and sensegiving have a significant impact on change results. The new meaning framework which set up in the process of sensemaking is the basis of the information they want to convey. Whether the framework is correct or not will affect the direction of future change. And the means of sensegiving will affect employee’s understanding of the change and their enthusiasm. This study shows that middle managers who combine narrative, behavior demonstration, motivation and communication with employees will get more significant sensegiving effects.