Industrial and Organizational Psychology Commons^™

Managing One’S Anxiety When Work Narratives Misalign, Shannon Eric Ford, Shannon Ford

Industrial-Organizational Psychology Dissertations

Humans use personal narratives to bring a sense of order and stability to life situations; especially when events are experienced as negative or threatening. As an employee encounters a workplace event that does not align with their understanding of the organization, termed a metaleptic moment, typical emotional reactions can include disengagement, tolerance, or resistance, or a non-emotional response of engagement. Family systems theory proposes that individuals who possess higher levels of differentiation have the ability to better manage the narrative crash. In this study, participants in the experimental group were given a 10-minute differentiation induction that would, when compared with …