Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 1,764Management and Organizational StudiesOrganizational Learning and LeadershipAppreciative Inquiry and Organizational Change

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 270 of the 270 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Sensemaking in Organizations: Taking Stock and Moving Forward

Maitlis, Sally, Christianson, Marlys·2014·Academy of Management Annals
DOI 10.5465/19416520.2014.873177
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

Sensemaking is the process through which people work to understand issues or events that are novel, ambiguous, confusing, or in some other way violate expectations. As an activity central to organizing, sensemaking has been the subject of considerable research which has intensified over the last decade. We begin this review with a historical overview of the field, and develop a definition of sensemaking rooted in recurrent themes from the literature. We then review and integrate existing theory and research, focusing on two key bodies of work. The first explores how sensemaking is accomplished, unpacking the sensemaking process by examining how events become triggers for sensemaking, how intersubjective meaning is created, and the role of action in sensemaking. The second body considers how sensemaking enables the accomplishment of other key organizational processes, such organizational change, learning, and creativity and innovation. The final part of the chapter draws on areas of difference and debate highlighted throughout the review to discuss the implications of key tensions in the sensemaking literature, and identifies important theoretical and methodological opportunities for the field.

Overview

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.5465/19416520.2014.873177

Cites

270 of 270 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Verification

Claims the paper makes

This paper’s full text isn’t openly available, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Citations

Cites

Research works printed but not linked: 16

  1. Ancona D., 2011, The handbook for teaching leadership, 3
  2. Brown A. D., 2000, Academy of Management Review, 25, 102, 10.5465/amr.2000.2791605 · DOI · Paper page
  3. Colville I., 2013, Management Learning
  4. Dewey J., 1922, Human nature and conduct
  5. 10.1177/014920639502100603 · DOI · Paper page
  6. LaPorte T. R., 1991, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 1, 19
  7. Leung A., 2013, Organization Studies
  8. 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2004.00407.x · DOI
  9. 10.5465/amr.2011.61031809 · DOI
  10. Orton J. D., 1990, Academy of Management Review, 15, 203, 10.5465/amr.1990.4308154 · DOI · Paper page
  11. Phillips N., 2004, Academy of Management Review, 29, 635, 10.5465/amr.2004.14497617 · DOI · Paper page
  12. Shrivastava P., 1987, Bhopal: Anatomy of a crisis
  13. Smircich L., 1985, Academy of Management Review, 10, 724, 10.5465/amr.1985.4279096 · DOI · Paper page
  14. Sutcliffe K. M. (2013). Sensemaking. In M. Augier & D. Teece (Eds.), The Palgrave encyclopedia of strategic management . Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Advance online publication. Retrieved from http://www.palgraveconnect.com/pc/doifinder/10.1057/9781137294678.0623 · DOI
  15. Watzlawick P., 1976, How real is real?
  16. Weick K. E., 1979, The social psychology of organizing

Cited by

See all 1,764

Related

See all

Metadata

Authors
Maitlis, S., & Christianson, M.
Affiliations
University of British Columbia (CA)
ORCID
Venue
Academy of Management Annals
Publisher
Academy of Management
Published
2014-01
Volume
8
Issue
1
Pages
57-125
ISSN
  • 1941-6067 (ISSN-L)
  • 1941-6520
DOI
10.5465/19416520.2014.873177
OpenAlex
W4245597957
Cited by
1,764
References
268
Citations by year
2026: 332 · 2025: 187 · 2024: 167 · 2023: 192 · 2022: 182 · 2021: 188 · 2020: 160 · 2019: 139 · 2018: 87 · 2017: 55 · 2016: 39 · 2015: 31 · 2014: 3
FWCI
93.84
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Locations
Academy of Management Annals (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management › Management and Organizational Studies
  • Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management › Organizational Learning and Leadership
  • Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management › Appreciative Inquiry and Organizational Change
Keywords
sensemaking, organizational sensemaking, ambiguity, intersubjective meaning, organizational change, organizational learning, creativity and innovation

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.