Guanxi, emotion and culture: Exploring employees’ sensemaking process of team building activities from CCO's perspective
(2025) SKOM12 20241Department of Strategic Communication
- Abstract
- Shifting away from long-standing optimistic evaluations of team building activities, this thesis provides insights into the nuanced and contested roles of team building activities in the context of Chinese workplaces. By integrating the perspectives of the communicative constitution of organizations (CCO) with sensemaking theory, the study focuses on how employees make sense of team building activities. Through qualitative methods, including semi-structured interviews with 12 participants, this research, based on the four flows model, examines the communication processes and power dynamics among team members, emphasizing the interplay between different communicative flows. The study also highlights the significance of guanxi-based... (More)
- Shifting away from long-standing optimistic evaluations of team building activities, this thesis provides insights into the nuanced and contested roles of team building activities in the context of Chinese workplaces. By integrating the perspectives of the communicative constitution of organizations (CCO) with sensemaking theory, the study focuses on how employees make sense of team building activities. Through qualitative methods, including semi-structured interviews with 12 participants, this research, based on the four flows model, examines the communication processes and power dynamics among team members, emphasizing the interplay between different communicative flows. The study also highlights the significance of guanxi-based organizational culture, particularly the unique drinking culture and the underlying entanglement of individualism and collectivism cultural logic. The findings reveal that in the pursuit of plausibility, team members perceive team building activities as dual-purpose: both as organizational strategies for enhancing cohesion and communication and as platforms for demonstrating loyalty and reinforcing hierarchical structures. Negative emotions, such as embarrassment and frustration, trigger the process of sensemaking, where employees reconcile their interpretations within the frameworks of harmony-focused collectivism and performance-based individual competition. The thesis theoretically expands the discussion on the role of emotion and culture in the sensemaking process. Additionally, it contributes to strategic communication by offering a renewed understanding of team building activities from the employees' perspective, pointing out the misalignment between leaders' and employees' interpretations of this strategic practice. (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
http://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/record/9185929
- author
- Jin, Jiahui LU
- supervisor
- organization
- course
- SKOM12 20241
- year
- 2025
- type
- H2 - Master's Degree (Two Years)
- subject
- keywords
- team building activities, organizational culture, guanxi culture, communication constitution of organizations (CCO), sensemaking
- language
- English
- id
- 9185929
- date added to LUP
- 2025-03-17 11:42:17
- date last changed
- 2025-03-17 11:42:17
@misc{9185929,
abstract = {{Shifting away from long-standing optimistic evaluations of team building activities, this thesis provides insights into the nuanced and contested roles of team building activities in the context of Chinese workplaces. By integrating the perspectives of the communicative constitution of organizations (CCO) with sensemaking theory, the study focuses on how employees make sense of team building activities. Through qualitative methods, including semi-structured interviews with 12 participants, this research, based on the four flows model, examines the communication processes and power dynamics among team members, emphasizing the interplay between different communicative flows. The study also highlights the significance of guanxi-based organizational culture, particularly the unique drinking culture and the underlying entanglement of individualism and collectivism cultural logic. The findings reveal that in the pursuit of plausibility, team members perceive team building activities as dual-purpose: both as organizational strategies for enhancing cohesion and communication and as platforms for demonstrating loyalty and reinforcing hierarchical structures. Negative emotions, such as embarrassment and frustration, trigger the process of sensemaking, where employees reconcile their interpretations within the frameworks of harmony-focused collectivism and performance-based individual competition. The thesis theoretically expands the discussion on the role of emotion and culture in the sensemaking process. Additionally, it contributes to strategic communication by offering a renewed understanding of team building activities from the employees' perspective, pointing out the misalignment between leaders' and employees' interpretations of this strategic practice.}},
author = {{Jin, Jiahui}},
language = {{eng}},
note = {{Student Paper}},
title = {{Guanxi, emotion and culture: Exploring employees’ sensemaking process of team building activities from CCO's perspective}},
year = {{2025}},
}