Management -- Psychological aspects

Animal rights organizations, in attempting to affect institutional change in industrial
animal agriculture, face an institutional mountain. I show how these organizations,
though contesting institutions which are highly reified, tacitly endorsed, and historically
inertial, leverage emotional experiences and regulation to incrementally move this
mountain. Using a grounded qualitative study of interview data from animal rights
advocates and archival data generated by animal rights organizations, this study finds that
animal rights organizations have encoded both response- and antecedent-focused emotion
regulation into two distinct strategies used to garner support for their institutional change
project: transgression mining and seed planting. Furthermore, this study expounds upon
the role of moral emotional experiences in the individual-level process by which persons
alternate into support for animal rights organizations and their goals, here labeled
autodidactic frame alignment. Drawing on Goffman’s backstage/frontstage distinction,
this study illustrates how emotion’s role in institutional change efforts varies across both level of analysis and areas of interactive life. In doing so, this research adds empirical
weight to and extends recent theoretical work expounding upon the emotionally-charged
nature of the lived experience of institutions.

The focus of this study was to determine if university student leaders’ cognitive and behavioral agility is related to organizational member commitment and if this relationship is moderated by alterable and non-alterable variables. The empirical results from this study are based on the responses of 37 student leaders who occupy leadership positions in organizations and clubs in their respective university. Cognitive agility was measured by the student leader’s use of systems thinking, reframing, and reflection. Student leader behavioral agility was assessed by a minimum of three organizational members rating the student leader’s use of leader influence actions (transforming, managing, bonding, bridging, and bartering) in carrying out their functions. Organizational member commitment was measured by organization member’s level of commitment with the goals and values of the organization using the Organizational Commitment Questionnaire (OCQ).