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From Clear Skies to EF5s: How Storm Chasing Teams Stay Engaged with Temporally Uncertain Work
How do people in teams engage with temporally uncertain activities, where the work bounces from slow and uneventful to exciting and chaotic, often unpredictably? Existing management theory focuses on temporal uncertainty as a coordination or strategic problem. This view, however, misses the extent to which people respond emotionally to the temporal dimensions of work. Its timing, pace and rhythm can foster role engagement among organizational participants, or disappoint and disengage them. Based on an ethnographic study of storm chasers in Tornado Alley, we propose that teams coordinate their sense of time in part to maintain collective role engagement with temporally uncertain work. Theorizing temporal organizing as a process of group emotion work, we explain our seemingly counterintuitive observations, like storm chasing teams creating ambiguous, open-ended or less plausible expectations about the future. We show how these findings contribute to the literatures on temporality and collective role engagement, and draw practical implications for teams doing temporally uncertain work.