Chasing Tornadoes:
Temporal Work to Foster Group Engagement Under Uncertainty

With Nina Granqvist, Professor at Aalto University School of Business

Abstract
Experiences of group engagement have a significant influence on performance and members’ satisfaction with work. In temporally uncertain settings however, unpredictable transitions between idle and busy periods disrupt members’ immersion. Through an ethnographic study of storm chasing teams in Tornado Alley, we investigate how groups foster engagement with temporally uncertain work. We found that while efficiently structuring and coordinating time helped groups get to storms, it could exacerbate the difficulty of engaging and disengaging across transitions. We develop a process model showing how groups switch between forms of temporal work to facilitate transitions – enabling experiences of temporal control through broadeningfocus and compressing duration in idle-to-busy transitions, and immersive durations through extending duration and narrowing focus in busy-to-idle transitions. This permits engagement across episodes of uncertain work where anticipated encounters are brief, unpredictable, and interrupted. We contribute by developing a temporal perspective to engagement at work, showing how groups set and experience the temporal context within which they encounter tasks and how this permits or constrains engagement. We also advance a durational perspective on uncertain work in organizational temporality, founding how experiences of duration represent a key concern and a core aspect to be accounted for and managed in organizations.