(Photo by iStock/Vesnaandjic)
Anger is a motivating force for social movement activists. Yet while employees of an organization that might be targeted by activists may share their anger, they typically shrink from acting on it.
Professors Katherine A. DeCelles of the University of Toronto, Scott Sonenshein of Rice University, and Brayden G. King of Northwestern University wanted to understand why the anger that energizes social movements, such as Occupy Wall Street, fails to move insiders to push for organizational change. They believed that the same anger that mobilizes outsiders provokes fear in sympathetic insiders.
“Previously, scholars have found that insiders know that the expression of anger and support for social change at work can be risky—this has the potential to damage one’s reputation and can be viewed as threatening to business objectives,” says DeCelles, a professor of organizational behavior and HR management at UT’s Rotman School of Management. “What we find is that the experience of the emotion of anger about a social movement cause actually increases fear of negative work consequences for supporting social change, which in turn is associated with a lower likelihood of collective action.”
In a series of surveys across a range of social movements plus an experiment with institutional insiders, the researchers took a psychological approach in focusing on individuals’ collective action intentions—their inclination to speak out or act in support of a cause they feel strongly about. These intentions are motivated by anger but suppressed by the fear of jeopardizing their positions, the researchers hypothesized.
The field study with Occupy Wall Street supporters was relatively small: 160 surveys from protesters in Zuccotti Park in New York City were collected but only 94 from finance industry insiders who were supportive of OWS. Insiders were asked to rate their frustration, anger, and aggravation since the beginning of the movement and also explain how they planned to support its goals. The outsiders’ anger translated into plans to act. But those insiders who were most angry reported significantly fewer plans for action than did outside protesters.
“CEOs and large investors (and even politicians) have begun to pay serious attention to this issue only recently,” says Aazam K. Virani, assistant professor of finance at the University of Arizona’s Eller College of Management. “I think this is illustrative of the paper’s main point—the anger that mobilizes outsiders to act collectively does not have the same effect on institutional insiders, at least in the short run.”
To test whether the finance industry was a singular case, the researchers conducted a larger study via online surveys of self-reported outsider activists whose causes ranged from environmentalism and gender issues to gun control and Black Lives Matter. In terms of demographics and political affiliation, most were white women with a college degree who had jobs outside of online surveys; most were Democrats—only 8.4 percent were Republican. This study showed a strong correlation between the degree of anger about an issue and the intention to advocate for it. The results showed that the angrier outsider activists were about an issue, the more likely they were to advocate for it in the future.
The researchers then designed a survey for business insiders who were culled from Net Impact, an organization whose members self-identified as agents of social change in business. They were asked to think about a social issue they felt strongly about and that was relevant for their organization. Most named environmental sustainability, with workers’ rights, health, poverty, and diversity also flagged. Participants reported the degree to which they felt angry when thinking about their cause, their action intentions, but also their fear of negative consequences at work. The results revealed that individuals with relatively greater degrees of anger reported marginally lower action intentions than their less angry peers. “Insiders who are less angry are likely to be less fearful of negative consequences for taking action, which in turn would relate to a greater likelihood to act,” DeCelles says.
“What I found remarkable in the study is how persistent the effect is across multiple settings,” Virani says. “The obvious implication of this is that outsider activist groups ought to rethink their strategy for soliciting support and eliciting action from institutional insiders.”
This consistency led the researchers to theorize that institutional insiders must contend with goal conflicts particular to their structural location: They may want to do something about an injustice committed by their organization but believe they face career risks for doing so and thus are less apt to act.
Recruiting insiders to a cause may thus require a different strategy than getting them riled up. “The use of identity framing, or other emotions like guilt or compassion for those harmed, might be more effective than anger,” DeCelles says.
Katherine A. DeCelles, Scott Sonenshein, and Brayden G. King, “Examining Anger’s Immobilizing Effect on Institutional Insiders’ Action Intentions in Social Movements,” Administrative Science Quarterly, October 21, 2019.
Read more stories by Marilyn Harris.