Making sense of uncertainty

Sammanfattning

Organizational change often creates uncertainty for managers who are expected to providedirection, maintain coordination and keep everyday work moving while broader conditionsremain unsettled. This study examines how managers make sense of and give sense touncertainty during organizational change. Drawing on a qualitative and inductive researchdesign, the study is based on 28 semi-structured interviews with managers across differentorganizational contexts. The analysis follows the Gioia methodology and uses sensemakingand sensegiving as the main interpretive lens.The findings show that managers do not experience uncertainty as a broad or abstractcondition. Instead, uncertainty becomes visible through concrete organizational problemsrelated to responsibility, authority, priorities, decision-making and the translation of broaderchange into everyday work. Three closely connected dimensions capture how managershandle uncertainty in practice: interpreting uncertainty, communicating uncertainty andworking with uncertainty. The study shows that managers often make sense of uncertaintyand give sense to it at the same time, while also trying to keep work moving underincomplete clarity. Rather than eliminating uncertainty, managers often organize around it bycreating temporary structures, provisional priorities and workable directions that makecoordination possible.The study contributes to research on uncertainty and organizational change by offering amore concrete understanding of what managers become uncertain about in practice and howthey handle it. It also contributes to sensemaking and sensegiving research by showing thatthese processes often unfold in parallel under continued operational pressure.