The polyvalence of fear

Our paper captures the instrumental nature of fear in the workplace and its implications for the socio-ideological control literature. The belief that actors’ internalisation of values would foster the achievement of organisational goals impacted on identity management. As a result, management’s appeals to individuals’ emotions and values have been used to foster actors’ compliance with organisational interests. Fear has served this purpose. Nevertheless, researchers have overlooked the possibility that negative emotions can lead to actors’ proactive behaviours. Drawing on the outcomes of an ethnographic study, we argue that fear is a polyvalent resource that can show actors’ responses to the dynamic cycle of organisational sensebreaking – sensegiving as a form of socio-ideological control. Our finding reveals that, as much as socio-ideological controls enable organisations to persist in their intention of encouraging actors’ compliance, the processes through which they are constructed and shared makes them fluid, shifting and ambivalent.