Understanding awe elicitors in the workplace: a qualitative inquiry

Despite its practical importance, the emotion of awe has received scant research attention in the organizational literature. To facilitate future scholarship on this important topic, the authors explore and compare the elicitors of awe at work in three countries representing two culture clusters, including the USA and Canada (the Anglo cluster) and China (the Confucian Asia cluster).

The authors gathered responses from 163 working adults from the USA and Canada and 126 working adults from China using open-response survey, and analyzed each response following the guidance of grounded theory.

Across cultures, there are 10 common elicitors of awe, including virtue of organization, ability and achievement of organization, beauty of workplace, virtue of colleagues, ability and achievement of colleagues, dedication of colleagues, charisma of colleagues, status and power of colleagues, personal growth and achievement and perceived meaningfulness. Looking within cultures, the authors found two awe elicitors that are specific to China: status and power of organization, and work content.

Organizations and supervisors wishing to induce the emotion of awe would be well-advised to pay attention to the design of their workplace, as well as their attitudes and behaviors toward employees, customers and the general public.

This study contributes to the emotion literature, organizational literature and cross-cultural literature by demonstrating elicitors of awe in the workplace across the Anglo cluster and the Confucian Asia cluster.