Organizing for the ‘Good Atmosphere’: Collegial Emotional Work for Collective Coping in High-performance Environments

Coping is often considered an individual, cognitive phenomenon, leaving the individual employee responsible, often ignoring organizational structures and -processes that are beyond the individual employee’s influence sphere. Drawing on an ethnographic study of a high-performance engineering organization, we present a collective emotional perspective on coping. Our analysis reveals how a group of employees, we call them the Tuning Forks, creates, and maintains the ‘good atmosphere’ by imposing certain feelings on their colleagues and adjusting their behaviour. Interestingly, Tuning Forks consider this engagement to be a core part of their job and identity, but it comes at a cost for both Tuning Forks and colleagues who are being ‘tuned’.