Organizational sensemaking: A systematic review and a co-evolutionary model

Over the last 30 years, a massive body of literature has been generated for explaining how individuals and groups make/give sense to their experiences in organizations. Reviews on sensemaking have been produced, but they did not update the original Weickian sensemaking model – strongly based on the Darwinian principles – according to the occurred developments. To fill this gap, a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) of 402 contributions on organizational sensemaking has been conducted; sample articles have been interpreted according to a renewed evolutionary lens: co-evolution. This study offers an updated and holistic revisitation of the original sensemaking model and proposes a co-evolutionary framework of organizational sensemaking. In particular, it identifies four new and two evolved properties that compose the sensemaking phenomena, emotional schemata as the new unit of analysis for sensemaking studies, and specifies the individual and collective sensemaking processes.