Surprise at Work: An Integrative Review of Engineering Surprises (Not Just Reacting to Them)

Abstract

Organizations rely on roles, routines, and other mechanisms to build systems of shared expectations. By definition, surprises occur when expectations are violated. Hence, surprise is inevitable in organizations and important because the experience of surprise threatens to undo the expectations that make organizations feel predictable and therefore workable. Reacting to surprises can therefore feel unpredictable and threatening. Indeed, surprises can be seen as offering evidence of poor planning and bad management. However, in this review, we integrate literature on surprise that offers a contrasting perspective: that individuals in organizations do not just react to and experience surprises but also proactively engineer them. Our review explores who engineers surprises, why they choose to do so, how they structure situations to create surprises, what happens as individuals and collectives deal with the emotional impact of surprises, and what happens next as individuals and collectives either learn from or dismiss surprises. Our review provides an important corrective to research that focuses exclusively on surprises as negative events in organizational life and offers questions for future research that provide an agenda for developing theory on engineering surprise.