Drawing from an ethnographic study of a management consultancy specializing in strategic change, this paper examines how emotions can be engaged and mobilized to induce commitment to change (C2C) across large organizations and how C2C is related to other forms of workplace commitment. We find that C2C is brought about and configured through the curation of managers’ emotions before strategic change goals are created. We identify four emotion curation activities used to produce C2C: targeting emotional outcomes; triggering emotional reactions of managers; exhibiting emotional reactions; and codifying emotional outcomes into strategic change goals. The four activities, and associated processes, combine to create an “emotion work system” (Hochschild, 1979) that generates a desire for, and social obligation to deliver, change. As a result, C2C becomes a pre-requisite to organizational commitment, given that the process disrupts the prior basis for identification with, and attachment to, the organization. The process intentionally produces a majority of managers strengthened, and a minority weakened, in their commitment towards change and the organization. Theorizing from our findings we develop a model that explains how emotion curation occurs and the underlying processes affecting C2C and organizational commitment.
