Sustainability in business life is
inherently an emotionally laden phenomenon, but research on employees’ emotions
related with sustainability is limited. In this study, we apply sensemaking
approach to a company with a long background on sustainability management, but
bad public image related with sustainability. We ask how employees make sense
of the importance of sustainability at their employing firm and what role
emotions play in this sense making process? We studied sense making in the
interviews with 25 employees in the energy company. In our preliminary results,
we have identified three themes: external notion of negativity, internally
spread pride and expert culture based satisfaction. The results contribute the
prior literature by identifying internally experienced pride and satisfaction
can overrule the external suspicious and lead to positive sense making among
employees.