Tight, Loose, or Denied Holding: How Interpersonal Holding Shapes Innovators’ Responses to Innovation Obstacles

Innovating at work often requires persistence through distressing obstacles and failures. When innovators experience such distress, they may engage colleagues for interpersonal holding—a process in which the colleague (i.e., “holder”) helps contain the innovator’s distress and provides new ways of understanding the obstacle that incited that distress. Prior research has made great strides in explaining what holding processes share in common across different individuals and in different contexts. However, through an inductive study based on 91 semistructured interviews with 74 innovators in a large hospital system, we find significant variation in the dynamics of interpersonal holding. Our analysis uncovered three distinct “interpersonal holding trajectories”—tight holding, loose holding, and denied holding trajectories. At the heart of these trajectories are distinct interpersonal holding episodes. Each episode varies by how holders engage with the innovators’ distress and the obstacles that caused the distress. These distinct episodes uniquely reinforced (or not) our informants’ innovator identities, ultimately influencing divergent responses to the obstacles that they faced. By building theory from the perspective of those who seek holding, our findings highlight important divergences in how interpersonal holding may unfold and identify important implications for innovators and their organizations.