How Hope is Enacted Under Distress: Action, Waiting, and Endurance in Organizational Contexts

Hope is a consequential force in organizational life, yet the dominant framework for understanding it, anchored in individual agency and goal-directed action, is ill-suited to the conditions of distress that organizational members routinely face. This study asks how hope is enacted when futures are threatened, pathways are blocked, and control is constrained. Drawing on a critical realist ontology and retroductive analysis of 53 critical incident narratives from professionals with organizational experience, we argue that hope under distress manifests through two qualitatively distinct modes: action and waiting. We identify four configurations of each, produced by distinct generative mechanisms involving different combinations of distributed agency, future-oriented objects, and pathways thinking. When distress is prolonged, these mechanisms give rise to endurance, a proposed generative mechanism with relational and structural as well as individual sources, that keeps hopeful engagement viable over time. Our findings expand organizational hope research, establish waiting as a legitimate mode of hopeful conduct, and reframe the question of sustaining hope under adversity from a problem of individual resilience to one of organizational configuration.