Coordination Without Consensus: A Process Theory of Variance Reduction in Managerial Sensegiving
Fritz Jeffry Briones
Received: 21 July 2026; Revised: 01 September 2026; Accepted: 03 September 2026; Published: 07 September 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.66074/H7T1F3M8Q
Abstract
Organizations routinely coordinate despite persistent disagreement. Sensemaking theory explains how individuals construct meaning under ambiguity but leaves underdeveloped the temporal mechanism through which individual interpretations become sufficiently aligned to enable coordinated collective action. This paper develops a mechanism-based process theory of variance reduction in managerial sensegiving, specifying how recursive cycles of sensegiving progressively reduce interpretive dispersion—the variance in interpretive frames among team members—until interpretive convergence emerges as the collective state enabling coordinated action. The framework specifies four complementary mechanisms (informational, cognitive, affective, and social-identification) through which sensegiving reduces dispersion, identifies psychological safety as a boundary condition distinguishing genuine from illusory convergence, and develops seven process propositions: three specifying the core sensegiving mechanism and four extending the model to AI-augmented contexts, where AI-generated interpretations can compete with or substitute for managerial sensegiving. This is a conceptual paper: the seven propositions are developed for future empirical testing and are not tested within this manuscript. The framework extends sensemaking theory from a theory of individual interpretation to a theory of collective adaptation, offering a testable account of why teams stop pursuing further agreement—not because disagreement disappears, but because sensegiving reduces interpretive variance below the level required for coordinated action. For practice, the framework redirects managerial attention from pursuing unanimous agreement to directly monitoring and reducing interpretive dispersion, prioritizing psychological safety as the condition that distinguishes genuine convergence from surface compliance.
Keywords: interpretive convergence, interpretive dispersion, psychological safety, sensegiving, sensemaking, variance reduction
Author Information: University of Perpetual Help System DALTA – Las Piñas, Philippines; fritz.jeffry.briones@gmail.com
Volume 2, Issue 3, September 2026