Emotional UX Breakdown and Organizational Untangling: Toward Emotional Infrastructure Design

Abstract

Vision-driven organizations rely on abstract purposes to guide action under uncertainty, particularly during second-foundation growth and AI/DX transformation. While such abstraction enables adaptability, it also creates structural ambiguity, often resulting in misalignment between declared vision and everyday practice.This study employs a qualitative action research approach based on long-term participatory engagement in three Japanese organizational contexts.The findings reveal a previously under-theorized mechanism: vision–practice misalignment is informally managed through emotional translation labor. Empathetic professionals translate abstract intent into operational meaning, absorb ambiguity, and maintain psychological safety. This invisible labor functions as an implicit subsystem that stabilizes performance in the short term while concentrating emotional load on specific individuals, increasing vulnerability to burnout and exit.A leadership reflexivity gap is also identified, in which emotional feedback is not effectively integrated into decision-making. Under high-context cultural conditions, this dynamic is amplified as misalignment is internally absorbed rather than explicitly addressed.These dynamics are conceptualized as the Organizational Emotional UX Breakdown Model, reframing emotional load as a hidden system-level constraint. To move from breakdown to structural resolution, the study proposes an Organizational Untangling framework grounded in Human Systems Integration (HSI), which redistributes emotional load through visualization, decision rationale externalization, reflexive feedback loops, and cross-functional integration. AI is positioned as an emotional mediator that supports sense-making and reduces dependency on individual-based emotional processing.By positioning emotional processes as organizational infrastructure, this study extends HSI and offers a design-oriented approach to enhancing organizational resilience.

Keywords: Emotional Infrastructure, Organizational Untangling, Emotional UX Breakdown, Human Systems Integration, Organizational Resilience

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1007616