Specifying organizational contexts: systematic links between contexts and processes in organizational behavior

Abstract

Work contexts both shape and are shaped by the individuals who interact within them. This deceptively simple idea challenges researchers to construct theories, design studies and analyse data in a way that captures relationships between contexts and phenomena over time and across levels of analysis (Kozlowski & Klein, 2000). The Journal of Organizational Behavior emphasizes the importance of understanding organizational contexts and of including more detail and theory about the context for organizational behaviour (Johns, 2001; Rousseau & Fried, 2001). Over time, a concern with universal relationships that were independent of context, has given way to a focus on howwork settings and other organizational contexts interact with the processes important to organizational behaviour (Heath & Sitkin, 2001). The papers in this special issue show ways of developing more systematic studies of organizational context. By systematic, I mean that that context of the study is theorized as a conceptual construct, operationalized as a variable in the study and that variance associated with the context is directly incorporated in the analyses. These requirements coincide with Rousseau and Fried’s (2001, p. 9) ‘Tier 2’ approach to contextualizing, which is based on direct observation and analysis of contextual effects. They distinguished this approach from others based on rich description of a particular context or comparative studies involving highly distinct contexts. The systematic approach in the current papers is important for developing a better theoretical and empirical and understanding of context. This special issue is comprised of four papers, although one paper was published in an ealier issue (Daniels, Tregaskis, & Seaton, 2007), three empirical papers adopt the requirements for directly integrating context into the theory and research method, and one paper focuses on theoretical implications. In this introduction, I address two fundamental questions about organizational contexts posed by Johns (2001): what is organizational context and how does context operate in relation to organizational behaviour? The four papers in this special issue provide further direction for answering these questions about the nature of context in organizational behaviour. Journal of Organizational Behavior J. Organiz. Behav. 28, 859–863 (2007) Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/job.489