Organizational Scholars Research Articles

Leader expectations facilitate employee pro‐environmental behavior

AbstractFaced with increasing global environmental problems, organizational scholars and practitioners have increasingly considered how to promote employee pro‐environmental behavior. This research seeks to expand our understanding of the facilitators of employee pro‐environmental behavior from the perspective of leader expectations. Drawing on behavioral confirmation theory, we propose that leader pro‐environmental expectations are expressed in active support for the environment, which subsequently facilitates employee pro‐environmental behavior, thus rising to meet the leader's initial expectations. Furthermore, we argue that the above relationship becomes stronger with the increase in employees' pro‐environmental self‐expectations. Based on data from 197 leader‐employee dyads, the results of regression analysis showed that leader pro‐environmental expectations are positively related to employee pro‐environmental behavior via demonstrated leader support for the environment, and this indirect relationship is positively moderated by employee pro‐environmental self‐expectations. When an employee holds high pro‐environmental expectations for himself or herself, a leader with high pro‐environmental expectations will render support for the environment, which ultimately increases employee pro‐environmental behavior. Our findings highlight the relevance of incorporating behavioral confirmation theory into the pro‐environmental behavior literature and provide valuable insights for managers on how to effectively promote employee pro‐environmental behavior.

Identifying and Building Strengths: An Experiential Exercise in Developing Classroom Contributions

This experiential exercise uses feedback from peers to develop students’ classroom contributions and build a classroom climate that encourages active engaging and learning. It is best suited for courses that require active classroom participation, but works well in any format, traditional and online, and with any level of students. The activity takes a strengths-based approach, anchored in positive psychology, appreciative inquiry, and positive organizational scholarship, to guide peer feedback about classroom contributions. It asks students to provide appreciative and evaluative feedback to their teammates and discuss ways they can be more effective contributors in the classroom. This activity has several important learning objectives for students: (1) describe specific behaviors associated with effective contributions in the classroom, (2) gain awareness of how others view their classroom contributions, and (3) use appreciative and evaluative feedback to improve their contributions in the future.

Employee Green Behavior as the Core of Environmentally Sustainable Organizations

Environmental sustainability has become an ethical and strategic imperative for organizations, and more and more employees are interested, encouraged, or instructed to act in environmentally sustainable ways. Consequently, organizational scholars have increasingly studied individual-level antecedents of employee pro-environmental or employee green behavior (EGB). We argue that, to advance this literature and to inform effective interventions, research should investigate how EGB, as a compound performance domain, is associated with antecedents and consequences at multiple levels (i.e., individual, team, work context, organization, society). Accordingly, we pursue three interrelated goals with this review. We first present a comprehensive review of research on EGB, including definitions, theoretical frameworks, methodological approaches, and empirical findings. Second, we develop an integrative conceptual model of EGB as the core of organizational environmental sustainability. Third, we conclude with recommendations for future theory development and methodological improvements, as well as practical implications for employees, leaders, and human resource management.

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles: Commuting in the 2020s and Beyond.

In this introduction to the special issue about commuting, we invite readers to consider how this frequently occurring worker activity should be integrated and investigated within the organizational sciences. Commuting is ubiquitous in organizational life. Yet, despite this centrality, it remains one of the most understudied topics in the organizational sciences. This special issue seeks to remedy this oversight by introducing seven articles that review the literature, identify knowledge gaps, theorize through an organization science lens, and provide directions for future research. We introduce these seven articles by discussing how they address three cross-cutting themes (Challenging the Status Quo, Insights into the Commuting Experience, The Future of Commuting). We hope that the work within this special issue informs and inspires organizational scholars to engage in meaningful interdisciplinary research on commuting going forward.

Latent transition analysis in organizational psychology: A simplified "how to" guide by using an applied example.

Demands for more robust designs in organizational research have led to a steady increase in the number of longitudinal studies in organizational psychology (OP) journals. Similarly, the number and ways to analyze longitudinal data have also increased. In this paper, we adopt a relatively new and promising approach to help researchers analyze their longitudinal data in OP, namely latent transition analysis (LTA). We present a simplified guideline on LTA and discuss its role for OP researchers. Moreover, we demonstrate how organizational scholars can use this method with a practical example. In this example, we investigate (a) if there are qualitatively distinct subgroups of employees based on particular patterns of psychological capital (PsyCap) dimensions (i.e., efficacy, hope, resilience, and optimism), (b) if employees stay in these subgroups or transition to other groups over time, and finally, (c) if leader-member exchange (LMX) is associated with this transition. We use LTA to examine these steps in a German sample (N = 180).

From “Civilian Clergy to Officer”: Hiring and Training Chaplains for Federal Government Positions

Abstract This article asks how people hired into federal chaplaincy positions are trained on the job. We find that unlike those hired into positions based on education, knowledge, and skills to date, chaplains are hired—by design—without some of the skills required for the job. Employers do not expect hired chaplains to understand organizational norms and practices, and so we identify strategies like inculcation and embodiment that employers use to help chaplains integrate their religious identity with their new professional identity. Drawing on interviews and archival data, we examine the process of hiring and training for federal chaplains as a case study of religious professionals in secular and pluralistic organizational contexts. This article contributes to and bridges work between scholars of religion and scholars of work and organizations who are interested in processes of hiring and training but do not often consider the role of religion in relation to such processes.

Does Inclusive Leadership Improve the Sustainability of Employee Relations? Test of Justice Theory and Employee Perceived Insider Status

The concept of inclusion has moved beyond being a social construct and has received widespread attention from organisational scholars and practitioners due to its varied effects on employee behaviours and sustainable organisational outcomes. This study tests the impact of inclusive leadership on the withdrawal behaviours of employees. Perceived insider status is used as a mediator and distributive justice as a moderator. This study has collected data from nurses, physicians, and paramedics of selected tertiary hospitals in Pakistan. A convenience sampling technique was used to collect data. A total of 264 responses were analysed using the PLS-SEM approach. Results found that inclusive leadership was positively related to perceived insider status and negatively related to employee withdrawal. Perceived insider status mediated the link. The impact of inclusive leadership on perceived insider status was stronger when distributive justice was high. This study offers multiple theoretical and practical implications, as it uses justice theory as a mechanism to explain boundary conditions around the effects of inclusive leadership on employee perceptions of being insiders, managing employee withdrawals, and improving sustainability in employee relations.

Organizations on stage: organizational research and the performing arts

Management and organization scholars have long been intrigued by the performing arts—music, theater, and dance—as a rich context for studying organizational phenomena. Indeed, a plethora of studies suggest that the performing arts are more than an interesting sideline for authors, as they offer unique theoretical and empirical lenses for organization studies. However, this stream of literature spreads across multiple research areas, varies with regard to its underlying theories and methods, and fails to pay sufficient attention to the contextuality of the findings. We address the resulting limitations by identifying and reviewing 89 articles on management and organization related to the performing arts published in 15 top-tier journals between 1976 and 2022. We find that research in the performing arts advances organizational theory and the understanding of organizational phenomena in four key ways, namely by studying (1) organizational phenomena in performing-arts contexts; (2) performing-arts phenomena in organizational contexts; (3) organizational phenomena through the prism of performing-arts theories; and (4) organizational phenomena through the prism of performing-arts practices. We also find that, in contrast to other settings, the performing arts are uniquely suited for immersive participant-observer research and for generating genuine insights into fundamental organizational structures and processes that are generic conditions of the performing arts and management alike, such as leadership, innovation, and the management of uncertainty. Finally, based on our consolidation of the research gaps and limitations of the reviewed studies, we develop a comprehensive agenda for future research.

Stakeholder theory, strategy, and organization: Past, present, and future

We reflect on the past, present, and future of stakeholder theory, focusing on its link to strategy and organization scholarship. Stakeholder theory was originally conceived as a theory of strategic management, but for most of its history it largely developed without having a noticeable impact on strategy research. This has changed in the past decade, however, with the strategy field making a “stakeholder turn.” We highlight the streams of research at the forefront of this turn, including work on “behavioral stakeholder theory,” ‘stakeholder strategy theory,’ and “stakeholder governance.” We conclude with an outlook on how stakeholder theory can help strategy scholars develop a theory of managing value creation that explicitly acknowledges both the economic and moral nature of relationships in and around organizations.

Measuring What Matters: Assessing How Executives Reference Firm Performance in Corporate Filings

We know very little about the performance measures executives use to make decisions. To fill this void, we investigate the performance variables that executives reference in corporate filings with the SEC. Our analyses suggest that executives refer to monetary variables (i.e., revenue, profit, and cash flow) in over 98% of filings. In contrast, executives refer to the unitless performance measures scaled by size (i.e., return on assets, return on equity), which are favored by organizational scholars, in less than 15% of filings. We find that this preference for unscaled measures remains across market capitalization and actual firm performance. In other words, even observations with the highest levels of ROA and ROE are more likely to include monetary measures as opposed to ratios. In fact, we find that almost every observation that references ratios also includes monetary measures of firm performance. Stated differently, our findings suggest executives use ratios in addition to—and not instead of—monetary measures. We discuss research opportunities for scholars to further align with the practitioner perspective and to revisit conceptualizations of firm performance.

Mapping the research about organisations in the latin american context: a bibliometric analysis

The Latin American region has attracted a great amount of interest among management and organizational scholars in recent years. The distinctive economic, social, and institutional features of the region represent a unique opportunity for theory building and testing in management and business research. This research answers the following overarching question: How the research about organizations in the Latin American context has evolved and how could it move forward? We perform an in-depth analysis consisting of a systematic review and bibliometric techniques (i.e., co-occurrence, co-citation, and co-authorship network analysis) of 1940 peer-reviewed articles published in the field during the 2004–2021 period. We examine the most influential publications, authors, journals, and research organizations. Building on our analysis and results, we describe current research hotspots and suggest avenues for future research. Our results contribute to a broad discussion relative to the relevance of context in the organizational research community, providing the first holistic analysis of it.

Impactful Theory: Pathways to Mattering

Organization Theory is an academic journal dedicated to the development and dissemination of novel theory in the domain of organizational scholarship. At the same time, an increasing chorus of organizational scholars have advocated for “impact”—broadly defined as producing societal benefit beyond the realm of academia. In this editorial, we question the implicit dichotomy between theory, on the one hand, and impact, on the other, and critically explore the notion of impactful theory. Rather than seeing theory as inherently opposed to impact, we celebrate and elucidate theory as a meaningful way to achieve impact. Specifically, we unpack the apparent oxymoron of impactful theory, and articulate seven distinct pathways whereby theory can be impactful. We close by outlining several critical questions, both for individual scholars and our collective community, as well as future research directions.

Rhetorical History as Institutional Work

AbstractRhetorical history has emerged as a useful theoretical construct that bridges the long recognized gap between historical and organizational scholarship. Despite its growing popularity, the precise nature of rhetorical history as a construct, its scope conditions, and its utility in resolving critical issues in historical organizational analysis remains unclear. This paper addresses these issues. We define rhetorical history and contextualize the construct by elaborating its relationship to associated concepts like collective memory, rhetoric, and narrative. We ground the construct by reviewing literature that has applied rhetorical history in both theory and empirical research. Our inductive review identifies four recurring themes in which rhetorical history is used to construct perceptions of; (a) continuity and discontinuity, (b) similarity and difference, (c) winners and losers, and (d) morality and immorality. We conclude with a discussion of how rhetorical history is an essential mechanism of institutional work.

Organizational humor as making our work more meaningful: mediation by crafting job resources

Abstract In the present study, we examined the impact of humor’s positive functions on the perception of a job’s meaningfulness. We argued that liberating and stress-relieving humor act as job resources enhancing job crafting to increase social and structural resources to experience meaningfulness. We hypothesized that crafting the job to increase structural and social resources would mediate the link between organizational humor functions (i.e., liberating and stress-relieving) and meaningfulness. We conducted a cross-sectional study among 200 Turkish employees from different occupations. Our results revealed that increasing structural resources mediated the relationship between liberating humor and meaningfulness, while this mediation was partially for stress-relieving humor. The mediating role of increasing social resources was partial and conditional for both types of organizational humor functions. The practical and theoretical implications have been discussed from a positive organizational scholarship perspective.

Navigating the promises and perils of researching emerging phenomena in strategy and organizations

Editors and reviewers often issue clarion calls for interesting research with novel theoretical contributions. In response to these calls, scholars often gravitate toward emerging phenomena—novel contexts lacking scholarly community or hot contexts with growing interest. However, simply examining novel and hot phenomena is insufficient to carve an “interesting” theoretical contribution. The promise of studying emerging phenomenon may be seductive, but doing so can also introduce under examined perils. We argue that novel and hot phenomena have distinct promises and perils that are under appreciated—with significant consequences for scholarly careers. Novel phenomena can provide first mover advantages to scholars and generate much interest but may constitute a lonely, risky journey if an appropriate theoretical community does not emerge. Hot topics attract significant attention, but can also be marked by conceptual confusion, fragmenting the accumulation of knowledge as scholars struggle to differentiate their work within a rapidly growing field. Yet, what is considered novel or hot is dynamic. Scholarly interest in novel phenomena can wax, ignite fascination, and become hot or wane with skeptical, uncertain acceptance, influencing both promises and perils. We contribute strategies to help strategy and organization scholars mitigate the perils and amplify the promises of theorizing from novel and hot phenomena.

Not on Skid Row: Stigma Management in Addiction Treatment Organizations

AbstractWe respond to a paucity of organizational scholarship considering how organizations manage their clientele's stigma as opposed to their own through studying the discursive stigma management efforts of addiction treatment organizations (ATOs). In studying the discursive stigma management of ATOs on behalf of their potential clientele, we offer some initial tactics organizations might use to reconstruct the stigma associated with fulfilling their mission. As a function of pursuing their missions, ATOs must elicit those with substance use disorder (SUD), who have largely concealable stigmas, to seek treatment from the organization. While not sharing the same stigma, reputable ATOs thus find themselves in the position of managing stigma on the behalf of their potential clientele. Analysing texts and images of three prominent US ATOs, we found the organizations managed stigma through discursive tactics directed at encouraging potential clientele's engagement. We contribute to the literature on organizational stigma management through (1) exploring the discursive tactics and strategies used by organizations to manage stigma attributed to their clientele, (2) exploring the role of constructing provisional selves in managing stigma, and (3) considering how neutralizing negative provisional selves is an important part of managing the stigma of potential clientele.

Guest editorial: Positive organizational scholarship in South Asia

Guest editorial: Positive organizational scholarship in South Asia

Network formation in organizational settings: Exploring the importance of local social processes and team-level contextual variables in small groups using bayesian hierarchical ERGMs

Statistical models for social networks, such as exponential random graphs (ERGMs), have increasingly been used by organizational scholars to study the social interactions inside organizations, departments, and teams. While such models have been successful in providing insights about the local processes that underlie these interactions (such as homophily, reciprocity or transitivity), an additional interesting avenue for research focuses on the role of group-level contextual variables (such as the climate or composition of a team or organization) when considering a multitude of teams or organizations. In this paper we show how, in a team context, integrating team-level factors in a multilevel framework (i.e., a Bayesian hierarchical ERGM) enables us to answer questions about: 1) how team-level contextual factors might provide alternative explanations for the emergence of intra-team ties, and 2) whether any variation in local tendencies between teams might be dependent on such team-level variables (i.e., cross-level interactions). Using data collected among 103 MBA students who were grouped into 18 teams of 5–7 members to work on a project, we study the impact of members’ expertise and perceived psychological safety on advice seeking behavior. At a local level, we focus on the effect of these nodal attributes for homophily and differences in advice seeking and giving, while at the team level we incorporate the average expertise and the team’s psychological safety climate. Our results show that expert members are more likely to be the recipient of advice ties, but also that this effect is more pronounced in teams where the overall level of expertise is high. For psychological safety, we find that a high psychological safety climate impacts the advice relations among all members in the group, not solely those who themselves perceive a high level of psychological safety, suggesting that the team climate has an impact on all its members. This illustrates how a Bayesian hierarchical ERGM allows us to obtain relevant results even when studying small-sized groups.

Public administration and politics meet turbulence: The search for robust governance responses

Public administration and politics meet turbulence: The search for robust governance responses

Inhabited Institutionalism

Inhabited Institutionalism is a meso-level theoretical approach for evaluating the recursive relationships among institutions, social interactions, and organizations. This theoretical framework offers organizational scholars a multi-faceted consideration of coupling configurations that highlight how institutional processes are maintained, challenged, and transformed without reverting to nested yet binary arguments about individual agency and structural conditions.