Knowledge that Transforms

Symbols are habitually used by organizations to transform the meaning of their actions and intentions in ways that enable them to manage complex stakeholder relationships and achieve competitive advantage. However, applications of symbolic management across disciplines and research traditions in the organization sciences are fraught with theoretical ambiguity pertaining to the meaning of symbols, the value of symbols to organizations, the tactics used by organizations to manage symbols, and the outcomes of symbolic management. Thus, we review the literature to solidify our theoretical understanding of organizational symbolic management. Based on our review, we advance a process framework of symbolic management to describe the relationships between organizational approaches to managing symbols, the forms of symbolic value organizations seek to create and capture, and the prevailing outcomes of symbolic management. Using this framework, we also examine the literature for insights pertaining to the management of symbols for competitive advantage in separate contexts of organization–stakeholder interaction, leading to the development of a strategic framework of symbolic management. We conclude by outlining a set of directions for future research that evoke pressing questions about the role of symbolic management in organizations to encourage new pastures of scholarly inquiry.

Socioeconomic mobility, or the ability of individuals to improve their socioeconomic standing through merit-based contributions, is a fundamental ideal of modern societies. The key focus of societal efforts to ensure socioeconomic mobility has been on the provision of educational opportunities. We review evidence that even with the same education and job opportunities, being born into a poorer family undermines socioeconomic mobility because of processes occurring within organizations. The burden of poorer background might, ceteris paribus, be economically comparable to the gender gap. We argue that in the societal and scientific effort to promote socioeconomic mobility, the key context in which mobility is supposed to happen—organizations—and the key part of the life of people striving toward socioeconomic advancement—that as working adults—have been overlooked. We integrate the organizational literature, pointing to key within-organizational processes impacting objective (socioeconomic) success with research, some emergent in organizational sciences and some disciplinary, on when, why, and how people from poorer backgrounds behave or are treated by others in the relevant situations. Integrating these literatures generates a novel and useful framework for identifying issues people born into poorer families face as employees, systematizes extant evidence and makes it more accessible to organizational scientists, and allows us to lay the agenda for future organizational scholarship. Our hope is that the current review will help bring organizational science—in our view, the best equipped domain of scholarship for studying how workers from different backgrounds fare in organizations—to the forefront of the quest for promoting socioeconomic mobility of workers coming from poorer families.

Self-regulatory focus reflects both a trait (chronic focus) and a state (situational focus) that can either influence or be influenced by various organizational factors and outcomes, allowing us to be promotion focused, “keeping our head in the clouds” and/or prevention focused by “keeping our feet on the ground.” Self-regulatory focus is a significant explanatory construct because it comprises an inner-self component (ideal versus ought), which is evident as a motivational force that mobilizes different individual and work-group processes and behaviors to achieve end results. These unique characteristics of regulatory focus make it especially appropriate for understanding the psychological mechanisms that underlie leadership–followership processes involving dynamic relationships and mutual influences across time and context. To date, the relationships between leadership and regulatory focus and the roles of time and context have not been assessed systematically. We review the literature on regulatory focus and leadership, while integrating the multiple targets and levels of regulatory focus (leaders, followers, dyads, and teams). We further offer a comprehensive conceptual framework that focuses on the significance of time and context across these levels, to advance our knowledge and to suggest a roadmap for future research on leader–follower motivational processes and their influence on multiple-level outcomes.

A fundamental concern in conflict management research is characterizing (dys)functional conflict; what is missing from this conversation is dynamics. We thus provide a systematic analysis of the ways in which dynamics have been investigated in prior conflict research and show how dynamics have been incompletely explained even when the research intended to focus on such dynamic processes. We demonstrate how the conceptual frameworks used to study conflict are not built to capture dynamic change and review a different framework, the system dynamics (SD) framework, as a means to move beyond linear causality. We next show how using the SD framework we can reinterpret and synthesize a multitude of static cause and effect findings from across levels of analysis in conflict research. We demonstrate how this framework may solve some of the Gordian knots in research on conflict utility (e.g., why task conflict may not be as helpful as it is theorized). We close with suggestions for how to use the SD framework to advance the study of conflict beyond what linear causality can provide and capture conflict dynamics in a more substantial way.

Time-use refers to the amount of time spent working and how that time is allocated over a particular period. A growing number of scholars are considering how social context—people’s immediate social environments (e.g., colleagues and managers, norms, work groups, and nonwork demands)—shape time-use. However, this research is fragmented across disciplines, methods, and levels of analysis. To integrate and advance knowledge in this area, we review empirical studies that inform current understanding of social context and time-use. In doing so, we develop a framework that reveals how the extant literature coalesces around four taken-for-granted social meanings: time-use as dedication, time-use as performance, time-use as identity, and time-use as power. These four meanings are anchored in broadly shared societal ideologies but are enacted and interpreted locally as people engage time in a specific context. Looking across the four social meanings, we discuss how they are interconnected, and identify overarching themes that unite them. Building on these insights, we suggest important directions for future research on the social context of time-use.

Although high-quality work relationships are essential for organizational effectiveness and employee well-being, they often fracture in the course of organizational life. To better understand how work relationships recover from relationship fractures, we provide an integrative review under the umbrella of relational resilience. We establish a unified definition of relational resilience, and then use two broad attributes—resilience processes and resilience foundations—as an organizing framework for our discussion of relational resilience. Resilience processes describe how fractures are triggered, interpreted, and repaired. We review common triggers of relationship fracture and describe two distinct pathways—gradual drifts and abrupt shocks—to fracture, highlight the important role that positive attributional and prosocial sensemaking processes play in facilitating postfracture repair, and discuss the process by which fractured relationships are restored or strengthened. Resilience foundations describe the preconditions for successfully engaging in prosocial sensemaking and relational repair. Our review identified the relational foundations critical to positive sensemaking and positive relational attributions, and the reparative foundations critical to relational repair. Finally, we organize insights and future directions around six themes: balancing and realigning emotions, synchronizing attributions and cognitions, contingencies of effective repair, fracture pathways and repair, trajectories of repair, and reciprocal relationships.

The aging workforce is a widely acknowledged, major organizational phenomenon. Nevertheless, its present level of scholarship is both narrow in focus and inconclusive in implications for key organizational domains: namely, individual-level performance (why does evidence suggest no effect of worker age on overall performance?), interpersonal-level discrimination (why do older workers face heightened discrimination if their performance is generally valued?), and group-level diversity (why has research failed to identify consistent age diversity benefits?). The present review argues that answering these questions necessitates expanding the older worker space by incorporating research approaches of other, well-established literature studies—each of which offer equally valid ways of understanding (older) worker age, but do not typically cast themselves as covering age per se. Although these other literatures—comprising Generation, Age, Tenure, and Experience (GATE)—potentially foster a more sophisticated conception of older workers than present approaches typically offer, these literatures have remained largely separate, resulting in their own level of inconclusive and sometimes contradictory predictions for an aging workforce. To address each of these issues going forward, researchers must integrate GATE elements in all older worker investigations. A GATE approach avoids overreliance on chronological age as a predictor, more accurately represents the inherent complexity of age as a status category, and potentially offers more definitive conclusions than present approaches do. Such is timely, and crucial, for a topic that is somehow both ubiquitous in the workforce and yet not well understood by mainstream organizational scholarship.

This article reviews the history, foundations, development, and position of systems psychodynamic scholarship in organization studies. Systems psychodynamic scholarship focuses on the interaction between collective structures, norms, and practices in social systems and the cognitions, motivations, and emotions of members of those systems. It is most useful to investigate the unconscious forces that underpin the persistence of dysfunctional organizational features and the appeal of irrational leaders. It is also well equipped to challenge arrangements that stifle individual and organizational development. The article documents the tension, in this body of work, between an “outside-in” perspective, focused on institutions’ influence on individuals, and an “inside-out” perspective, focused on leaders’ influence on institutions. It also interrogates the marginalization of systems psychodynamic scholarship, positing that its marginality is both a social defense for organization studies as a whole and a generative feature of the systems psychodynamics approach. Granting it a position of functional, rather than oppressed, marginality, the article concludes, will enrich research about the experience, management, and organization of contemporary work.

Academic interest in start-up teams has grown dramatically over the past 40 years, with researchers from a wide variety of disciplines actively studying the topic. Although this widespread interest is encouraging, a review of the literature reveals a lack of consensus in how researchers conceptualize and operationally define start-up teams. A lack of consensus on the core phenomenon—a foundational part of a strong paradigm—has stifled the systematic advancement of knowledge about start-up teams, which has downstream implications for the viability of this field of research. To advance the development of a stronger paradigm, we present a multidimensional conceptualization of start-up teams that is derived from points of consensus in existing definitions. Our multidimensional conceptualization accounts for the fact that although all are under the umbrella of the concept of “start-up team,” start-up teams vary in a set of key ingredients—ownership of equity, autonomy of strategic decision-making, and entitativity. This conceptualization serves as a framework for reviewing and beginning to integrate past research on start-up teams. It also serves as a framework for guiding and informing an integrated program of future research on start-up teams. By introducing a multidimensional conceptualization of start-up teams, we highlight the value of considering the defining ingredients of start-up teams for furthering a stronger paradigm.

Organizational misconduct has substantial effects on the well-being of a firm and its stakeholders. As this body of work has grown, organizational scholars have devoted considerable research attention toward understanding how firms can minimize the negative effects of misconduct through various corrective actions. Consequently, discrete research streams have formed around specific types of organizational misconduct and corrective actions, which has left the literature without a unifying theoretical model. We provide a conceptual synthesis and typology that aggregates disconnected concepts into the higher order constructs of organizational misconduct (fraud, product safety issues, employee mistreatment, and environmental violations) and corrective actions (executive dismissal, product recalls, organizational accounts, and policy changes). Using the theoretical tenets of stakeholder salience and managerial cognition, we offer insight and future research directions about managers’ decision-making processes following misconduct and why firms respond using accommodative versus defensive strategies.