Knowledge that Transforms

Organizational fields are a central construct in institutional theory and the notion of shared meaning is integral to the definition of “field.” In this review, we discuss how institutional scholars have examined discourse, rhetoric, and framing as mechanisms through which meanings form, change, and coalesce in institutional fields. We assess the important contributions of this literature, but we also argue that what scholars identify as discourse, rhetoric, and frames are the residues or echoes of prior social interactions. When scholars miss the opportunity to examine interactions as a key mechanism and source of these meanings, a fundamental dynamic of fields becomes obscured and the accounts become, ironically, static. A focus on interactions enables researchers to observe how institutional fields are understood and tethered to local activity, as actors layer their multiple meanings in ways that may result in unexpected outcomes. As a way to incorporate discourse, rhetoric, and frames into a dynamic approach that features social interaction as an important source of meaning, we examine possibilities evident in the growing line of research on “inhabited institutions,” and we chart productive avenues for future research on the dynamics of fields.

We review recent research that employs an open polities perspective on organizations. Open polities research combines an open systems conception of organizations as intimately linked to their external environment with scholarship that treats organizations as polities—associations of groups with evolving interests and resources that operate within the constraints and opportunities afforded by a formal organizational system. In this perspective, external political environments seep into the internal political dynamics of organizations in various ways, and those internal politics in turn mediate organization-level outcomes in relation to external pressures. We use the framework of the open polity perspective to 1) connect largely parallel literatures at a meta-theoretical level and thus point to ways in which they can inform each other, 2) identify key processes through which internal and external polities are linked and single out organizational dimensions for the comparative analysis of organizations as polities, and 3) identify open questions and opportunities for future research in this perspective.

People care about the way that other members of their work groups and organizations view them. That is, they care about their social worth or social reputation at work. These concerns are the foundation of two distinct lines of scholarly research: one on status and the other on respect. Yet, although the research literatures on people’s sense of their own status and respect both explore the same fundamental concerns, they differ in their conceptual origins, theorized assumptions, motivational underpinnings, judgment processes, and the group dynamics that they ascribe to social worth. Overall, the status and respect literatures provide differing images of the dynamics of individuals’ social worth at work. However, these literatures have been largely disconnected from one another, and there have been relatively few systematic efforts to analyze their differences and similarities. We address this gap by reviewing and comparing the status and respect literatures. Our analysis leads us to conclude that although status research and respect research are highly distinct, the two research areas ultimately investigate the same phenomenon and should be integrated more extensively. Moreover, our analysis highlights several limitations and gaps in prior research on status and respect. We suggest opportunities for integrating status and respect research and for developing a more complete understanding of the dynamics of social worth at work.

Scholars have devoted considerable effort to exploring the causes of executive behavior, with the accumulated research spanning multiple social science disciplines. This variety is beneficial in that numerous theories and methodologies have been brought to bear on the topic, but over time has led to increasingly fragmented literatures that often differ widely in their causal accounts of executive behavior. Confronted by such fragmentation, scholars in this domain tend to examine research questions through the lens of a single motivational perspective when developing and testing models. We believe that a more holistic perspective on the drivers of executive behavior can help scholars build richer models that bridge disciplinary silos by reframing existing theories in a new light. We specifically aim to bring clarity to this domain by developing a parsimonious framework for understanding executive motives in terms of the nature of the rewards (pecuniary versus nonpecuniary) that motivate executive action and the motivational frame of reference (individualized versus socialized agency) for conceptualizing rewards. Using this bidimensional framework to synthesize research from the last decade, we outline a platform for research that conceptualizes executive motives as the lynchpin for understanding, integrating, and advancing theoretical perspectives on executive behavior.

The goal of this review is to organize, synthesize, and critically appraise the literature on courage—a concept as old as the written word—to create a common base for the study of “workplace courage.” To situate what follows, we begin with a brief review of the diverse foundational and current courage literature. We then use the literature and our critique to suggest a grounded working definition for the workplace courage construct, to discuss the overlap between workplace courage and many related organizational phenomenon and constructs, and to review four main approaches to the study of workplace courage. We next review the “perspective problem” in the study of courage (and related constructs), proposing a path forward that involves explicit researcher acknowledgement of the appropriate perspective(s) based on theoretical interests, as well as research attention to the causes and consequences of (dis)agreement in perspective itself. We conclude by outlining additional focused opportunities—such as those involving the role of gender, emotions, and time—to advance understanding of workplace courage.

Organizations, and the groups and individuals within them, sometimes face the thorny dilemma of whether or not to continue failing courses of action. Escalation of commitment describes the tendency to “carry on” with such questionable endeavors, regardless of whether doing so is likely to result in success. Despite the wide variability between and within organizations, early research on escalation of commitment largely ignored the role of context. Since then, an impressive volume of studies on the context of escalation has accumulated, and we present a fresh take on the literature by reviewing and analyzing this work. Using a multilevel framework, we elucidate how escalation is influenced by factors at the group and organizational levels, as well as by factors external to the organization. Ultimately, we aim to provide a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of escalation to stimulate new avenues of research and offer insights into how decision-makers can respond more effectively to escalation dilemmas.

Research on the consequences of diversity in teams continues to produce inconsistent results. We review the recent developments in diversity research and identify two shortcomings. First, an understanding of the microdynamics affecting processes and outcomes in diverse teams is lacking. Second, diversity research has tended to treat different social categories as equivalent and thus not considered how members’ experiences may be affected by their social category membership. We address these shortcomings by reviewing research on stereotypes, which indicates that stereotypes initiate reinforcing microdynamics among (a) attributions of a target team member’s warmth and competence, (b) perceiving members’ behavior toward the target team member, and (c) the target team member’s behavior. Our review suggests that perceivers’ impression formation motivation is the key determinant of the extent to which perceivers continue to treat a target based on categorization. On the basis of our review, we provide an integrative perspective and corresponding model that outlines these MIcrodynamics of Diversity and Stereotyping in Teams (MIDST) and indicates how stereotyping can benefit as well as harm team functioning. We discuss how this integrative perspective on the MIDST relates to the social categorization and the information/decision-making perspective, set a research agenda, and discuss the managerial implications.

This paper provides a historical review of the conceptualization and measurement of organizational justice. We demonstrate how, over time, a dominant norm for conceptualizing and measuring justice has emerged. We posit that although consistent conceptualization and measurement across justice studies can enable the accumulation of knowledge, if the dominant approach is incomplete, this can impede the accumulation of knowledge and risk construct reification. We suggest that these risks are high given that (a) contemporary approaches to measuring fairness perceptions fail to capture the full domain of organizational justice as it was initially conceptualized by early scholars; (b) despite a foundation of “classic” theories, our field has yet to systematically map the justice domain; and (c) the normative operationalizations of organizational justice are based on observations that predate the 21st century workplace. We offer suggestions for future research and new approaches to assessing workplace fairness. Our paper’s goal, ultimately, is to reconsider how justice is conceptualized and measured so that the findings obtained from future empirical justice studies can go beyond the constraints of the current paradigm.

Individual work performance has been a central topic for scholars over the past century. There is a mass of research on performance but it is embodied in a variety of disconnected literatures each using their own set of constructs and theoretical lenses. In this paper, we synthesize this disparate literature to better understand individual work performance and pave the way for future research. First, using a bibliometric technique to analyze 9,299 articles, we identify the cumulative intellectual structure of the field and show how the field has evolved over the past 40 years. Second, drawing on the Griffin, Neal, and Parker (2007) model, we classify 97 performance constructs according to their form (proficiency, adaptivity, proactivity) and level of contribution (individual, team, organization). We conclude this model is useful for understanding the similarities and differences among many distinct performance constructs. Third, using the Griffin et al. (2007) model, we illuminate the nomological network by mapping the antecedents and outcomes of each form and level of contribution. Our synthesis identified theoretically relevant and differentiating antecedents of form; whereas the nomological network is underdeveloped in relation to the level of contribution. Finally, we propose 18 recommendations which include ensuring conceptual clarity for performance constructs, expanding theoretical models to account for more performance dimensions, greater attention to the underlying mechanisms through which individual performance contributes to higher-level outcomes, increased consideration of how performance changes over time and across contexts, and more investigations into how multiple performance constructs interact with each other to shape effectiveness.

Self-control is an important component of organizational life, with organizational members constantly needing to exert self-control to overcome their desires and achieve long-term goals. Attesting to this importance, much research has focused on why individuals lose self-control and the consequences of self-control failure for individuals and organizations. Unfortunately, this research has overly focused on one component of self-control—resource depletion perspectives (and ego depletion perspectives in particular)—while neglecting other components that play equally important roles in the self-control process. As such, we argue that the organizational literature has failed to appreciate the broader picture of what components are involved in the self-control process, and the extent to which these components are intertwined with organizational phenomenon. In this review, we address these issues by using an integrative self-control theory framework to review the management self-control literature, outlining seven components of self-control within three broad phases of the self-control process (activation, exertion, and enactment). This framework integrates the relevant literature into a larger self-control process model, and highlights concerns with existing depletion perspectives as well as the lack of attention paid to other components in the self-control process. We discuss the implications of these issues for future research on self-control.