Knowledge that Transforms

Organizations are increasingly designing workplaces that offer employees opportunities to incorporate nature into their professional lives. Despite the extensive study of work design, the scope and effects of employees’ contact with nature have rarely been considered as a meaningful element of the work context. This is an important oversight, given the significance of the biophilia hypothesis, which proposes that humans have an innate desire to connect with nature, and research showing that individuals benefit from contact with nature. Moreover, prior research has largely focused on the positive effects of nature on individuals, and it is unclear whether these effects will remain positive in organizational settings, or whether biophilia at work can sometimes have negative implications. In this paper, we draw on the biophilic design literature to identify contextual characteristics of work design that influence the extent to which employees have contact with nature while on the job. In addition, we describe how contact with nature affects employees’ cognitive, emotional, prosocial, and physical reserves of energy. Finally, we explain how the effects of biophilic work design on employees’ potential energy is enhanced, reduced, or even reversed by situational and individual factors.

In their recent paper, Dencker, Bacq, Gruber and Haas (2019) reconceptualize necessity entrepreneurship—sometimes referred to as necessity-motivated entrepreneurship (McMullen, Bagby & Palich, 2008...

A pervasive phenomenon in the workplace is that men appear eager to show how “tough” they are as negotiators. We introduce the Masculinity Effects in Negotiations model to explain men’s negotiation behaviors and outcomes. According to the model, men perceive negotiating as an activity through which they can signal their masculinity and pursue social status, but they also recognize that their masculinity might be questioned and that they might lose social status. As a result, men can become enthusiastic but also anxious about negotiations and these emotions lead them to display a number of agentic negotiation behaviors to protect and underscore their masculinity and their social status. Depending on their own and their counterpart’s behavior, men then either succeed or fail to obtain favorable economic negotiation outcomes, which influence their subsequent emotions (e.g., pride or shame). With our model, we advance a novel explanation for gender differences in negotiations and expand the understanding of men’s workplace behaviors and outcomes (e.g., their pay, position, and reputation).

In recent decades, numerous voices in managerial scholarship and business ethics have championed conciliatory business strategies capable of achieving both economic and social ends. While these “good ethics pays” or “win–win” approaches have garnered significant attention in both academic and practitioner-oriented arenas, empirical vetting of such strategies has lagged far behind their widespread diffusion. Even more problematic, careful examination of the scholarly work in this area reveals fundamentally different presuppositions about what it means to claim “good ethics pays” and how this claim relates to managerial activity. This article maps out the various good ethics pays arguments across the managerial discipline to uncover three competing, divergent, and at times incommensurable frameworks. This mapping is followed by examining how disciplinary commitments to parsimonious explanations and stable behavioral patterns utilize good ethics pays frameworks to effectively minimize the moral agency of managerial actors. This article concludes by laying out a new research approach that foregrounds the varied contingency of how ethics and economics intersect. The approach moves beyond ungrounded confidence in a grand theory of win–win convergences to instead investigate the provisional and contextual social mechanisms that reward or sanction ethical action.

The paper outlines a novel perspective for theory building by showing how methods of conceptual engineering enable systematic development of conceptual competences. Conceptual engineering is a hot ...

In this paper we share the behind-the-scenes story of the development of our paper “When worlds collide: The internal dynamics of organizational responses to conflicting institutional demands,” whi...

Understanding the impact that employee job performance has on firm value creation and capture has been an enduring challenge. Micro management scholarship has focused on employee job performance behavior and rarely considered the extent to which value created by employees is actually appropriable by the employing firm. Simultaneously, macro management scholarship has focused on firm value creation and capture without explicit attention to the nature and types of individual job performance or collective performance processes within firms. Thus, we conceptually integrate strategic management theory on value creation and capture with psychological theory on employee job performance and collective performance, to propose a theory that explains how and when firms will capture value from employee job performance. Heterogeneity in value created and captured by employee job performance is affected by two broad factors: individual (e.g., the type of job performance) and market (e.g., labor market constraints). These insights lead to theoretical and practical advances for both micro and macro fields, suggesting that the relationship between employee job performance and firm value capture is more conditional and context-specific than previously recognized.