Knowledge that Transforms

Based on our review of the past 40 years of strategy implementation research, we find that the focus of the research area has moved from the pioneering structural control view to a more adaptive conception of strategy implementation.Whereas early research focused mainly on how to conceptualize strategy implementation plans and how to establish optimal structures, systems, incentives, and controls for strategy implementation, the adaptive turn has shifted the research emphasis on to how organizations make sense of and enact strategies in practice. Although this adaptive turn has contributed significantly to understanding how strategies are implemented and adapted, it has also led to a further fragmentation of the field.We put forward an integrative view that aims at combining the distinctive strengths of the two complementary views. Instead of focusing on either conceptualizing or enacting, we call for researchers to examine the continuous interplay of conceptualizing and enacting strategies at multiple hierarchical levels and in multiple organizational units simultaneously. We hope that our reviewwill inspire future strategy implementation research to complete the adaptive turn through an enhanced, integrative view of strategy implementation.

Interdependence is a core concept in organization design, yet one that has remained consistently understudied. Current notions of interdependence remain rooted in seminal works, produced at a time when managers’ near-perfect understanding of the task at hand drove the organization design process. In this context, task interdependence was rightly assumed to be exogenously determined by characteristics of the work and the technology. We no longer live in that world, yet our view of interdependence has remained exceedingly task centric and our treatment of interdependence overly deterministic. As organizations face increasingly unpredictable work streams and workers codesign the organization alongside managers, our field requires a more comprehensive toolbox that incorporates aspects of agent-based interdependence. In this article, we synthesize research in organization design, organizational behavior, and other related literatures to examine three types of interdependence that characterize organizations’ workflows: task, goal, and knowledge interdependence. We offer clear definitions for each construct, analyze how each arises endogenously in the design process, explore their interrelations, and pose questions to guide future research.

Social support research proliferated across multiple disciplines for more than a half century. This growth, as well as disciplinary differences, resulted in mixed views, conceptualizations, and operationalizations. This review synthesizes knowledge and empirical findings from more than 4,500 studies across disciplines. We summarize several characteristics of social support studied in the literature: quantity and quality, utilization, source, content, format, and consistency. We also identify four dynamic roles of social support in predicting individual outcomes directly, indirectly, and interactively (with stressors): a positivity catalyst, a positivity enhancer, a negativity buffer, and a negativity exacerbator. We find that the incongruence between social support, stressors, and individual characteristics accounts for the diverse roles of social support and mixed findings. Based on our analysis, we discuss how management scholars may draw insights from other disciplines to advance social support research and provide recommendations for future research.

Transaction cost theory (TCT) has been fruitfully applied to a wide range of organizational phenomena, as reflected in a vast and evolving body of research. However, in part due to the theory's broad success, important advances in some fields have not diffused to other fields. In this essay, we lay out a path toward a pluralistic view of TCT that incorporates insights from multiple fields, primarily strategy and international business. In so doing, we critically assess the assumptions, key constructs, and evolving theoretical logic of TCT. We then propose an agenda for future research, highlighting opportunities for scholars to (a) expand and deepen the exchange of insights between strategy and international business, and further integrate TCT with the trust literature and with recent insights from behavioral economics and psychology, and (b) further apply TCT to study recent phenomena such as platforms and two-sided markets, the implications of artificial intelligence for governance decisions, and the pursuit of nonpecuniary objectives such as sustainability.

Compared with people of average attractiveness, the highly attractive earn roughly 20 percent more and are recommended for promotion more frequently. The dominant view of this “attractiveness advantage” is one of taste-based discrimination, whereby attractive individuals are preferred without justification in economic productivity. We conduct a comprehensive review of research on attractiveness discrimination, finding relatively more evidence that this phenomenon constitutes, to some extent, statistical (as opposed to solely taste-based) discrimination, in which decision makers assume that attractive people are more competent and discriminate based on instrumental motives. We then review research that speaks to whether decision makers might be correct in assuming that attractive workers are more productive, finding that the attractive possess a slight advantage in human and a notable advantage in social capital. We finally review studies evaluating whether an advantage exists beyond that explained by capital differences. We find that the current body of work provides inconclusive evidence of taste-based but relatively more conclusive evidence of statistical discrimination processes. Our integrative view suggests how attractiveness biases can be detected more effectively, and points to key directions for future research on the sources of the attractiveness advantage. We conclude by discussing the promise of an integrative approach to understanding other achievement gaps, such as those on the basis of gender, race, and social class.

© Academy of Management Annals. People design and use technology for work. In return, technology shapes work and people. As information communication technology (ICT) becomes ever more embedded in today’s increasingly digital organizations, the nature of our jobs and employees’ work experiences are strongly affected by ICT use. This cross-disciplinary review focuses on work design as a central explanatory vehicle for exploring how individual ICT usage influences employees’ effectiveness and well-being. We evaluated 83 empirical studies. Results show that ICT use affects employees through shaping three key work design aspects: job demands, job autonomy, and relational aspects. To reconcile previous mixed findings on the effects of ICT use on individual workers, we identify two categories of factors that moderate the effects of ICT use on work design: user-technology fit factors and social-technology fit factors. We consolidate the review findings into a comprehensive framework that delineates both the work design processes linking ICT use and employee outcomes and the moderating factors. The review fosters an intellectual conversation across different disciplines, including organizational behavior, management information systems, and computer-mediated communication. The findings and the proposed framework help to guide future research and to design high-quality work in the digital era.

Given its extremely negative impact, it is not surprising that there is extensive literature focused on understanding and reducing corruption. However, the existing academic work focuses largely on corruption in government. Yet, corporations play a key role in much of the corruption that occurs in society and are important contexts for corruption themselves; they are also very different from governments and, we argue, deserve focused study and the development of a coherent theory of corporate corruption. In this article, we define corporate corruption and argue that management researchers are uniquely positioned to contribute to the development of a theory of corporate corruption and the development of solutions to prevent it. We then examine the current state of research on this important topic and propose a framework for organizing research on corporate corruption into four perspectives: corporate corruption as rational action, corporate corruption as institutionalized practice, corporate corruption as cultural norm, and corporate corruption as moral failure. We go on to propose a research agenda for management scholars in some traditional areas of management research to take this important but under-researched topic forward, as well as highlight some of the methodological challenges that management researchers face in conducting research in corporate corruption.

Resource seeking, or the act of asking others for things that can help one attain one’s goals, is an important behavior within organizations because of the increasingly dynamic nature of work that demands collaboration and coordination among employees. Over the past two decades, there has been growing research in the organizational sciences on four types of resource seeking behaviors: feedback seeking, information seeking, advice seeking, and help seeking. However, research on these four behaviors has existed in separate silos. We argue that there is value in recognizing that these behaviors reflect a common higher order construct (resource seeking), and in integrating the findings across the four literatures as a basis for understanding what we do and do not know about the predictors and outcomes of resource seeking at work. More specifically, we use conservation of resources (COR) theory as a framework to guide our integration across the four literatures and to both deepen and extend current understandings of why and when employees engage in resource seeking, as well as how resource seeking behaviors may lead to both individual- and collective-level outcomes. We conclude with a discussion of future research needs and how COR theory can provide a fruitful foundation for future resource seeking research.

Although values were once the central focus of institutional scholarship, they occupy a marginal position in the contemporary literature. Viewing this situation as both a significant problem and a latent opportunity, our paper seeks to stimulate change by pursuing three broad aims. The first is to present an integrative review of the institutional and sociological literatures on values. This review addresses basic questions about values' nature, origins, and functions, and uncovers many latent connections between these currently separate bodies of research. Drawing on this literature review, our second aim is to elaborate the "value of values" for institutional analysis. Specifically, we will suggest that a renewed focus on values can (a) enhance our understanding of institutions and their human inhabitants and (b) increase the moral and practical relevance of institutional scholarship. Our third aim is to sketch out a preliminary agenda for future research. Although we stress that values can be incorporated into contemporary research in many different ways, our main focus is on promoting research that gives renewed attention to the enduring problems that were at the heart of early institutional scholarship.

Entrepreneurial team formation—the process through which founders establish a team to start a new venture—has important implications for team performance and entrepreneurial success. Although research on entrepreneurial team formation is gradually growing, it is at a critical juncture and marked by considerable fragmentation. In part, this is because scholars have examined entrepreneurial team formation through different disciplinary lenses and within very different contexts. Our structured content analysis situates the literature based on questions addressed for new venture team formation, such as why, how, when, and where entrepreneurial teams are formed. The resulting integrative framework delineates the dynamic nature of the formation process, the origins of new venture teams, primary formation strategies used to initiate cofounding relations, and their effects on team characteristics, processes, and performance. Two key insights emerge to guide future research. One, the need for integration, especially across disciplines and contexts, acknowledging the role of the latter in shaping the formation process. Two, the need to embrace (self-) selection and endogeneity of founding characteristics, processes, and performance outcomes to the antecedent formation stage. We conclude that entrepreneurial team formation research is a fertile ground that has met merely a fraction of its potential to advance important knowledge in the field.