Knowledge that Transforms

The state of the economy represents a concern for individuals and shapes their behavior in profound ways. The current review of studies on how individuals respond to economic cycles reveals that organizational relevance of such responses has often not been considered, and the literature is characterized by a variety of seemingly disconnected explanations for how and why individuals respond to the perceived state of the economy. I develop a theoretical framework that systematizes the literature and accounts for the seemingly disparate findings, highlighting the underlying functionality of such responses for individuals. I then integrate the literature on individual responses to economic cycles with organizational research to examine the meaning of different individual responses from the perspective of organizational functioning. This integration generates a novel insight that individually functional responses to economic cycles can be dysfunctional from the perspective of organizations, often hindering rather than helping organizations’ performance and undermining the well-being of other organizational members. The systematization of the literature also reveals that many responses which would be predicted by the identified theoretical processes and which would be also relevant to organizations have not been studied, laying an agenda for future organizational research.

The concept of climate strength—the extent of agreement among group members regarding climate perceptions—has evolved from a statistical criterion for aggregation to a focal management construct. We review 156 empirical team climate studies spanning the last decade, observing a widely held assumption that environmental stimuli influence climate strength. However, closer inspection of these studies suggests that this relationship is far more complex and nuanced than previously considered. This is problematic, since an oversimplified view of how climate strength develops may lead to erroneous conclusions—for example, that everyone will share similar perceptions if exposed to the same stimuli. Our review: (a) distinguishes experiences from interpretations, explaining how some stimuli are experienced by all (some) yet are interpreted differently (the same); (b) distinguishes stimuli from the contexts in which they occur, explaining how contextual elements—specifically, the structural dimensions of teams—are not stimuli but rather act as a lenses through which experiences and interpretations occur; and (c) develops a more complete theory of climate strength reflecting contemporary work practices—including informal structures and teams with more fluid boundaries—by explaining how these lenses simultaneously filter multiple stimuli in either complementary or competing ways.

Research to date on leader behaviors such as justice rule adherence, abusive supervision, and ethical leadership has found a clear linkage between such behaviors and employees’ work attitudes and performance. Historically, and surprisingly, understanding of what initiates these impactful leader behaviors is much more limited, and only recently have scholars begun to examine their antecedents. Thus, the goal of our integrative review is to advance cumulative knowledge of why leaders are fair, ethical, and nonabusive—which we refer to collectively as principled leader behaviors. Our review is structured around a framework of four theoretical lenses that elucidate what initiates and perpetuates such behaviors: interpersonal motives, focused on relational explanations; instrumental motives, centered on these behaviors as a means to some end goal; moral motives, which characterize these leader behaviors as an end in themselves; and self-regulation and disposition, focused on leaders’ automatic inclinations and capacity to enact these behaviors. We not only synthesize previously fragmented findings of what shapes principled leader behaviors, but also highlight areas of overlap and distinction across them. Extending our framework, we highlight the interplay of lenses and critical research avenues to better understand why leaders treat followers in beneficial and not harmful ways.

The entrepreneurship setting—an extreme organizational context—provides fertile ground for organizationally relevant theory testing and development. In this article, we propose that randomized experiments in the context of entrepreneurship have considerable potential to advance theory in entrepreneurship, as well as other areas of organization science, including organizational behavior and strategic management. We ground this proposition in a multipronged review of randomized experiments in entrepreneurship (REE). Based on this review of prior work and emerging trends, we provide illustrative examples of innovative theory-driven experiments and motivate future research to consider randomized experiments in the entrepreneurial context both for testing boundary conditions and enhancing organizational theorizing broadly.

Interpersonal competition is ubiquitous in organizations and is studied across a variety of disciplines. However, these literatures have developed in parallel with little integration, stunting scholarly progress and leaving researchers and practitioners uncertain as to whether competition within organizations is beneficial versus harmful. This review attempts to resolve these issues. First, we define interpersonal competition as existing when an individual desires, and directs behavior toward, attaining relative superiority over other(s) on a particular dimension. Second, we review the empirical research on the consequences of interpersonal competition, focusing on the factors that determine when interpersonal competition is helpful versus harmful for individual and interpersonal outcomes in organizations, while highlighting the common mechanisms that appear to underlie these factors. This prior work suggests when competition is appraised as a challenge, its downsides are mitigated and its benefits are most evident. Conversely, when competition is appraised as a threat, its downsides become most evident. We hope this review provides an entry point for scholars interested in interpersonal competition and a more parsimonious account of its consequences.

High-achieving employees, the “stars” of an organization, are widely credited with producing indispensable, irreplaceable, value-enhancing contributions. From the recruitment of celebrity chief executive officers to the fierce competition for star scientists, and from lucrative contracts for sports icons to outsized bonuses for top salespeople, human capital strategies have long promoted the importance of star performers. Sixty years of research on stars has witnessed a wide array of contexts, levels of analysis, and subdimensions, much of which is focused on the accomplishments of these alpha-tail individuals. More recently, however, scholars have begun to draw varied conclusions regarding both the favorable and unfavorable impacts of star performers, leading to a balkanization of perspectives comprising the stream. Our review of the multidisciplinary work on stars synthesizes disparate studies, settles definitional problems, and integrates complementary factors into a coherent formative construct. Through this, we foster the development of a research agenda concerning the manner in which star performers are, by their very nature, simultaneously red giants and black holes, the precise balance of which is fertile soil for future inquiry.

Literature has long highlighted that entrepreneurs benefit from having the right network connections. We observe, however, that although the large and growing literature on entrepreneur network evolution shares a common focus around the formation and dissolution of entrepreneurs’ interdependent, socially embedded relationships, this literature is fragmented and does not always use the explicit language of network theory. We conduct an integrative review to put forth a typology of five core drivers of entrepreneur network evolution. A core insight of our review is that most entrepreneurial network research emphasizes an overarching pattern that suggests substantial path-dependence, with new ties often being local to entrepreneurs’ existing network, hierarchical, and geographic positions. We label this perspective structural localism. By contrast, more recent, emerging research on entrepreneurial action in forming interorganizational relationships, much of which does not use the language of network theory (e.g., ties and networks), suggests a more dynamic and path-creating pattern. We label this perspective agentic network change. After explicating the distinct theoretical foundations and behavioral assumptions of each perspective, we sketch a research agenda for better balancing our understanding of the two and how they intertwine.

Frequent interruptions and task transitions are an inescapable reality of modern organizational life, yet the relevant research spans across numerous seemingly disconnected domains that paint an incomplete and often inconsistent picture regarding the detrimental and/or beneficial consequences of such transitions, thus undermining the potential for this body of research to inform theory and practice. In this study, we review research relevant to interruptions such as intrusions, breaks, distractions, and discrepancies, as well as relevant work on multitasking and multiple goal self-regulation. In so doing, we identify ambiguities in the existing literature, and shed light on shared and unshared features across studies and fields to bring some coherence and start reconciling existing knowledge. At a theoretical level, our review reveals that behaviors on a task and the related interruptions and task transitions cannot be fully understood without taking into account the system of goals, within which they are embedded. We highlight that how people decide what to pay attention to and when to stop a goal pursuit to engage in another; have important emotional, cognitive, and performance implications; and provide directions for advancing knowledge on interruptions and task transitions.

Homophily, the tendency to associate with similar others, is a fundamental pattern underlying human relationships. Although scholars largely agree on the definition of homophily, their empirical measures of it vary widely. This both raises the question of whether everyone is studying the same phenomenon and suggests that our understanding of homophily is incomplete. To address this question, we examined the homophily literature from 1954 through 2018 and constructed a typology that includes the empirical measures most commonly used. We found that these measures tend to neglect the meaning that people attribute to and derive from homophilous relationships in three ways. First, measures often do not capture how individuals’ interactions with others influence their sense of the world—how social constructions affect meaning. Second, measures often do not capture whether individuals interpret and attach importance to their associations or similarities the same way researchers do. Finally, measures often do not capture the meaning-related ambiguities introduced by studies of multiple types of social contexts, associations, and similarities. Because homophily remains a central construct in social science, this divergence between measures and meaning suggests a need for refinement.

Risk has become a crucial part of organizing, affecting a wide range of organizations in all sectors. We identify, review, and integrate diverse literatures relevant to organizing risk, building on an existing framework that describes how risk is organized in three “modes”—prospectively, in real-time, and retrospectively. We then identify three critical issues in the existing literature: its fragmented nature, its neglect of the tensions associated with each of the modes, and its tendency to assume that the meaning of an object in relation to risk is singular and stable. We provide a series of new insights with regard to each of these issues. First, we develop the concept of a risk cycle that shows how organizations engage with all three modes and transition between them over time. Second, we explain why the tensions have been largely ignored and show how studies using a risk-work perspective can provide further insights into them. Third, we develop the concept of risk translation to highlight the ways in which the meanings of risks can be transformed and to identify the political consequences of such translations. We conclude the article with a research agenda to elaborate these insights and ideas further.