Knowledge that Transforms

To survive and prosper, organizations must reconcile stability, reliability, and exploitation with change, innovation, and exploration. These imperatives and the mechanisms that support them are generally seen as incompatible and mutually exclusive. I present an alternative: a duality view in which stability and change are fundamentally interdependent—contradictory but also mutually enabling. This view revisits several enduring ideas about stability and change and offers theoretical and pragmatic opportunities to dissolve and transcend their paradoxical relationship.

We propose that a leadership identity is coconstructed in organizations when individuals claim and grant leader and follower identities in their social interactions. Through this claiming-granting process, individuals internalize an identity as leader or follower, and those identities become relationally recognized through reciprocal role adoption and collectively endorsed within the organizational context. We specify the dynamic nature of this process, antecedents to claiming and granting, and an agenda for research on leadership identity and development.

Environmental velocity has emerged as an important concept but remains theoretically underdeveloped, particularly with respect to its multidimensionality. In response, we develop a framework that examines the variations in velocity across multiple dimensions of the environment (homology) and the causal linkages between those velocities (coupling). We then propose four velocity regimes based on different patterns of homology and coupling and argue that the conditions of each regime have important implications for organizations.

Incompleteness of inductive reasoning presents an enduring dilemma for organizational researchers. We examine two practical reasoning strategies—idealization and contextualization—that can be used at the pinnacle of this dilemma: when theoretical conclusions are drawn from empirical data. Understanding the two strategies can lead to more effective argumentation and evaluation. Appreciating the methodological incompleteness of both strategies, in turn, helps us distinguish between the methodological and the policy dimensions of organization-scientific debates.

Drawing on both Job Demands-Resources theory and contagion theory, we conceptualize cognitive, affective, and conative influences on expatriate work role and family role performance. We clarify expatriate adjustment by expanding the concept to capture family role adjustment and by mapping relationships among the forms of adjustment. We also highlight the mediating role of engagement for understanding the influence of adjustment on role performance, and we consider spillover across work and family contexts and crossover between expatriates and partners.

In this paper we organize research on work-related identities into a four-perspective typology that captures different ways identities can be “positive.” Each perspective on positive identity—virtue, evaluative, developmental, and structural—highlights a different source of positivity and opens new avenues for theorizing about identity construction. We use these four perspectives to develop propositions about how different forms of positive work-related identity construction can strengthen employees through building social resources.

Self-narratives—stories that make a point about the narrator—help people revise and reconstruct identities during work role transitions. We propose a process model in which people draw on narrative repertoires to engage in narrative identity work in role-related interactions. Using feedback from their interactions, they revise both the stories and repertoires. Successful completion of the transition is facilitated by enduring and coherent repertoire changes to express the new role identity.