Knowledge that Transforms

The role of organizational resilience enabling firms to respond to adversity and survive has become ever more critical in the wake of an increasingly unpredictable external environment. Yet, while we understand the importance of resilience in responding to a major adversity, we have little appreciation for how firms are affected and react when facing multiple adversities over time, or how multilevel factors might impose on this process. These are crucial issues given that adversities are not necessarily single, isolated, or infrequent episodes. By studying a long-established family firm in the United Kingdom that experienced four major adversities, we identify the process that enabled it not only to survive but also to thrive. In this qualitative study, we introduce the notion of organizational fortitude to describe the approach that a firm develops to cope with the challenges of multiple unexpected adversities and highlight how multilevel factors combine to foster organizational fortitude.

Building on a body of management research that explores strategies for addressing issues of prejudice and discrimination against persons who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer (LGBTQ), we introduce a conceptual framework for creating and maintaining LGBTQ-supportive climates in organizations. Based on a review of theory and research on LGBTQ-policies and practices, we highlight limits to our current understanding of their associated effects and the processes through which such effects occur. We draw from key propositions from the strategic human resource management literature to conceptualize LGBTQ systems and advance insight into the mechanisms through which they influence the development of supportive workplace environments. Specifically, we propose the formation of LGBTQ practice bundles and articulate how system components of content and strength can be leveraged to enable sensemaking about an organization's commitment to sexual orientation and gender identity diversity that can amplify the impact of LGBTQ policies and practices in organizations. We conclude by offering an agenda for a more systemic approach to the study of LGBTQ policies and practices as well as a more purposeful approach to their implementation to better understand and address sexual orientation and gender identity as hidden inequalities in organizations.

Our research extends past envy research by considering how envy and gender congruence shape interpersonal dynamics at the dyadic level and their bottom-up effects for team performance. Integrating social comparison theory and social identity theory, we examine when and how dyadic level envy influences team performance. Using time-lagged data from 428 dyads of 161 employees in 51 teams, our results show that envious employees are likely to engage in interpersonal deviance directed toward envied team members and that envied employees are likely to seek advice from envious team members. Gender congruence further influences these relationships, with different patterns for males and females. Specifically, while envious male employees are more likely to engage in interpersonal deviance toward envied male team members (i.e., male–male dyads), envied female team members are more likely to ask envious female employees for advice (i.e., female–female dyads). Interpersonal dynamics involving envy have performance implications, such that team performance is worse where envious employees are more likely to engage in interpersonal deviance directed toward envied team members, in comparison to teams where this relationship is weaker. Finally, collective team identification mitigates the negative effect of envious employees’ interpersonal deviance on team performance.

Initiatives aimed at fostering diversity in organizations have become an increasingly common means for combatting inequality among demographic groups. There is growing recognition that the success of diversity initiatives is a function of not only the relatively concrete policies they include but also less visible factors, such as the diversity cognitions held by organizational members. Diversity cognitions—and particularly beliefs regarding how to approach diversity and its effects—have received significant scholarly attention and a variety of literatures conclude they are invisible, yet powerful, drivers of diversity, inclusion, and other desirable workplace outcomes. Nevertheless, different diversity cognitions are often studied in isolation of one another, which prevents a full understanding of their nature and outcomes. We review and integrate research on different cognitions regarding how to approach diversity and its effects, with the goal of identifying synergistic opportunities for guiding future research. To this end, we focus on three diversity cognitions: diversity ideologies, diversity beliefs, and diversity climates. We review similarities and differences in how these constructs are conceptualized and studied, as well as in their nomological networks of outcomes and antecedents. We then use our review to identify gaps in current understanding and generate recommendations for guiding future work. Our recommendations focus on enhanced construct clarity, nuance with regard to dimensionality, and understanding of outcomes and antecedents. Deeper understanding of beliefs regarding how to approach diversity and its effects is likely to provide new insight into strategies for fostering workplace diversity and inclusion and thereby help combat inequality.

Although emerging actor-centric research has revealed that performing morally laden behaviors shapes how employees behave subsequently, less is known about what work behaviors may emerge following employees’ unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB)—a unique behavior with competing moral connotations. We integrate the moral self-regulation literature with research on micro corporate social responsibility (CSR) to develop and test a theoretical framework articulating how perceived CSR initiatives reconcile the morally paradoxical nature of UPB and how people respond to such behavior. We propose that, given its dual moral nature, performing UPB simultaneously increases feelings of moral deficit (which triggers moral cleansing) and psychological entitlement (which triggers moral licensing). Importantly, perceived CSR initiatives moderate these countervailing psychological experiences by strengthening feelings of moral deficit while weakening psychological entitlement, which respectively result in increased service-oriented helping behavior and decreased deviant behavior. Results from a scenario-based lab study, an online experiment, and two field studies largely corroborate our propositions. This research provides a finer-grained understanding of the complex moral self-regulation processes that employees experience at work and highlights why and how organizations’ CSR initiatives affect employees’ moral mindsets and behaviors.

The growing literature at the intersection of executives’ characteristics and stakeholders’ evaluations argues that executives’ characteristics not only have “first-order effects” on their organizations’ actions and outcomes, as in upper echelons theorizing, but also give rise to “second-order effects” or “opportunity structures,” whereby stakeholders evaluate and react to focal executives’ organizations based on those characteristics. Despite many insights from the burgeoning literature on the second-order effects of executives’ characteristics on stakeholders’ evaluations and reactions, the literature lacks a comprehensive framework with core tenets by which stakeholders form evaluations of executives’ characteristics that drive their actions (or, reactions, as it were) based on such characteristics and the ensuing outcomes. In turn, knowledge from the proliferating literature on how stakeholders react on the basis of their evaluations of referent organizations’ executives’ characteristics is fragmented, consisting of a series of disconnected findings and attendant insights scattered across various theoretical and topical domains. We conducted a framework synthesis of the literature to iteratively derive a conceptual framework from extant research—which we call the stakeholder view of upper echelons —that synthesizes knowledge at the intersection of executives’ characteristics and stakeholders’ reactions around this framework. In doing so, we provide the foundation for future research to help extend knowledge in this important domain. We identify several avenues that are important for future work to address and provide practical implications from our framework.

Organizations are demonstrating a burgeoning interest in hiring neurodivergent employees, prompting a parallel expansion of research on autism and employment. In this review, we evaluate, critique, and integrate diffuse research and theory on autism and employment across the domains of disability studies, autism, industrial relations, management, and rehabilitation. In doing so, we illustrate how incorporating the experiences of individuals on the autism spectrum can benefit management theory. Likewise, we highlight how existing management theory can help contextualize and enrich autism research. In addition, our review highlights barriers and potential enablers that individuals on the autism spectrum encounter during varying stages of employment, while also providing insight into steps that can be taken by organizations and practitioners to improve employment outcomes for neurodivergent individuals. We conclude with an agenda for advancing research and practice that enhances the employment experiences of autistic individuals and the outcomes of the organizations that employ them.

In recent years, we have seen a proliferation of research on discursive legitimation, which has shed light on how legitimacy is established through communication. However, this body of work remains fragmented, and there is a need to synthesize and develop a more comprehensive and in-depth theoretical understanding of this vibrant area of research. This article aims to address this need by providing an integrative theoretical framework and outlining an agenda for future research. The framework encompasses five key elements of discursive legitimation: strategies, positions, foundations, temporality, and arenas. Drawing on this framework, we present a research agenda that highlights key topics related to these elements along with theoretical and methodological considerations cutting across them. Our contribution lies in conceptualizing discursive legitimation as a multifaceted and dynamic phenomenon, offering a complementary framework to existing models and paving the way for future studies, and placing discursive strategies—which have been the focus of prior research—in context by highlighting the critical role of key discursive elements in enabling or constraining legitimation processes.

Collective creativity and innovation are key determinants of various important outcomes ranging from competitiveness of an organization to GDP growth of a country. As a result, this topic has attracted widespread scholarly interest from different disciplines, including strategic management, entrepreneurship, production and operations management, information systems, marketing, organizational behavior, sociology, economics, and psychology. However, this research remained isolated within disciplinary boundaries, which presents a major barrier for knowledge accumulation and cross-disciplinary learning. In this review, building on a new taxonomy of collectivity, we develop an integrative framework that organizes and synthesizes the fragmented research on the topic. The framework shows how antecedents related to the cognitive, social, and organizational architecture of a collective impact innovation depending on the collectivity type: attention-based, divergence-based, and convergence-based collectives. As a whole, our framework builds an integrative understanding of drivers of collective creativity and innovation and sets the stage for further theory development by facilitating communication across different disciplines. We conclude our review with an agenda for future research.