Knowledge that Transforms

Mindfulness research activity is surging within organizational science. Emerging evidence across multiple fields suggests that mindfulness is fundamentally connected to many aspects of workplace functioning, but this knowledge base has not been systematically integrated to date. This review coalesces the burgeoning body of mindfulness scholarship into a framework to guide mainstream management research investigating a broad range of constructs. The framework identifies how mindfulness influences attention, with downstream effects on functional domains of cognition, emotion, behavior, and physiology. Ultimately, these domains impact key workplace outcomes, including performance, relationships, and well-being. Consideration of the evidence on mindfulness at work stimulates important questions and challenges key assumptions within management science, generating an agenda for future research.

Two parallel strands of nonmarket strategy research have emerged largely in isolation. One strand examines strategic corporate social responsibility (CSR), and the other examines corporate political activity (CPA), even though there is an overlap between the social and political aspects of corporate strategies. In this article, we review and synthesize strategic CSR and CPA research published in top-tier and specialized academic journals between 2000 and 2014. Specifically, we (a) review the literature on the link between nonmarket strategy and organizational performance, (b) identify the mechanisms through which nonmarket strategy influences organizational performance, (c) integrate and synthesize the two strands—strategic CSR and CPA—of the literature, and (d) develop a multi-theoretical framework for improving our understanding of the effects of nonmarket strategy on organizational performance. We conclude by outlining a research agenda for future theoretical and empirical studies on the impact of nonmarket strategy on organizational outcomes.

Transparency is often cited as essential to the trust stakeholders place in organizations. However, a clear understanding of the meaning and significance of transparency has yet to emerge in the stakeholder literature. We synthesize prior research to advance a conceptual definition of transparency and articulate its dimensions, and posit how transparency contributes to trust in organization-stakeholder relationships. We draw from this analysis to explicate the mechanisms organizations can employ that influence transparency perceptions.

Academic and practitioner interest in how market-based organizations can drive positive social change (PSC) is steadily growing. This paper helps to recast how organizations relate to society. It integrates research on projects stimulating PSC—the transformational processes to advance societal well-being—that is fragmented across different streams of research in management and related disciplines. Focusing on the mechanisms at play in how organizations and their projects affect change in targets outside of organizational boundaries, we (1) clarify the nature of PSC as a process, (2) develop an integrative framework that specifies two distinct PSC strategies, (3) take stock of and offer a categorization scheme for change mechanisms and enabling organizational practices, and (4) outline opportunities for future research. Our conceptual framework differentiates between surface- and deep-level PSC strategies understood as distinct combinations of change mechanisms and enabling organizational practices. These strategies differ in the nature and speed of transformation experienced by the targets of change projects and the resulting quality (pervasiveness and durability), timing, and reach of social impact. Our findings provide a solid base for integrating and advancing knowledge across the largely disparate streams of management research on corporate social responsibility, social entrepreneurship, and base of the pyramid and open up important new avenues for future research on organizing for PSC and on unpacking PSC processes.

This study reviews research on the social, behavioral, and cognitive influences on CEOs, top management teams (TMTs), and the CEO-TMT interface during strategic decision making. We identify the key issues examined in this research over the past 10 years and relate developments in the field to previous knowledge in this area. We also attempt to identify what constitutes an established body of knowledge in the field and, therefore, areas that need additional examination. Our review indicates that while there has been an explosion of research on the influence of CEO personality and TMT social processes on strategy process, much remains to be done in terms of examining CEO and TMT cognition, particularly at the level of the CEO-TMT interface.

We provide a theory-driven review of empirical research in diversity climate to identify a number of problems with the current state of the science as well as a research agenda to move the field forward. The core issues we identify include (a) the fact that diversity climate is typically treated as unidimensional, whereas diversity research would suggest that there are two major perspectives that could be reflected in diversity climate—efforts to ensure equal employment opportunity and the absence of discrimination versus efforts to create synergy from diversity; (b) a tendency to let the level of analysis (individual psychological climate or shared team or organizational climate) be dictated by convenience rather than by careful theoretical consideration, thus sidestepping key issues for research concerning the causes and consequences of the sharedness, or lack thereof, of diversity climate perceptions; and (c) the tendency to include diversity attitudes and other nonclimate elements in climate measures even though they are different from climate both conceptually and in their antecedents and consequences. The research agenda we advance suggests a need both for different operationalizations and for new research questions in diversity climate, diversity, and relational demography research.

We propose that the mixed findings of research on the internationalization-performance (I-P) relationship reflect its failure to adequately consider the moderating role of firms’ home country formal and informal institutions. This general hypothesis is supported in a meta-analysis of the firm-, industry-, home country–, and host country–level factors driving the I-P relationship across 32 countries between 1972 and 2012 from 359 primary studies—the largest sample of primary studies of any meta-analysis on this topic to date. We make three main contributions to the I-P and global strategy literatures. First, we develop a novel integration of the theoretical logics from the I-P research and the institution-based view of strategy to explain how embeddedness in home country institutions affects the strength of the I-P relationship. Second, we show the importance of including both formal and informal institutions in analyses of firms’ institutional embeddedness, thereby extending our knowledge of the effects of institutional complexity. Our third contribution is methodological and reflects our use of advanced meta-analytical techniques based on both product-moment and partial correlations as effect sizes, which allow us to address unresolved debates about the sign and shape of the I-P relationship. Our results show that the I-P relationship is positive, although the overall effect is small and varies greatly across firms’ home countries. We conclude by discussing the findings’ relevance and promising future research avenues, including novel research questions, multilevel theoretical and empirical frameworks, and improvements in methodological rigor.

A large and growing literature spanning multiple fields has identified employee mobility as a critical influence on several important organizational outcomes. However, extant research on the topic is highly fragmented and lacks a unifying theoretical framework, impeding the development of a cumulative conceptually integrated body of research. We seek to remedy this situation by undertaking a review of research on employee mobility and its organizational impacts and casting it within a novel integrative conceptual framework. As a critical foundation for this framework, we highlight how the various organizational impacts of employee mobility are ultimately engendered by different dimensions of human and/or relational capital that are conveyed by mobile individuals. Building on this foundation, we describe how multilevel contextual factors—characterized as attributes of the employee, source and destination firms, and environmental conditions—may moderate the transfer and utilization of human and relational capital held by mobile individuals. Finally, we review how constraining factors, such as labor market imperfections on both demand and supply sides, can impede employee mobility and also how alternative competing channels—for example, alliances, networks and geographic spillovers, and acquisitions—may be used for effectuating the same organizational impacts as mobility events. These constraints and competing channels are important because they circumscribe the conditions under which employee mobility can be a critical influence on organizational outcomes. We seek to provide a rich integrative theoretical understanding of employee mobility and spur future research on important unanswered research questions.

Drawing from tenets of self-determination theory, we propose and test a multilevel model that examines the effects of employee involvement climate on the individual-level process linking employee regulatory focus (promotion and prevention) to innovation via thriving. Using data collected at three points in time from 346 participants in 75 groups, multilevel path analytic results demonstrated support for a positive indirect effect from promotion focus to innovation via thriving and a negative indirect effect from prevention focus to innovation via thriving. In addition, results showed a positive indirect effect from employee involvement climate to innovation via thriving. Perhaps most important, cross-level moderated mediation results demonstrated that employee involvement climate strengthens the relationship between promotion focus and thriving, which, in turn, positively relates to innovation. The theoretical and practical implications of these multilevel effects on innovation are discussed.

Social media (SM) pervades our society. One rapidly growing application of SM is its use in personnel decision making. Organizations are increasingly searching SM (e.g., Facebook) to gather information about potential employees. In this article, we suggest that organizational practice has outpaced the scientific study of SM assessments in an area that has important consequences for individuals (e.g., being selected for work), organizations (e.g., successfully predicting job performance or withdrawal), and society (e.g., consequent adverse impact/diversity). We draw on theory and research from various literatures to advance a research agenda that addresses this gap between practice and research. Overall, we believe this is a somewhat rare moment in the human resources literature when a new class of selection methods arrives on the scene, and we urge researchers to help understand the implications of using SM assessments for personnel decisions.