Knowledge that Transforms

Humanity – the virtue enabling meaningful human connection – is vital to the leadership we need to survive our polycrisis context. As a prerequisite to sustainable human community, the virtue of humanity is considered universal. It has been claimed as a ‘higher‐order virtue’, comprised of and enacted by – but irreducible to – a suite of ‘lower‐order virtues’ such as compassion and kindness. This claim is evident in widely‐adopted virtues catalogues, but we lack consensus on how humanity is defined, and which attributes qualify as its virtuous dimensions. To address this, we develop a robust definition of humanity and apply criteria distilled from virtue ethics to theorize the lower‐order virtues that comprise its virtuous dimensions. We thus determine the virtuous dimensions of humanity include empathy, compassion, forgiveness, love, kindness, and generosity. Our processual model illustrates how, when expressed by leaders and followers, these virtuous dimensions represent the fullest expression of the higher‐order virtue of humanity and sustain human community. Our systematic review details what is known empirically about each virtuous dimension of humanity in relation to leadership. Drawing on this, we propose a research agenda to advance understanding of how the virtue of humanity might enable the leadership needed today and into the future.

There is growing recognition that business activity can promote peacebuilding, yet contradictory claims have emerged about company roles in peace and conflict. The research field of business and peace has focused on this issue, as have scholars in related fields like political science, economics, law, and ethics. This has led to definitional variations, alongside unit and level of analysis differences, which generate contradictory claims that hamper future research on this critical topic. To reconcile extant research around companies and their place in peacebuilding scholarship, we undertake an organizational‐level examination of the field, cataloguing the research by scholars across disciplines through a systematic review of 215 publications. Our review maps the known ways by which businesses can engage in peacebuilding, while demonstrating how organizations exercise their agency to create heterogenous effects on peace and conflict. Our analysis highlights the need for businesses to advance peace‐positive ends across a range of activities to reduce the conflict‐causing effects of business. By showing that businesses, intentionally or not, create peace or conflict through their activities, this article issues a call to action for scholars and decision‐makers to advance knowledge concerning peacebuilding organizations.

Impact investing (II) aims to achieve intentional social impact in addition to financial return. Our systematic literature review of 104 articles finds that the growing academic literature on II is scattered across a variety of disciplines and topics, with inconsistencies in terminology and concepts and a paucity of theoretical explanations and frameworks. To provide an overview of common research areas and findings, we integrate the articles on II in nine emerging topics and shed light on inconsistencies in the literature. The analysis reveals one major shortcoming in II research: Despite the fact that II aims to create a measurable societal impact, this impact of II, its raison d’être, is not scrutinized in the literature. We argue that investigating the impact of II requires a holistic lens, for which we propose systems theory. We suggest prospective future research avenues which combine socio‐economic research approaches (esp. longitudinal qualitative studies and experimental methods) with socio‐technical methods (esp. life cycle analysis) to enable a holistic systems perspective of II.

Global strategy cannot be fully understood without consideration of dynamic capabilities (DCs). This is because the three key constituents of DCs – the sensing and seizing of opportunities and the reconfiguration of the resource base – are essential preconditions for strategy development, within nations and cross‐border. We investigate the aspects of DCs that are most suitable for global strategy and those that need to be revisited and developed. We discuss theory and evidence on DCs and global strategy, present a systematic literature review, compare theory and evidence, and identify gaps between the two as well as opportunities to align them more closely and to develop both. To help guide future research, we develop a novel conceptual framework and provide suggestions for more theory‐congruent empirical research.

Organizational purpose has recently gained great popularity in research and practice. However, the development of this nascent research field has struggled with definitional ambiguity, the lack of a measurement instrument and little empirical testing of potential outcomes. In our paper, we first introduce and define the multidimensional construct of perceived organizational purpose, which sheds light on the individual and subjective experiences of organizational purpose. Second, building on our construct definition, we develop and validate a four‐dimensional Perceived Organizational Purpose Scale. Third, we disentangle the related yet differentiated concepts of perceived organizational purpose and meaningful work and theorize how substantial knowledge in the field of meaningful work can be transferred to the relatively new and untested field of perceived organizational purpose. Fourth, we critically elaborate and empirically test the relationship of perceived organizational purpose with employee job satisfaction, subjective wellbeing and work‐life conflict.

We present a systematic review of empirical articles investigating the role of place and space within the organizational and institutional change literature. In taking stock of the change literature, our aim is to better understand the nature and degree of scholarly engagement with concepts associated with place and space to inform a future research agenda. Our systematic review identified 290 empirical articles published between 1979 and 2020 that attended to organizational or institutional change and also engaged with space or place. Our analysis generated four archetypal perspectives that represent qualitatively different ways of viewing the role of place and space in how organizations and institutions change: functional perspective, situated perspective, experiential perspective, and mutually constituted perspective. We synthesize the four perspectives into a typology that reveals different levels of attention to change as process and to place and space as lived or physical phenomena, and cast light on different assumptions about the relationships between change and place or space that can guide future research.

Serendipity – the notion of making surprising and valuable discoveries – plays a major role in the success of individuals and organizations alike. Previous research has established the importance of serendipity and identified important individual‐ and organizational‐level antecedents. However, the literature has been dispersed and the boundaries of the concept have been blurry, leading to a lack of conceptual clarity and structure, and thus limiting validity and managerial actionability. Based on a systematic literature review, I synthesize existing management‐related research on serendipity and explicate the emergence and composition of serendipity in the organizational context. I first identify three necessary conditions that differentiate serendipity from related concepts such as luck or targeted innovation: agency, surprise , and value . Then, I draw from the literature on sensemaking, event‐based theorizing, and quantum‐based approaches to management to conceptualize the process of cultivating serendipity in the organizational context as a process of enabling potentiality and materialization , and develop a multi‐level theory of (cultivating) serendipity. This conceptualization contributes to our collective understanding of how, why, and when (i.e., under what conditions) organizations can leverage the value in the unexpected, which opens up fruitful avenues for further research.

In this article we provide a systematic review of the extensive yet diverse and fragmented literature on digital transformation (DT), with the goal of clarifying boundary conditions to investigate the phenomenon from the perspective of organizational change. On the basis of 279 articles, we provide a multi‐dimensional framework synthesizing what is known about DT and discern two important thematical patterns: DT is moving firms to malleable organizational designs that enable continuous adaptation, and this move is embedded in and driven by digital business ecosystems. From these two patterns, we derive four perspectives on the phenomenon of DT: technology impact, compartmentalized adaptation, systemic shift and holistic co‐evolution. Linking our findings and interpretations to existing work, we find that the nature of DT is only partially covered by conventional frameworks on organizational change. On the basis of this analysis, we derive a research agenda and provide managerial implications for strategy and organizational change.

This paper consolidates the state of academic research on innovation . Based on a systematic review of literature published over the past 27 years, we synthesize various research perspectives into a comprehensive multi‐dimensional framework of organizational innovation – linking leadership, innovation as a process, and innovation as an outcome. We also suggest measures of determinants of organizational innovation and present implications for both research and managerial practice.