Stressor and exchange relationship paradigms have developed in isolation from each other to explain the negative effects of perceived organizational politics. We outline how these different paradigms share a common basis—a focus on psychological need satisfaction—and develop a needs-based paradigm to account for the negative effects of perceived organizational politics. Moreover, we argue that psychological need satisfaction acts as an unmeasured third variable, which, once accounted for, should limit the utility of stressor and exchange relationship paradigms. Across four samples using a combination of multiple sources, operationalizations of constructs, and measurement occasions, we found full support for the needs-based paradigm as a mediator of the effects of politics on contextual performance, creativity, and proactive behavior, whereas strain and exchange relationship constructs by and large had no effect on outcomes once psychological need satisfaction was accounted for. Theoretical implications and future research directions are discussed.

Despite the generally positive consequences associated with justice, recent research suggests that supervisors cannot always enact justice, and responses to justice may not be universally positive. Thus, justice is likely to vary in both how much it is received and the employee reactions it engenders. In order to understand the range of justice responses, we develop a dynamic theory of justice by using person-environment fit to take both the value that an individual places in justice and the justice they received into account. Using this framework, we clarify the consequences of congruence versus incongruence in daily justice received and valued, which have implications for treatment discrepancies and subsequent work behavior. We also identify the differences between excess and deficient justice on cognitive and affective responses to justice. Our findings reveal that employees’ experience of justice is more complicated than simply whether the justice they received was high or low on a particular day. Using experience sampling and polynomial regression methods, we observe that not all instances in which employees receive high levels of justice are equivalent. In fact, we find that, depending on justice valued, receiving high levels of justice can be just as detrimental as receiving low levels. Additionally, we find that although both forms of justice misfit (excess and deficiency) cause-negative work outcomes, they affect these outcomes through differential responses to justice — with excess causing increased rumination and deficiency causing decreased positive affect. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for extant justice theory and for supervisor-employee work interactions.

Although multiple disciplines have been applied to the study of organizations, organizational research is rarely interdisciplinary in the sense of two or more disciplines being linked in the joint analysis of organizational phenomena. The articles in this special issue illustrate the kinds of insights that can be gained by moving from a purely disciplinary perspective on organizational behavior to an interdisciplinary perspective that considers network phenomena and psychological phenomena as intertwined in organizational life. The advances of this special forum notwithstanding, large swaths of network–psychological integration are still largely unexplored in organizational research. We highlight a subset of particularly promising avenues for further interdisciplinary exploration. We also observe that the two research programs have developed into distinct paradigms, making interdisciplinary discourse challenging, and offer suggestions toward a greater integration and collaboration across the two research communities.

We introduce and study the concept of a “jagged technology frontier” to describe the uneven impact of artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, where AI assistance improves performance for some tasks but worsens it for others, even within the same knowledge workflow and with a seemingly similar level of difficulty. In collaboration with the global management consulting firm Boston Consulting Group, we have developed realistic management consulting tasks and examined the human performance implications of using AI to perform complex and knowledge-intensive work. The preregistered experiment involved 758 knowledge workers. After establishing a performance baseline on similar tasks, subjects were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: no AI access, GPT-4 AI access, or GPT-4 AI access with a prompt engineering overview. For each one of a set of 18 realistic knowledge tasks within the frontier of AI capabilities ranging from creative to analytical tasks, subjects using AI outperformed those not using AI, completing 12.2% more tasks and completing them 25.1% more quickly on average while also delivering solutions of significantly improved quality. However, for a complex managerial task selected to be outside the frontier, subjects using AI were 19% less likely to produce correct solutions compared with those without AI, pointing to potential limitations of AI supporting knowledge workers. We discuss the positive and negative implications of AI-aided human performance in knowledge-intensive tasks. Funding: Financial support of the Harvard Business School Digital Data Design Institute and Division of Research and Faculty Development is acknowledged. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2025.21838 .