Knowledge that Transforms

With the growing complexity of social and environmental issues, there has been a blossoming of hackathons and open innovation challenges. This push to accelerate innovation embraces a perspective of time as clock time—conceived as objective, linear, measurable, and therefore, rather easy to compress. Such a view of time conflicts with the emergent nature of idea generation and the indeterminate process that leads to social impact, which both rely on event time. Drawing on a 40-month ethnographic study of OpenIDEO, an open social innovation platform, I examine how, in designing open innovation challenges, the OpenIDEO team interwove clock time and event time in order to foster idea generation and support social impact. Through inductive analysis, I identify three practices—mapping, stretching, and squeezing time—enacted by the OpenIDEO team to “make time” and thus, continuously engage participants and sponsors in the challenges as well as to allow participants to implement their ideas. My findings demonstrate how organizations can intentionally use time to nurture collaborative innovation and yield sustainable social impact. My study questions the traditional interpretation of clock time as the foundation of all temporalities as it shows how temporal work can be grounded within event time.

Creativity in teams is spurred by members’ access to diverse knowledge, often from interactions with external sources. However, not all teams that have the capabilities to acquire such external knowledge are equally creative. Integrating theories of absorptive capacity and creative synthesis in teams, we propose that teams’ external knowledge acquisition capabilities in securing a wide variety of knowledge resources need to be complemented by internal knowledge integration capabilities that facilitate balanced/equal participation of all team members in the creative problem-solving process. In turn, this combination enables effective information elaboration processes underlying the generation of truly creative team outcomes. We test these ideas in two field studies. First, in a sample of 81 research and development teams in three organizations in science and technology fields, we find that teams’ connections with a wide range of external parties—indicating their external knowledge acquisition capability—benefit their creativity, but only when the team’s internal team member problem-solving network structure—an indicator of the team’s knowledge integration capability—is less centralized (i.e., not controlled by one or few members). We further demonstrate that these effects are more salient when the team’s task is more complex. Replicating these findings in a second sample of 57 project teams in an energy manufacturing and services firm, we show that these effects are mediated by the team’s information elaboration processes. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Prior studies that examine how new expertise becomes integrated into organizations have shown that different occupations work to legitimate their new expertise to develop credibility and deference from other organizational groups. In this study, we similarly examine the work that an expert occupation did to legitimate their expertise; however, in this case, they were legitimating practices that they actually considered illegitimate. We report findings from our 20-month ethnography of data analysts at a financial technology company to explain this process. We show that the company had structured data analytics in ways similar to Bechky’s idea of a captive occupation: They were dependent on their collaborators’ cooperation to demonstrate the value of data analytics and accomplish their work. The data analysts constantly encountered or were asked to provide what they deemed to be illegitimate data analysis practices such as hacking, peeking, and poor experimental design. In response, they sometimes resisted but more often reconciled themselves to the requests. Notably, they also explicitly lowered their stated standards and then worked to legitimate those now illegitimate versions of their expert practices through standardization, technology platforms, and evangelizing. Our findings articulate the relationship between captive occupations and conditions wherein experts work to legitimate what they consider illegitimate practices.

The ideal worker is represented as constantly available for work. However, an increasing number and variety of workers experience conflict between work and family demands. Research has identified numerous practices to manage this conflict with positive implications for non-work relationships, but the implications of these practices for work relationships remain unclear. How do efforts to manage role conflict affect workplace relationships? To examine this question, we draw on ethnographic data from 72 STEM workers across three organizations. We find that workers who experienced role conflict interpreted interactions in the workplace—often unpredictable in timing, frequency, and length—as a threat to fulfilling both their work and family roles on a daily basis. Thus, they controlled work interactions to make time for both work and non-work roles. However, interactional control limited their sense of workplace belonging and opportunities for resource exchange. In contrast, workers who did not experience daily role conflict encouraged interactions, allowing these encounters to expand across time. As a result, their work extended into evenings and weekends, and they experienced a sense of belonging and more regular resource exchange. We identify how interactional control practices manage role conflict but limit the development of workplace relationships. We also expand the repertoire of how devotion to work can be performed, identifying the occupied worker who expresses devotion through focused and efficient work and interactions rather than availability for work and interactions.

Employees often receive conflicting advice about sharing personal information in the workplace. They are told to “bring your whole self to work” but also to keep it professional and not share too much personal information with colleagues. Research has been equivocal in its overall guidance about sharing personal information at work: it may be either beneficial or harmful for work relationships. These inconsistencies are likely driven by the types of questions posed. Specifically, existing research has studied the impact of a particular piece of personal information and the specific details of what is learned, not what all of these pieces of personal information amount to. Instead, this paper takes a new vantage point to understand how the amount of personal knowledge (the quantity of information that one person knows across many aspects of a colleague’s personal life) influences positive interpersonal dynamics at work by humanizing the known colleague. Through a full-cycle research approach, I establish causal support experimentally and then replicate support for my hypotheses in the field, demonstrating a positive, persistent effect: having more personal knowledge—regardless of whether that knowledge conveys value incongruence or life-to-work interference—leads to a more humanized perception of the known colleague, resulting in increased responsiveness toward that colleague. These findings resolve an existing puzzle in the literature and also contribute to a more nuanced understanding of work relationships and interpersonal learning at work.

Prior research emphasizes how organizational culture can hinder organizational adaptation. In this study, we investigate how organizational culture can help promote organizational adaptation to environmental changes, using a formal model from cultural evolution theory. In the model, organizational members face a trade-off between innovating versus following tradition (because environmental changes are uncertain). Members can also decide to help others who are following the tradition, thereby improving its diffusion. Organizational leaders shape the culture of their organization, which influences members’ decisions to choose innovation or tradition or to help others following tradition. Culture comprises two dimensions: beliefs and prosocial values. We find that increasing the accuracy of beliefs leads to improvements in both innovation and following tradition, thereby mitigating the trade-off between them and boosting adaptation and performance. On prosocial values, we find that increasing their intensity reduces the cost of following tradition but at the expense of reduced adaptation, resulting in an inverted-U relationship between intensity of prosocial values and performance. Overall, we show how leaders can fine-tune the dimensions of organizational culture to foster improvements in adaptation and performance. The formal model we introduce is novel to the literature and offers a way of studying adaptation to a changing environment and to incorporate social learning into models of adaptation under bounded rationality.

Soldier-medic. Undercover police officer. Collaborative divorce attorney. Certain jobs require an individual to enact antithetical sets of role expectations (to do X and not-X), such as saving a life and taking a life, in the case of a soldier-medic. Despite their important consequences, we lack a unifying framework for such antithetical expectations and their implied identity foils—where one is expected to be both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (a life-saver and a life-taker). To this end, we build theory on how and why antithetical expectations and their implied identity foils arise in organizations. We offer a model of the responses through which individuals tend to manage these seemingly impossible binds—avoidance, favoritism, gray compromise, black-and-white compromise, and holism—and discuss the conditions under which a given response is likely. We conclude that this respective order of responses predicts more positive outcomes (i.e., clarifying the identities, fostering resources, enabling complementary or synergistic solutions) and less negative outcomes (i.e., impaired jobholder performance and credibility, increased cynicism) for individuals and their organizations. We theorize that, given certain conditions, the extreme role-based conflict caused by identity foils is best addressed by the response of holism.

This study investigates whether the success of salary history bans could be limited by job-seekers volunteering their salaries unprompted. We survey American workers in 2019 and 2021 about their recent job searches, distinguishing when candidates were asked about salary history from when they were not. Historically well-paid workers may have an incentive to disclose, and employers who are aware of this could infer that nondisclosing workers are concealing low salaries. Through this mechanism, all workers could face pressure to avoid the stigma of silence. Our data shows a large percentage of workers (28%) volunteer salary history, even when a ban prevents employers from asking. An additional 47% will disclose if enough other job candidates disclose. Men are more likely than women to disclose their salaries unprompted, especially if they believe other candidates are disclosing. Over our 1.5-year sample covering jurisdictions with (and without) bans, unprompted volunteering of salary histories increased by about 6–8 percentage points.

Increasing demands to be seen as authentic at work have created a paradox of self-presentation for employees: the desire to be seen as simultaneously true to self and professionally appropriate in workplace interactions. The present paper introduces one way in which individuals may navigate this tension: strategic authenticity, a self-presentational approach that involves enacting behaviors intended to increase colleagues’ perceptions of one’s authenticity while accounting for individual and contextual factors that influence one’s professional image. I propose that the behavioral signals of social deviations (nonconformity and spontaneity) and self-expressions (transparency and vulnerability) increase colleagues’ perceptions of a worker’s authenticity but pose a threat to their professional image. Next, I highlight how felt authenticity and the degree of perceived violation of social expectations (i.e., benign versus taboo signal content and aligning with communal versus agentic norms) moderate the impact of signals on perceptions of authenticity and professional image, suggesting that strategic authenticity can be achieved via a careful selection of behaviors based on individual and contextual factors. Last, I consider how the enactment of strategic authenticity leads to high-quality connections at work, which over time, may lead to the formation of positive relationships (enhanced by an actor’s felt authenticity). This paper extends prior scholarship on authenticity, professional image construction, and high-quality connections by highlighting how to balance interpersonal goals to appear authentic and at the same time, maintain a desirable professional image in workplace interactions.

The metaphor of an organization as a garbage can is often invoked as a playful insult. However, as was recognized early on by management theorists studying garbage can ideas, the unpredictability arising from garbage can decision making has the potential to be adaptively rational for organizations facing complex task environments. The chaos produced by preference conflict and fluid participation in collective decision making can aid in search by enabling organizations to escape local performance peaks or competency traps. The decades-old hypothesis that conflict and chaos could promote adaptively rational search, however, has largely been overlooked in research on organizational design. This paper uses an agent-based model to evaluate these competing views and, in the process, identify conditions under which garbage can decision making is adaptively rational for executives searching for high-quality strategies. I show that the biased and chaotic outcomes that emerge as a result of garbage can decision making—the very features of garbage cans that lead them to be perceived to be dysfunctional—can facilitate short-term exploitation and long-term exploration of uncertain technical landscapes when organizations engage in serial judgment of local alternatives if internal conflict over desired outcomes is not too extreme. I conclude that decision-making routines that encourage chaotic conflict are robust to bounded rationality and complex task uncertainty and thus should be included in the organizational designer’s portfolio.