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The purpose of diversity initiatives is to help groups that face disadvantage in society achieve better outcomes in organizations, but they do not necessarily work as intended. To advance understan...

We present a theoretical framework describing the experiences and cultural abilities of social class transitioners—those who have moved from one social class to another—in organizations. Evidence s...

This is a reflection on my 2006 article, “The Essential Impact of Context on Organizational Behavior,” which received the 2016 Academy of Management Review Decade Award. I review some studies suppo...

Conflicts in the workplace have been characterized by their type (task, process, relationship), but little attention has been paid to how conflicts are expressed. We present a conceptual framework of conflict expression and argue that understanding how conflicts are expressed can help us gain new insights about the effects of conflict. We propose that conflict expressions vary in their directness and oppositional intensity and that these differences directly influence how people experience and react to conflict, resulting in dynamic escalatory or de-escalatory conflict spirals. We argue that directness of conflict expression is a function of the ambiguity of expression and who is involved (antagonists versus involving other people). Oppositional intensity of conflict expression is indicated by the communicated entrenchment in positions and subversiveness of actions. We argue that while oppositional intensity and directness are universal dimensions characterizing conflict expression, the cultural context and characteristics of the disputants will influence how conflict is expressed and perceived. We consider the implications of our conceptual framework for related research examining conflict.

Despite the acknowledged existence of egoism and altruism in human behavior, existing work teams research has primarily used a descriptive approach to summarize team behavior that does not distinguish between egoism and altruism. And despite increasing interest in positive organizational behavior and psychology, much more attention has been paid to understanding team egoistic behavior than team altruistic behavior, thus leaving theories of team motivation incomplete. Extending research on team processes and individual-level citizenship behavior, we develop a multilevel, dynamic framework that comprehensively establishes the team altruism construct and identifies its key dimensions. We further discuss the unique motives and evolution of team altruism over time. As a result, our theoretical framework offers a new taxonomy of team altruism, distinguishes team altruism from other related constructs, advances research on team processes by delineating those that are more altruistic from those that are more egoi...

Using a microsociological lens, we develop a theoretical framework that explains how social class distinctions are sustained within organizations. In particular, we introduce the concept of “class work” and explicate the cognitions and practices that members of different classes engage in when they come in contact with each other in cross-class encounters. We also elucidate how class work perpetuates inequality, as well as the consequences of class work on organizations and those at the lower end of the organizational hierarchy. By examining microlevel interactions and how they become institutionalized within organizations as prevailing rules and practices, we contribute to both institutional theory and the sociology of social class differences. We encourage future research on social class and discuss some of the challenges inherent in conducting it.

Despite the generally negative relationship between organizational citizenship behaviors and counterproductive work behaviors, employees often engage in both. Psychologists have found that when people engage in morally praiseworthy behaviors, they often grant themselves a moral license to behave immorally. In this article we draw on moral licensing theory and research on identity orientations to explain why and when citizenship behavior may lead to subsequent counterproductive behavior. We also explain how the harm done to the personal reputation of employees who engage in counterproductive work behaviors will be lessened by the degree to which they have a moral license to engage in such behaviors.

Current theories of how organizations harness knowledge for innovative activity cannot convincingly explain emergent practices whereby firms selectively reveal knowledge to their advantage. We conceive of selective revealing as a strategic mechanism to reshape the collaborative behavior of other actors in a firm's innovation ecosystem. We propose that selective revealing may provide an effective alternative to known collaboration mechanisms, particularly under conditions of high partner uncertainty, high coordination costs, and unwilling potential collaborators. We specify conditions when firms are more likely to reveal knowledge and highlight some boundary conditions for competitor reciprocity. We elaborate on strategies that allow firms to exhibit managerial agency in selective revealing and discuss selective revealing's implications for theories of organization and open innovation and for management practice.

Although helping behaviors can increase the effectiveness of work units, when task interdependence is low, units often develop norms of self-interest that inhibit helping. Little research has explained how these norms can be changed by a work unit member. We present a minority influence framework that specifies how norms can shift in response to a challenger's consistent modeling, advocating, or inquiring about helping behavior, contingent on prosocial impact, status, similarity, work unit agreeableness and openness, and timing. We also examine how normative conflict motivates efforts to initiate and sustain challenges, depending on identification, status, and small wins. Our model provides a novel theoretical account of how helping norms emerge in work units to support caring and compassion.

Corporate volunteering programs are important channels for expressing care and compassion, but little research has examined when and why employees sustain involvement. Integrating work design and volunteering theories, I introduce a model that explains how depleted task, social, and knowledge characteristics of jobs trigger compensatory motives during initial volunteering episodes. When these motives are fulfilled by volunteering projects, employees repeat participation, internalizing volunteer identities—contingent on pressure, matching incentives, recognition, managerial support, and targeted causes.

We introduce a multilevel model of workplace forgiveness and present forgiveness climate as an organizational-level phenomenon that explains when and why employees respond to conflict prosocially. We begin with an examination of the core cultural values that allow forgiveness climates to emerge, including restorative justice, compassion, and temperance. We then explore how the organizational environment, organizational practices, and leader attributes produce these core cultural values and facilitate forgiveness climate emergence. Drawing from a sensemaking perspective, we subsequently examine the cross-level impact of forgiveness climate on individual employees, as well as the boundary conditions of these effects. We conclude with a discussion of our model's contributions and implications for future theory building and empirical research.

We describe a hybrid relational bureaucratic form with structures that embed three processes of reciprocal interrelating—relational coproduction, relational coordination, and relational leadership—into the roles of customers, workers, and managers. We show how these role-based relationships of shared goals, shared knowledge, and mutual respect foster participants' attentiveness to the situation and to one another, enabling the caring, timely, and knowledgeable responses found in the relational form, along with the scalability, replicability, and sustainability found in the bureaucratic form. Through these role-based relationships, relational bureaucracy promotes universalistic norms of caring for particular others.

Intergroup leadership¿leadership of collaborative performance of different organizational groups or organizations¿is associated with unique intergroup challenges that are not addressed by traditional leadership theories. To address this lacuna, we describe a theory of intergroup leadership. Firmly grounded in research on social identity and intergroup relations, the theory proposes that effective intergroup performance rests on the leader's ability to construct an intergroup relational identity. We describe key leadership actions to establish such an identity.

Although envy has been characterized by resentment, hostility, and ill will, researchers have begun to investigate envy's benign manifestations. We contend that the substance of envy has been confounded with its consequences. We conceptualize envy as pain at another's good fortune. This reconceptualization allows envy to result in both positive and negative consequences. We then examine how envy affects interpersonal behaviors and job performance, contingent on core self-evaluation, referent cognitions, and perceived organizational support.

To better understand the workplace commitments experienced by organizational members, we reconceptualize commitment to highlight its distinctiveness and improve its applicability across all workplace targets. We present a continuum of psychological bonds and reconceptualize commitment as a particular type of bond reflecting volitional dedication and responsibility for a target. We then present a process model applicable to any workplace target to bring clarity, consistency, and synergy to the research and management of workplace commitments.

I review and reconceptualize identity threat, defining it as an experience appraised as indicating potential harm to the value, meanings, or enactment of an identity. I also develop a theoretical model and propositions that generate insights into how individuals respond to identity threats originating from a range of sources. I use this theory to explore individual and organizational consequences of different identity threat responses and their implications for research on identity dynamics within organizations.

I develop a theoretical framework that specifies the content underlying legitimacy judgments and a model of the process by which these judgments develop and change. I argue that individual-level legitimacy judgments are based on evaluations that fall along three dimensions (instrumental, relational, and moral). I specify three stages of the legitimacy judgment process and two modes by which judgments may be developed or revised (evaluative and passive). I end by discussing implications for the study of institutional change.

We present a theory of why some people who witness or learn about acts of mistreatment against others in organizations are more likely to recognize this injustice and become personally involved. Drawing from theories of moral identity, moral intuitions, and self-regulation, we explain third parties' morally motivated responses to mistreatment and consider the role of power and belief in the disciplinary system in this process. We discuss implications of the theory and propose future research directions.

We investigate the organizational pursuit of seemingly impossible goals—commonly known as stretch goals. Building from our analysis of the mechanisms through which stretch goals could influence organizational learning and performance, we offer a contingency framework evaluating which organizations are positioned to benefit from such extreme goals and which are most likely to pursue them. We conclude that stretch goals are, paradoxically, most seductive for organizations that can least afford the risks associated with them.

Organizations use multiple team membership to enhance individual and team productivity and learning, but this structure creates competing pressures on attention and information, which make it difficult to increase both productivity and learning. Our model describes how the number and variety of multiple team memberships drive different mechanisms, yielding distinct effects. We show how carefully balancing the number and variety of team memberships can enhance both productivity and learning.

We summarize the manifest and latent content of the articles that make up the Special Topic Forum on Theory Development. Rather than offering new theories, however, most of the articles offer a series of critical accounts of current organizational theory and a range of novel ideas about the process of theory construction. We conclude by speculating about the institutional barriers to new theory creation and how those barriers might be changed.

We distill existing literature on theoretical contribution into two dimensions, originality (incremental or revelatory) and utility (scientific or practical). We argue for a revision in the way scholars approach the utility dimension by calling for a view of theorizing that would enable theories with more “scope” (both scientific and practical utility). We also argue for an orientation toward “prescience” as a way of achieving scope and fulfilling our scholarly role of facilitating organizational and societal adaptiveness.

We develop an integrative framework that sheds light on managing multiple targets of employee identifications—specifically, coworker, workgroup, and organizational identifications. Drawing from cross-cultural and gender studies, we distinguish between individual tendencies (self-concept orientations) and self-definitions with specific relationships or groups (identifications). We explicate the role of individualist, relationist, and collectivist self-concept orientations, as well as identification motives, on organizationally relevant identifications and conclude with a discussion of the implications for identification in organizations.

What happens when an employee generates a new idea and wants to further explore it but is instructed by a manager to stop working on it? Among the various possibilities, the employee could choose to violate the manager's order and pursue the new idea illegitimately. I describe this action as creative deviance and, drawing on the creativity literature and deviance literature, propose a theory about its organizational conditions and implications.

To date, leader-member exchange (LMX) research has primarily examined member outcomes, such as member attitudes and performance. However, little research exists regarding outcomes specific to the leader. Focusing on the leader-member dyad, we develop a framework of leader outcomes resulting from resource exchanges with members. We propose specific resource substitutes and discuss the impact of LMX quality on the leader.

Competition between modernism and postmodernism has not been fruitful, and management researchers are divided in their preference, thereby undermining the legitimacy of truth claims in the field as a whole. Drawing on Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety, on complexity science, and in particular on power-law-distributed phenomena, we show how the order-seeking regime of the modernists and the richness-seeking regime of the postmodernists draw on different ontological assumptions that can be integrated within a single overarching framework.

We integrate concepts from research on emotion and memory to show how critical exchanges—or anchoring events—can suddenly and durably change the rules for organizational relationships, leading them to reach nonreciprocal forms like altruism or competition. We define these events and discuss the likelihood of their occurring as a function of the current state of the relationship, the time in that state of the relationship, and the social context in which the event takes place.

Organizations are increasingly subject to conflicting demands imposed by their institutional environments. This makes compliance impossible to achieve, because satisfying some demands requires defying others. Prior work simply suggests that organizations develop strategic responses in such situations. Our key contribution is to provide a more precise model of organizational responses that takes into account intraorganizational political processes. As a result, we identify situations in which conflicting institutional demands may lead to organizational paralysis or breakup.

I develop a theory of the distinctive characteristics of professional service firms and their organizational implications. I identify three distinctive characteristics—knowledge intensity, low capital intensity, and a professionalized workforce—with which I propose a taxonomy of four types of knowledge-intensive firms whose varying degrees of professional service intensity generate different organizational outcomes. The analysis highlights the danger of conflating the implications of professionalization with those of knowledge intensity and calls for comparative research across a wider range of professional services.

We examine the effects of organizational identity on the competitive dynamics of firms. Identity increases the awareness, motivation, and capability to respond to competitors' actions within the firm's identity domain, defined as cognitive competitive space that holds psychological value for a focal firm's management. Because of the psychological and motivational importance of a firm's identity, we predict that the actions and reactions within an identity domain may not adhere to traditional economically based explanations of managerial behavior.

Organizational rule violations are more likely when performance falls below aspiration levels. We propose that such violations are systematically selective and that this selectivity emerges during the problemistic search for solutions to the performance shortfall. During this search, contextual conditions (structural secrecy and coupling between violations and outcomes) and characteristics of rules (enforceability, procedural emphasis, and connectedness) direct attention and shape risk perceptions. Consequently, some rules are more likely to be violated than others.

To enable a better understanding of the underlying logic of path dependence, we set forth a theoretical framework explaining how organizations become path dependent. At its core are the dynamics of self-reinforcing mechanisms, which are likely to lead an organization into a lock-in. By drawing on studies of technological paths, we conceptualize the emergent process of path dependence along three distinct stages. We also use the model to explore breakouts from organizational path dependence and discuss implications for managing and researching organizational paths.

Using a simple but general formalization, we state the conditions under which one might expect a negative or positive relationship between preexisting trust and governance complexity, and whether crowding out or complementarity arguments are necessary for such outcomes. Our analysis provides a platform for simple but rigorous analysis of other possible relationships between trust and governance and also suggests that the debate about the relationship between governance and trust could be fruitfully redirected through greater attention to the analytical structure of the arguments.

We examine the repair of one party's trust in another via repairing trustworthiness (Mayer, Davis, & Schoorman, 1995). Based on Weiner's (1986) causal attribution theory, we posit that causal attributions (i.e., locus of causality, controllability, and stability) for the cause of a negative outcome in a trusting relationship explain when trustworthiness is in need of repair and how trustworthiness may be repaired by the trustee's efforts. We also discuss the role of specific emotional reactions of the trustor in this process.

Building on Goffman's (1967) notion of interaction rituals, we propose a process model, a causal model, and several propositions about effective relationship restoration behavior following relationship conflict. We conceptualize relationship restoration as a ritualistic process triggered by a violation. We identify two types of relationship violations and show how they are linked to different restoration processes. We also argue that culture governs restoration rituals for different violations. Therefore, effective relationship restoration results from an interaction of the disputants’ cultures, the violation type, and the type of restoration mechanism offered.

This paper was motivated by the growing interest of scholars of multinational corporations (MNCs) in the institutional perspective. Our review of the literature suggests that international management applications of this perspective have been dominated by a narrow set of neoinstitutional ideas. We develop a set of provocations that challenge the validity of traditional neoinstitutionalism in the context of MNCs. We then offer ideas for more novel theory building in the study of MNCs, based on integrating “old” and “new” institutionalism.

Few studies have examined legitimation in multinational corporations from a discursive perspective. To complement the existing institutional literature, we adopt a critical discourse analysis perspective that allows us to examine the microlevel processes of discursive legitimation. We provide an example of a media text— dealing with a production unit shutdown—to demonstrate how this perspective elucidates the various textual strategies used to legitimate multinational corporations' actions and their controversial consequences.

This special topic forum was designed to stimulate theory development on corruption in organizational life as a systemic and synergistic phenomenon. Given the multiple perspectives and bodies of literature that can be brought to bear on the phenomenon, we introduce the forum with a micro view, macro view, wide view, long view, and deep view of organizational corruption. These views suggest that there is much need for conceptual work that is integrative, interactionist, and processual in nature.

We propose a four-stage model of the organizational actions that potentially increase the speed and likelihood that an organization will restore its legitimacy with stakeholders following a transgression. Organizations that work to discover the facts of the transgression, provide an appropriate explanation of their wrongdoing, accept and serve an equitable punishment, and make consistent internal and external rehabilitative changes increase the likelihood of meeting stakeholder demands and, consequently, have a higher probability of successfully achieving reintegration with stakeholders than those that do not.

We address the question of how and why corporate social responsibility (CSR) differs among countries and how and why it changes. Applying two schools of thought in institutional theory, we conceptualize, first, the differences between CSR in the United States and Europe and, second, the recent rise of CSR in Europe. We also delineate the potential of our framework for application to other parts of the global economy.

Conflict management research generally has focused on some aspects of conflict in organizations—for example, the predictors or consequences of using a particular dispute resolution method—with little theory to explain how various aspects of the process fit together. We present a model that integrates these factors and specifically focuses on the dynamic processes by which an individual concludes that he or she has been mistreated and responds to the mistreatment.

Although stigma has been studied extensively in psychology and sociology, there has been little research on stigmatization in organizational settings. This special topic forum, which includes four articles, builds on previous social science research and expands its coverage both to individuals within organizations and to organizations themselves. As we note here, these four articles provide an opportunity to examine not only the harm caused by stigma but its potential benefits as well. Copyright of the Academy of Management, all rights reserved.

In contrast to content-based models of corporate social responsibility (CSR), we propose a process model of organizational sensemaking explaining how managers think, discuss, and act with respect to their key stakeholders and the world at large. We also propose a set of cognitive, linguistic, and conative dimensions to identify such an intrinsic orientation that guides CSR-related activities. Recognizing patterns of interrelationships among these dimensions might lead to a better understanding of a firm's CSR impact and generate a rich research agenda that links key organizational features to CSR character.

This article advances a theory of incivility as a veiled manifestation of sexism and racism in organizations. To support this argument, I draw from social psychological research on modern discrimination. The result is a multilevel model of selective incivility, with determinants at the level of the person, organization, and society. Selective incivility could be one mechanism by which gender and racial disparities persist in American organizations, despite concerted efforts to eradicate bias. I discuss scientific and practical implications.

Methodological fit, an implicitly valued attribute of high-quality field research in organizations, has received little attention in the management literature. Fit refers to internal consistency among elements of a research project—research question, prior work, research design, and theoretical contribution. We introduce a contingency framework that relates prior work to the design of a research project, paying particular attention to the question of when to mix qualitative and quantitative data in a single research paper. We discuss implications of the framework for educating new field researchers.

Using a resource allocation framework, I propose that the time individuals allocate to organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) may come at the expense of task performance. Because most reward systems favor task performance, individuals may unintentionally hurt their careers by helping the organization. The question then becomes how individuals can engage in OCB and still have positive career outcomes. I explore a number of organizational, situational, and individual variables that may moderate this relationship and suggest implications and future research directions.

Research on organizational diversity, heterogeneity, and related concepts has proliferated in the past decade, but few consistent findings have emerged. We argue that the construct of diversity requires closer examination. We describe three distinctive types of diversity: separation, variety, and disparity. Failure to recognize the meaning, maximum shape, and assumptions underlying each type has held back theory development and yielded ambiguous research conclusions. We present guidelines for conceptualization, measurement, and theory testing, highlighting the special case of demographic diversity

Based on a survey of empirical research on gender in organizations published over a twenty-year period, we argue that, cumulatively, studies of sex difference tend to neglect organizational features. Drawing on concepts from feminist theory about gender as a system, as identity, and as power, we outline how greater attention to the links between gender identity and organizational structures and practices would enrich the field. We conclude with a research agenda that retains a focus on the individual while incorporating an analysis of the impact of organizations.