For decades researchers have studied various aspects of the technology transfer and commercialization process in universities in hopes of discovering effective methods for enabling more research to leave the university as technologies that benefit society. However, this effort has fallen short, as only a very small percentage of applied research finds its way to the marketplace through licenses to large companies or to new ventures. Furthermore, the reasons for this failure have yet to be completely explained.
In some respects, this appears to be an ontological problem. In their effort to understand the phenomenon of university commercialization, researchers tend to reduce the process into its component parts and study each part in isolation. The result is conclusions that ignore a host of variables that interact with the part being studied and frameworks that describe a linear process from invention to market rather than a complex system. To understand how individuals in the technology commercialization system make strategic choices around outcomes, studies have been successful in identifying some units of analysis (the tech transfer office, the laboratory, the investment community, the entrepreneurship community); but they have been less effective at integrating the commercialization process, contexts, behaviors, and potential outcomes to explain the forces and reciprocal interactions that might alter those outcomes.
The technology commercialization process that leads to new technology products and entrepreneurial ventures needs to be viewed as a complex adaptive system that operates under conditions of risk and uncertainty with nonlinear inputs and outputs such that the system is in a constant state of change and reorganization. There is no overall project manager managing tasks and relationships; therefore, the individuals in the system act independently and codependently. No single individual is aware of what is going on in any other part of the system at any point in time, and each individual has a different agenda with different metrics on which their performance is judged. What this means is that a small number of decision makers in the university commercialization system can have a disproportionate impact on the effectiveness and success of the entire system and its research outcomes.
Critics of reductionist research propose that understanding complex adaptive systems, such as university technology commercialization, requires a different mode of thinking—systems thinking—which looks at the interrelationships and dependencies among all the parts of the system. Combined with real options reasoning, which enables resilience in the system to mitigate uncertainty and improve decision-making, it may hold the key to better understanding the complexity of the university technology commercialization process and why it has not been as effective as it could be.
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Article
University Technology Commercialization
Kathleen R. Allen
Article
University Technology Transfer in Innovation Management
Tom Hockaday and Andrea Piccaluga
University technology transfer (UTT) has been growing in importance for many decades and is of increasing importance to university leadership, university researchers, research funding agencies, and government policy makers. It is of interest to academic researchers in the fields of business management, economics, innovation, geography, and public policy.
UTT is a subset of the broader field of technology transfer, and it involves the transfer of university research results from the university to business so that the business can invest in the development of products and services that benefit society. The research results can arise from any academic discipline, are not limited to a particular definition of technology, and can be transferred to existing and new for-profit and not-for-profit organizations. The core activity involves licensing patent applications and other intellectual property to existing companies and establishing new companies that raise investment finance, to develop the early-stage research outputs into new products and services.
In recent decades, research universities have set up technology transfer offices (TTOs) to manage their UTT activities. TTOs adopt a project management approach to supporting university researchers who wish to transfer the results of their research to business. Project stages include identifying, evaluating, protecting, marketing, deal making, and post-deal management. TTOs are also involved in other activities, beyond patenting, licensing, and entrepreneurship, which generate positive impact on society.
Measuring and evaluating UTT is a topic of continuing debate, with an early focus on activity metrics developing into a more sophisticated assessment of the impact of university research outputs on society. Current issues in UTT involve understanding the position of UTT in the broader area of research impact, as well as funding and organization models for UTT within a university.
The COVID-19 global crisis is highlighting the importance of university research and its transfer out to organizations that develop and deliver products and services that benefit society. It has further emphasized the importance of UTT as an activity where much more has to be researched and understood in order to maximize the benefits for society of all the activities performed by universities.
Article
The Uppsala Model in the Twenty-First Century
Jan-Erik Vahlne
When it was developed in 1977, the Uppsala internationalization process model (Uppsala model for short) had three basic premises: process ontology, behavioral assumptions, and the presence of uncertainty. Multinational business enterprises (MBEs), among all actors, were in their infancy, and their future could not be known. Later on, the model was extended to cover the evolution of the MBEs, with factors such as internationalization, globalization, and the development of characteristics prompting changes and making them possible. Likewise, the knowledge concept was substituted for by capabilities, operational and dynamic, fitting well the other concepts of the model. The neoclassical view of the firm as an independent unit on the market is considered unrealistic. Instead, firms, MBEs, and small and medium enterprises are seen as embedded in networks with other cooperating and competing actors. The mechanisms of the 2017 version, though, are the same as in the original version. Hopefully, the latest version can be used as a tool within the scope of the “theory of the firm” research and as a platform for more studies on causal mechanisms, later to be applied in normative conclusions. It follows that static cross-sectional statistical methods are not fully satisfactory. Application of dynamic analytical methods requires investment in longitudinal data collection, which is costly, and has to be performed by institutions rather than individuals. A dream is that the Uppsala model can be used as a stepping stone in the construction of realistic macro-level studies of the economy.
Article
User Innovation
Nikolaus Franke and Christian Lüthje
Users of products and services, be they user firms or consumers, frequently develop innovations for their own benefit. Such user innovation is a long-existing phenomenon, but it has gained much momentum in the new millennium. The Internet has greatly facilitated connections between creative users, and at the same time cost-effective design and prototyping technologies are making it increasingly feasible for users to develop their own products and services.
Users have been found to innovate mainly because they want solutions that best serve their own needs. In general, their innovation activities involve no expectations of monetary profit, being motivated rather by self-rewards (such as fun, positive feelings of altruism, signaling of competence to the community of peers). This explains why users are typically willing to share their innovations without requiring payment. A problem of user innovation is that, since the benefit that others could gain is an externality for users, they lack strong incentives to invest in the active diffusion of their innovations. The consequence of this “diffusion shortfall” is social welfare losses.
There are several ways in which producers and service providers can help overcome these problems and benefit from the innovation potential of users at the same time. They can apply the lead user method to actively search for a small group of particularly highly motivated and qualified users, they can outsource product design work to their users via user design toolkits, and they can broadcast innovation challenges to an appropriate crowd of external problem solvers.
Article
Values, Other-Interest, and Ethical Behavior: The Critical Role of Moral Emotions
Jason Kautz, M. Audrey Korsgaard, and Sophia So Young Jeong
Organizations and their agents regularly face ethical challenges as the interests of various constituents compete and conflict. The theory of other-orientation provides a useful framework for understanding how other concerns and modes of reasoning combined to produce different mindsets for approaching ethical challenges. To optimize outcomes across parties, individuals can engage in complex rational reasoning that addresses the interests of the self as well as others, a mindset referred to as collective rationality. But collective rationality is as difficult to sustain as it is cognitively taxing. Thus, individuals are apt to simplify their approach to complex conflicts of interest. One simplifying strategy is to reduce the relevant outcome set by focusing on self-interests to the neglect of other-interest. This approach, referred to as a rational self-interest mindset, is self-serving and can lead to actions that are deemed unethical. At the other extreme, individuals can abandon rational judgment in favor of choices based on heuristics, such as moral values that specify a given mode of prosocial behavior. Because this mindset, referred to as other-oriented, obviates consideration of outcome for the self and other, it can result in choices that harm the self as well as other possible organizational stakeholders. This raises the question: how does one maintain an other-interested focus while engaging in rational reasoning? The resolution of this question rests in the arousal of moral emotions. Moral emotions signal to the individual the opportunity to express, or the need to uphold, moral values. Given that moral values direct behavior that benefits others or society, they offset the tendency to focus on self-interest. At extreme levels of arousal, however, moral emotions may overwhelm cognitive resources and thus influence individuals to engage in heuristic rather than rational reasoning. The effect of moral emotions is bounded by attendant emotions, as individuals are likely to experience multiple hedonic and moral emotions in the same situation. Deontic justice predicts that the arousal of moral emotions will lead individuals to retaliate in response to injustice, regardless of whether they experience personal benefit. However, evidence suggests that individuals may instead engage in self-protecting behavior, such as withdrawal, or self-serving behaviors, such as the contagion of unjust behavior. These alternative responses may be due to strong hedonic emotions, such as fear or schadenfreude, the pleasure derived from others’ misfortunes, overpowering one’s moral emotions. Future research regarding the arousal levels of moral emotions and the complex interplay of emotions in the decision-making process may provide beneficial insight into managing the competing interests of organizational stakeholders.
Article
Vertical Integration and the Theory of the Firm
Jongwook Kim
How do firms organize economic transactions? This question can be thought of as a question of firm boundaries or as a decision about a firm’s scope, encompassing the choice along a continuum of governance structures, including spot markets, short-term contracts, long-term contracts, franchising, licensing, joint ventures, and hierarchy (integration). Although there is no unified theory of vertical integration, transaction cost economics, agency theory, and more recently property rights theory have been influential not only in analyzing make-or-buy decisions but also in understanding “hybrid forms” or inter-firm alliances, such as technology licensing contracts, equity alliances, joint ventures, and the like.
Before Coase’s work became widely known, whatever theoretical underpinnings there were of vertical integration were provided by applications of neoclassical theory. Here, the firm was viewed as a production function that utilized the most technologically efficient way to convert input into output. In particular, neoclassical theory was concerned primarily with market power and the distortions that it created in markets for inputs or outputs as the main driver of vertical integration. Hence, the boundaries of the firm—that is, where to draw the line between transactions that occur within the firm and those outside the firm—were irrelevant within this framework. It was Coase’s question “Why is there any organization?” that first suggested that price mechanisms in the market and managerial coordination within firms were alternative governance mechanisms. That is, the choice between these alternative mechanisms was driven by a comparative analysis of the costs of implementing either mechanism.
Oliver Williamson built on Coase to provide the theoretical foundations for vertical integration by joining uncertainty and small numbers with opportunism in defining exchange hazards, and consequently established comparative analysis of alternative governance forms as the way to analyze vertical integration. More recently, property rights theory brought attention to ownership of key assets as a way to distinguish between the governance of internal organizations and those of market transactions, where ownership confers the authority to determine how these assets will be utilized. And lastly, agency theory also provides important building blocks for understanding contractual choice by placing the emphasis on the different incentives that vary with different contractual arrangements between a principal and its agent.
Transaction cost economics, property rights theory, and agency cost theory complement one another well in explaining vertical integration in terms of alternative governance forms in a world of asymmetric information, bounded rationality, and opportunism. These theories have also been utilized in analyzing “hybrid” organizational forms, in particular strategic alliances and joint ventures. Together, vertical integration and alliances account for a significant part of corporate strategy decisions, and more research on the theoretical foundations as well as novel ways to apply these theories in empirical analyses will be productive avenues for a better understanding of firm behavior.
Article
Virtual Worlds Affordances for Organizations
Kathryn Aten
Virtual work has become critical to competing in the global information economy for many organizations. Successfully working through technology across time and space, especially on collaborative tasks, however, remains challenging. Virtual work can lead to feelings of isolation, communication and coordination difficulties, and decreased innovation. Researchers attribute many of these challenges to a lack of common ground. Virtual worlds, one type of virtualization technology, offer a potentially promising solution.
Despite initial interest, organizational adoption of virtual worlds has been slower than researchers and proponents expected. The challenges of virtual work, however, remain, and research has identified virtual world technology affordances that can support virtual collaboration. Virtual world features such as multi-user voice and chat, persistence, avatars, and three-dimensional environment afford, in particular, social actions associated with successful collaboration. This suggests that the greatest value virtual worlds may offer to organizations is their potential to support virtual collaboration.
Organizational scholars increasingly use a technology affordance lens to examine how features of malleable communication technologies influence organizational behavior and outcomes. Technology affordances represent possibilities of action enabled by technology features or combinations of features. Particularly relevant to virtual world technology are social affordances—affordances of social mediating technologies that support users’ social and psychological needs. To be useful to organizations, there must be a match between virtual world technology affordances, organizational practices, and a technology frame or organizing vision. Recent studies suggest a growing appreciation of the influence of physical organizational spaces on individual and organizational outcomes and increasing awareness of the need for virtual intelligence in individuals. This appreciation provides a possible basis for an emerging organizing vision that, along with recent technology developments and societal comfort with virtual environments, may support wider organizational adoption of virtual worlds and other virtualization technologies.
Article
Voluntary Turnover in Organizations
Peter Hom and Jungmin Seo
Employee turnover—or voluntary resignation from employing organizations—affects both the welfare of leavers and employers. Given its import, scholarly inquiries during the 20th century have identified its causes, manifestations, and consequences. Classic theories focused on why employees quit, highlighting job dissatisfaction, job alternatives, and critical events prompting thoughts of quitting (“shocks”). Since the 21st century, scholars increasingly examined job embeddedness (forces constraining incumbents from leaving jobs), recognizing that the motives for why incumbents stay are not mirror opposites of oft-studied motives for why they leave. Empirical evidence for these perspectives, their deficiencies, and their refinements are discussed. Turnover research also investigated different types of turnover—notably, dysfunctional turnover (stellar performers leaving), collective turnover (unit-level quit rates), and turnover contagion (turnover inducing more turnover). Lastly, emerging work on different forms of job embeddedness, as well as its “dark side,” are examined.
Article
Whistleblowing and Whistleblowers
Niamh M. Brennan
Whistleblowing (also called good faith reporting, anonymous reporting, protected disclosure) is growing in importance as a corporate governance mechanism. It is increasingly recognized as a key internal control mechanism. Whistleblowing is a term used to describe an act whereby wrongdoing is exposed. It gained impetus following the collapse of Enron in 2001 arising from financial reporting fraud, which culminated in the U.S. Time magazine selecting three whistleblowers (all women) as its person of the year in 2002. The term was first used in 1966. Researchers have invoked a variety of theories and models attempting to explain whistleblowing. Elements that influence the process include the whistleblowers, the type of wrongdoing, the wrongdoers, the decision to blow the whistle, whistleblowing recipients, organizational factors, and finally the consequences of whistleblowing. Organizational processes, alternative to the more extreme step of whistleblowing, include silence (the other side of the coin to whistleblowing), speaking up, and open disclosure. An organizational response resisting an employee speaking up is the trigger that creates a whistleblower. The definition of whistleblowing only includes organizational members. Should it be extended to include external parties as well as organizational members? Social media has had an impact on whistleblowing. Questions remain as to the efficacy of whistleblowing: Is it a substantive or symbolic mechanism of governance?
Article
Whiteness in Organizations: From White Supremacy to Allyship
Donna Chrobot-Mason, Kristen Campbell, and Tyra Vason
Many whites do not identify with a racial group. They think very little about their own race and the consequences of being born into the dominant racial group. They do not think much about race because they do not have to. As a member of the dominant group, whites view their race as the norm. Furthermore, whites consciously or unconsciously typically view their experiences as race-less. In actuality whites’ experiences are far from race-less.
Many whites also fail to acknowledge the privileges their racial group provides. As long as whites continue to dominate leadership roles and positions of power in organizations, there will continue to be strong in-group bias providing unearned advantages to whites in the workplace, such as greater hiring and advancement opportunities. Additionally, as long as whites fail to acknowledge privilege, they will likely adopt a color-blind perspective, which in turn leads to a lack of recognition of microaggressions and other forms of discrimination as well as a lack of support for organizational initiatives to improve opportunities for employees of color.
In order to create a more inclusive workplace, it is imperative that both whites and white dominated organizations promote and foster white allies. For whites who wish to become allies, acknowledging white privilege is a necessary but insufficient step. Becoming a white ally also requires questioning meritocracy as well as working in collaboration with employees to implement lasting change.
Article
White Supremacy in Business Practices
Helena Liu
Contrary to its popular use to refer to racially violent extremism, white supremacy in the tradition of critical race studies describes the normalized ideologies, structures, and conventions through which whiteness is constructed as biologically, intellectually, culturally, and morally superior. This socially constituted racial hierarchy was developed through European colonialism to justify the acts of genocide and slavery that extracted resources from “non-white” lands and bodies to enrich “white” elites. Despite prevailing myths that colonialism and racism are artifacts of the past, the cultural hegemony of white power and privilege remain enduring pillars of contemporary business and society.
White supremacy inextricably shapes business practices. Indeed, our current practices of business administration and management are themselves modeled on slavery—the possession, extraction, and control of human “resources.” White supremacist ideologies and structures can also be found in the highly romanticized discourses of leadership that continue to rely on imperialist myths that white people are more fit to govern. They likewise surface in entrepreneurship and innovation where white people are overwhelmingly cast in the glorified roles of geniuses and pioneers. Even diversity management, which purports to nurture inclusive organizations, ironically reinforces white supremacy, treating workers of color as commodities to exploit. Within liberal logics of multicultural tolerance, workers of color are often tokenistically hired, expected to assimilate to white structures and cultures, and used as alibis against racism.
White supremacy is an integral (and often invisible) dimension of work, organizations, society, and everyday life. Challenging white supremacy requires that we engage in frank, honest conversations about race and racism, and the brutal legacy of European colonialism that maintains these constructs and practices. The path ahead requires the relinquishment of beliefs that race is an immutable, primordial essence and recognize it instead as a socially constructed and politically contested identification that has been used for white gain. Two ways that white supremacy may be dismantled in our cultures include redoing whiteness and abolishing whiteness. Redoing whiteness requires collectively understanding the mundane cultural practices of whiteness and choosing to do otherwise. Abolishing whiteness calls for a more absolute rejection of whiteness and what it has come to represent in various cultures. Antiracist resistance demands people of all racial identifications to commit to thinking, doing, and being beyond the existing racial hierarchy.
Article
Women in the Upper Echelons: Women on Corporate Boards and in Top Management Teams
Jihae You, Siri Terjesen, and Diana Bilimoria
In light of the growing number of women in the upper echelons, it is necessary to integrate and synthesize research on women at the top of corporations. The extant literature occurs in several disciplines—appearing in the fields of management, strategy, finance, economics, organizational behavior, ethics, sociology, and industrial relations—and is disparate and fragmented. A large and growing set of scholars provide various theoretical perspectives and empirical findings addressing organizational demographics, supply side factors, and outcomes. A number of theories are employed to understand the issue of women in the upper echelons, including resource dependence, tokenism and critical mass, glass cliff, social identity, human capital, social capital, and signaling theories. Most articles use U.S. data and tend to deal with the effect of female CEOs or that of female representation on corporate boards and top management teams (TMTs) on various firm-level outcomes. The majority of the studies investigate a potential relationship between gender diversity and financial performance. Research on this topic can guide policy and practice, improving the performance of organizations and the individuals who work within them.
Article
Work Design in the Contemporary Era
Caroline Knight, Sabreen Kaur, and Sharon K. Parker
Work design refers to the roles, responsibilities, and work tasks that comprise an individual’s job and how they are structured and organized. Good work design is created by jobs high in characteristics such as autonomy, social support, and feedback, and moderate in job demands such as workload, role ambiguity, and role conflict. Established research shows good work design is associated with work outcomes such as job satisfaction, organizational commitment, work safety, and job performance. Poor work design is characterized by roles that are low in job resources and/or overly high in job demands, and has been linked to poor health and well-being, absenteeism, and poor performance. Work design in the 20th century was characterized by traditional theories focusing on work motivation, well-being, and performance. Motivational and stress theories of work design were later integrated, and work characteristics were expanded to include a whole variety of task, knowledge, social, and work-context characteristics as well as demands, better reflecting contemporary jobs. In the early 21st century, relational theories flourished, focusing on the social and prosocial aspects of work. The role of work design on learning and cognition was also recognized, with benefits for creativity and performance.
Work design is affected by many factors, including individual traits, organizational factors, national factors, and global factors. Managers may impact employees’ work design “top-down” by changing policies and procedures, while individuals may change their own work design “bottom-up” through “job crafting.”
In the contemporary era, technology and societal factors play an important role in how work is changing. Information and communication technology has enabled remote working and collaboration across time and space, with positive implications for efficiency and flexibility, but potentially also increasing close monitoring and isolation. Automation has led to daily interaction with technologies like robots, algorithms, and artificial intelligence, which can influence autonomy, job complexity, social interaction, and job demands in different ways, ultimately impacting how motivating jobs are.
Given the rapidly changing nature of work, it is critical that managers and organizations adopt a human-centered approach to designing work, with managers sensitive to the positive and negative implications of contemporary work on employees’ work design, well-being, and performance. Further research is needed to understand the multitude of multilevel factors influencing work design, how work can be redesigned to optimize technology and worker motivation, and the shorter- and longer-term processes linking work design to under-researched outcomes like identity, cognition, and learning. Overall, the aim is to create high-quality contemporary work in which all individuals can thrive.
Article
Work-Family Conflict and Work-Life Conflict
Ellen Ernst Kossek and Kyung-Hee Lee
Work-family and work-life conflict are forms of inter-role conflict that occur when the energy, time, or behavioral demands of the work role conflicts with family or personal life roles. Work-family conflict is a specific form of work-life conflict. Work-family conflict is of growing importance in society as it has important consequences for work, non-work, and personal outcomes such as productivity, turnover, family well-being, health, and stress. Work-family conflict relates to critical employment, family, and personal life outcomes. These include work outcomes (e.g., job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and turnover), family outcomes (e.g., marital satisfaction and family satisfaction), and personal outcomes related to physical health (e.g., physical symptoms, eating and exercise behaviors), and psychological health (e.g., stress and depressive symptoms, life satisfaction). Many different theoretical perspectives are used to understand work-life conflict: starting with role theory, and more recently conservation of resources, job demands and resources, and life course theories. Many methodological challenges are holding back the advancement of work-family conflict research. These include (1) construct overlap between work-family conflict and work-life conflict, and work-life balance measures; (2) measurement issues related to directionality and operationalization; and (3) a lack of longitudinal and multilevel studies. Future research should include studies to (1) advance construct development on linkages between different forms of work-family and work-life conflict; (2) improve methodological modeling to better delineate work-family conflict mechanisms; (3) foster increased variation in samples; (4) develop resiliency interventions that fit specific occupational contextual demands; (5) increase integration and sophistication of theoretical approaches; and (6) update work-family studies to take into account the influence of the growing prevalence of technology that is transforming work-family relationships.
Article
The Work–Home Interface: An Integration of Perspectives
Lieke ten Brummelhuis
Work–family research has become a central area of research within organizational psychology and management. Since its inception around 1970, work–family research has seen tremendous growth, parallel to the increase in employees combining paid work with caregiving responsibilities. Fifty years later, a new trend is visible with an increase in single-person households and employees having a variety of other roles in addition to work beyond just family, suggesting that the relevance of the work–home interface will continue to grow. To understand how work and nonwork domains collide and interact with each other, various concepts have been introduced, including work–family conflict, work–family interference, work–family spillover, work–family expansion, work–family enrichment, work–family enhancement, work–family facilitation, work–family depletion, and work–life balance.
Whereas conflict, interference, expansion, and balance all describe outcomes of combining two roles simultaneously, spillover, depletion, enhancement, facilitation, and enrichment describe a process whereby one domain affects outcomes in another domain. With the goal of increasing concept clarity, work–family concepts can be organized by categorizing them per their valence and perspective. Valence divides work–family constructs into those that consider positive versus negative outcomes of combining dual roles. Perspective differentiates between combination constructs that examine the joint effects of multiple roles versus process constructs that clarify how one domain affects outcomes in another domain.
This typology clarifies what research question a specific work–family construct answers. For instance, if a researcher is interested in examining how often employees experience family (work) interfering with work (family), a combination construct is most fitting. If a researcher is interested in how work (family) can undermine or contribute to family (work) performance, a process construct is more suitable. By pinpointing the differences between work–family constructs, the framework can help determine which theoretical model is most suitable to explain a work–family phenomenon and how it can be measured best. The gained concept clarity fosters the design of empirical research that addresses novel research questions related to a diverse workforce that might occupy a variety of roles beyond work and family.
Article
Workplace Deviance
Rebecca J. Bennett, Shelly Marasi, and Lauren Locklear
The history of workplace deviance research has evolved from a focus on singular behaviors, such as theft or withdrawal in the 1970s and 1980s, to the broader focus on a range of behaviors in the 21st century. This more inclusive cluster of related “dark side” behaviors is made up of voluntary behaviors that violate significant organizational norms and in so doing threaten the well-being of an organization, its members, or both. Examples of behaviors that fall in this domain are employee theft and sabotage of organizational goods, services, data, customer lists, materials, working slow, calling in sick when you are not, bullying, harassment, discrimination, and gossip. Workplace deviance can be targeted at other individuals in the organization (coworkers, supervisors, subordinates) or at the organization itself, or both. Typically the actor’s perspective is considered, but other relevant views of the behavior include the supervisor/the organization, peers, customers, or other third parties. Many causes have been studied as sources of deviant workplace behaviors, for example personality characteristics such as neuroticism or low conscientiousness, modeling others’ behavior, experiences of injustice, uncertainty, lack of control or feelings of anger, frustration, and dissatisfaction. Nowadays, some researchers are returning to a focus on individual behaviors, or smaller clusters of behaviors such as sexual misconduct, gossip, and even constructive deviance, and the outcomes of workplace deviance on actors, targets, and observers are being investigated.
Article
Workplace Dishonesty and Deception as Socially Situated Organizational Behavior
Keith Leavitt and David M. Sluss
Truthfulness and accuracy are critical for effective organizational functioning, but dishonesty (in the form of lying, misrepresentation, and fraud) continue to be pervasive in organizational life. Workplace dishonesty is an inherently unique behavior that should be distinguished from broader categories of unethical workplace behavior and organizational deviance, in that dishonesty is an overt social behavior—that is, requiring an audience to exist as a behavior. Compared to stealing or cheating, dishonest acts require knowing fabrication of false information, intended to deceive an anticipated audience. Thus, considering the overt social aspect of dishonesty (compared to the relatively clandestine behaviors of cheating and stealing) may add conceptual clarity to the construct of workplace dishonesty, which is surprisingly absent from extant literature. The potential audience for dishonest acts in the workplace is notably critical, in that dishonest organizational actors generally anticipate characteristics of the audience (in terms of relationship closeness, as well as expertise and motivation to evaluate the claim) and likely adapt and tailor their dishonesty accordingly. Historically two underlying paradigms have been used to study workplace dishonesty: the rational actor (economic) paradigm and the behavioral ethics (psychological) paradigm, but an emerging and nascent third paradigm (the social actor paradigm) may offer new opportunities for understanding antecedents of workplace dishonesty that do not occur exclusively for self-interested reasons. This novel paradigm suggests here important areas of inquiry related to the aftermath of workplace dishonesty: when will workplace dishonesty be detected in social interactions; what are the social and relational consequences of discovering dishonesty; how are dishonest actors likely to behave in the aftermath of their dishonest actions. Finally, two varying discrepancies relevant to workplace dishonesty should accordingly be considered when predicting subsequent behavior of the dishonest actor: the magnitude of the discrepancy between the truth and the fabrication, and the temporal discrepancy between the trigger event and dishonest act.
Article
Workplace Identity Construction: An Intersectional-Identity-Cultural Lens
Lize A. E. Booysen
With the development of an integrated cross-disciplinary framework to study workplace identity construction, the current theoretical discussion on workplace identity construction is extended—first, by focusing on intersectionality as theoretical lens and methodology in our thinking about workplace identity, highlighting the significance of an individual’s intersections of social locations in the workplace embedded in socio-historical and political contexts, and second, by focusing on the influence of national culture and societal landscapes as important macro contextual factors, adding a super-group level and a cross-cultural perspective on how individuals navigate their identities at work.
Using an intersectional-identity-cultural conceptualization of workplace identity formation elucidates the personal, social identity, sub-group, group, and super group level of influences on identity formation. It focuses on the interplay between individual, relational, collective, and group identity, and emphasizes social identity as the bridge between personal identity and group identity. It highlights the multiplicity, simultaneity, cross cutting, intersecting, as well as differing prominence and power differences of social identities based on differing contexts. It illustrates the relatively stable yet fluid nature of individual (intra-personal and core) identity as it adapts to the environment, and the constant changing, co-constructed, negotiated, and re-negotiated nature of relational (inter-personal), collective identity (social identity) as it gets produced and re-produced, shaped and reshaped by both internal and external forces, embedded in socio-historical-political workplace contexts.
Understanding the interplay of the micro-level, individual (agency), relational, and collective identity levels (social construction), nested in the meso level structures of domination, and group dynamics in the workplace (control regulation/political) in its macro level societal landscape context (additional control regulation) will help us to understand the cognitive sense-making processes individuals engage in when constructing workplace identities. This understanding can help to create spaces where non-normative individuals can resist, disrupt, withdraw, or refuse to enact the limited accepted identities and can create alternative discourse or identity possibilities.
Article
Workplace Mistreatment: A Review and Agenda for Research
Ivana Vranjes and Zhanna Lyubykh
Workplace mistreatment researchers study negative interpersonal behaviors under a plethora of different labels, including incivility, bullying, harassment, aggression, and violence. While negative interpersonal behaviors differ in their intensity, intent, and frequency, a common denominator of these behaviors is their adverse impact on employees and organizations. Research has identified the nomological network of workplace mistreatment, which illustrates individual and contextual factors associated with mistreatment behaviors. Authors have also highlighted outcomes of mistreatment, showing that mistreatment results in reduced psychological and physical health, worsened job attitudes, and diminished performance for both targets and bystanders. Further, enacted mistreatment is not without consequences for the perpetrators, and these consequences can be both negative and positive. While workplace mistreatment research has been steadily growing, many questions remain unanswered. There are unexplored topics, approaches, and methodologies. First, there is a need to understand the uniqueness and similarities of different mistreatment constructs to provide a more comprehensive approach for studying workplace mistreatment and highlight alternative ways of measuring mistreatment constructs. Novel methodological approaches, such as HotMap and artificial intelligence, could shed light on the dynamics between targets and perpetrators of mistreatment, allowing researchers to capture the dynamic nature of mistreatment behaviors. Second, the interactions among societal, cultural, and interpersonal factors are likely to shape enacted mistreatment. For instance, social networks within organizations and the interrelations between employees are likely to influence not only the individual who becomes targeted, but also the way in which bystanders are to take action against such mistreatment. Third, while the role of bystanders in the dynamics of workplace mistreatment is undoubtedly important, there is a need to critically investigate the role bystanders may play in curtailing or encouraging mistreatment. More specifically, bystander interventions can take both constructive and destructive forms. Finally, targets’ responses to experienced mistreatment are likely to be relevant to the understanding of the dyadic nature of workplace mistreatment, such that an aggressive target response is likely to cause a mistreatment spiraling. However, it remains unclear what type of target response, if any, would be beneficial in helping de-escalate destructive behavior from the perpetrator. Thus, more research is needed to help address the important question of the best ways to deal with experienced mistreatment.