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Article

Abusive Supervision  

Ann Peng, Rebecca Mitchell, and John M. Schaubroeck

In recent years scholars of abusive supervision have expanded the scope of outcomes examined and have advanced new psychological and social processes to account for these and other outcomes. Besides the commonly used relational theories such as justice theory and social exchange theory, recent studies have more frequently drawn from theories about emotion to describe how abusive supervision influences the behavior, attitudes, and well-being of both the victims and the perpetrators. In addition, an increasing number of studies have examined the antecedents of abusive supervision. The studied antecedents include personality, behavioral, and situational characteristics of the supervisors and/or the subordinates. Studies have reported how characteristics of the supervisor and that of the focal victim interact to determining abuse frequency. Formerly postulated outcomes of abusive supervision (e.g., subordinate performance) have also been identified as antecedents of abusive supervision. This points to a need to model dynamic and mutually reciprocal processes between leader abusive behavior and follower responses with longitudinal data. Moreover, extending prior research that has exclusively focused on the victim’s perspective, scholars have started to take the supervisor’s perspective and the lens of third-parties, such as victims’ coworkers, to understand the broad impact of abusive supervision. Finally, a small number of studies have started to model abusive supervision as a multilevel phenomenon. These studies have examined a group aggregated measure of abusive supervision, examining its influence as an antecedent of individual level outcomes and as a moderator of relationships between individuals’ experiences of abusive supervision and personal outcomes. More research could be devoted to establishing the causal effects of abusive supervision and to developing organizational interventions to reduce abusive supervision.

Article

The Adaptive Organization and Fast-Slow Systems  

Torben Juul Andersen and Carina Antonia Hallin

Contemporary organizations operate under turbulent business conditions and must adapt their strategies to ongoing changes. Sustainable performance can be achieved when the organization engages in interactive processes that link emerging opportunities to forward-looking analytics. But few organizations are able to practice this consistently. Fast processes performed by managers at the frontline respond to ongoing environmental stimuli and slow processes initiated by managers at the center interpret events and reasons about updated strategic actions. Current experiential insights from the fast processes can be aggregated systematically to inform the slow processes of reasoning. When the fast and slow processes interact they can form a dynamic system that adapts organizational activities to changing conditions.

Article

Advances in Team Creativity Research  

Lucy L. Gilson, Yuna S. H. Lee, and Robert C. Litchfield

Although creativity research has historically focused on individuals, with more and more employees working in teams, researchers have started to explore the construct of team creativity. Rather than a comprehensive review, this article takes an in-depth look at the most recent team creativity research. To do this, key themes and trends are discussed, which are then tied back to prior reviews, and new avenues for future research are proposed. Team creativity is a challenging construct because it can be conceptualized as both an outcome and a process, and there is no clear definition of either. When considering team creativity as an outcome, research has employed both complex mediation models as well as a more nuanced examination of moderating variables and constructs that may strengthen or attenuate the effects of relationships related to team creativity. This growing avenue of research recognizes the variability in team creativity that is possible in different circumstances and contexts, and seeks to identify what drives different outcomes. These approaches also acknowledge that team creativity is not guaranteed even when enabling conditions are in place, and that other variables may exert forces in different ways. The recognition that team creativity is unlikely to be the simple sum of members’ creative processes is becoming very apparent, with researchers examining ways of encouraging, fostering, and sustaining creativity in teams over time. Researchers have also recognized that team creativity is more likely to unfurl over time as a process, rather than a discrete point-in-time event. To this end, the key areas examined are the roles of member diversity and leadership. For diversity, racio-ethno, cultural, gender, age, political orientation, and diversity training have all been examined. For leadership, the focus has shifted away from the more traditional transformational theories and to newer constructs such as humility, ethical and shared leadership, as well as what it means to have an ideational leader who facilitates idea generation. Taken together, what the most recent research tells us is that creativity in teams remains a growing and evolving area of inquiry. While no longer unexplored, much remains to be clarified such as the barriers to effective team creativity, and practices that may help transcend these barriers. A lot of promising areas for future research are highlighted, which will become more important as workplaces pivot toward cultivating team creativity in a systematic and intentional way.

Article

The Antecedents and Outcomes of Heteronormativity in Organizations  

Oscar Holmes IV

Despite the term being coined in the early 1990s, heteronormativity is a longstanding and enduring hierarchical social system that identifies heterosexuality as the standard sexuality and normalizes gender-specific behaviors and roles for men, women, and transgender and non-binary individuals. As a system, it defines and enforces beliefs and practices about what is ‘normal’ in everyday life. Although there are many factors that shape heteronormative beliefs and attitudes, religion, the government, education, and workplaces are the principal macro-level factors that normalize and institutionalize heteronormative beliefs and attitudes. These institutions contribute an outsize influence on the perpetuation of heteronormativity in society because these institutions create and inculcate the norms and standards of what are and are not acceptable values, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors in our society. As such, in order to create effective interventions to eliminate the negative outcomes of heteronormativity, particular attention should be paid to each of these institutions. Parents, relatives, and other adults contribute to the normalization and institutionalization of heteronormativity at the individual- or micro-level. Although some people benefit from the system of heteronormativity (mainly heterosexual cisgender conforming men), much of the research on heteronormativity focuses on the negative outcomes. Heteronormativity is responsible for a host of pernicious outcomes such as lower self-esteem, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment, and greater rates of suicide ideation, verbal and physical abuse, and workplace mistreatment and discrimination. Future research should investigate identify effective micro- and macro-level interventions that could mitigate or eliminate the negative effects of heteronormativity.

Article

Artificial Intelligence and People at Work  

Anita Williams Woolley

The transition from manual to service-oriented and information-based work, driven by technological advancements, has reshaped the modern economy, demanding more analytical and cognitive skills. This change challenges traditional management strategies, as knowledge work’s intangibility requires approaches that are the opposite of those that successfully manage manual work. While early artificial intelligence (AI) applications streamlined manual tasks, applying AI to knowledge work revealed complexities in less structured environments. As AI capabilities improve, there is the potential to enhance knowledge-based work by enhancing collective intelligence (CI). At the intersection of management literature and intelligence research are opportunities for AI to improve the three essential functions underlying intelligence in any system—memory, attention, and reasoning. AI augments these functions in human systems, thereby opening the possibility of elevating CI in workplaces. Because of the most pressing research gaps, future exploration is needed in order to understand AI’s role in fostering a collaborative, efficient, and equitable workplace in ways that balance technology optimization with human-centric considerations.

Article

The Arts and the Art and Science of Management Teaching  

Joan V. Gallos

The arts have played a major role in the development of management theory, practice, and education; and artists’ competencies like creativity, inventiveness, aesthetic appreciation, and a design mindset are increasingly vital for individual and organizational success in a competitive global world. The arts have long been used in teaching to: (a) explore human nature and social structures; (b) facilitate cognitive, socioemotional, and behavioral growth; (c) translate theory into action; (d) provide opportunities for professional development; and (e) enhance individual and systemic creativity and capacities for change. Use of literature and films are curricular mainstays. A review of the history of the arts in management teaching and learning illustrates how the arts have expanded our ways of knowing and defining managerial and leadership effectiveness—and the competencies and training necessary for them. The scholarship of management teaching is large, primarily ‘how-to’ teaching designs and the assessments of them. There is a clear need to expand the research on how and why the arts are and can be used more effectively to educate professionals, enable business growth and new product development, facilitate collaboration and team building, and bring innovative solutions to complex ideas. Research priorities include: the systematic assessments of the state of arts-based management teaching and learning; explorations of stakeholder attitudes and of environmental forces contributing to current educational models and practices; analyses of the learning impact of various pedagogical methods and designs; examining the unique role of the arts in professional education and, especially, in teaching for effective action; mining critical research from education, psychology, creativity studies, and other relevant disciplines to strengthen management teaching and learning; and probing how to teach complex skills like innovative thinking and creativity. Research on new roles and uses for the arts provide a foundation for a creative revisiting of 21st-century management education and training.

Article

Aversive Racism: Foundations, Impact, and Future Directions  

Audrey Murrell

The concept of aversive racism has had a significant impact on theory, research, and practice devoted to better understanding bias, discrimination, and persistent disparities based on social identity group such as race, gender, social class, and so on. Originally developed to better explain subtle forms of bias toward racial and minoritized groups, this concept has been extended to understand the impact of disparities in a range of diverse settings, such as intergroup relations, health outcomes, fairness in employment setting, intergroup conflict, educational outcomes, racial bias in policing, experiences of stress and mental health issues, and persistent economic disparities. A core facet of the aversive framework paradigm is that because of human biases that are deeply rooted within a historical context and reinforced by ongoing societal ideologies, unintentional and subtle forms of discrimination emerge and persist. Given that these subtle forms of bias and discrimination exist within otherwise well-intentioned individuals, strategies to eliminate them require understanding the complexity of the aversive racism phenomenon in order to develop effective social interventions. This article reviews the foundation, research, and impact of this important body of work. In addition, the concept of aversive racism is discussed in connection to emerging research on microaggressions and unconscious (implicit) bias in order to create a more integrated framework that can shape future research and applications. Lastly, practical implications for organizations and future directions are explored, such as using social identity as a theoretical lens, including global perspectives on intergroup bias and leveraging emerging work on intersectionality, as useful perspectives to extend the aversive racism framework. Setting a future agenda for research and practice related to aversive racism is key to greater understanding of how to reduce intergroup bias and discrimination through interventions that cut across traditional academic and discipline boundaries as one approach to create meaningful and long-lasting social impact.

Article

Board Interlocks and Diversification Strategies  

Christine Shropshire

The board of directors serves multiple corporate governance functions, including monitoring management, providing oversight on strategic issues, and linking the organization to the broader external environment. Researchers have become increasingly interested in board interlocks and how content transmitted via these linkages shapes firm outcomes, such as corporate structure and strategies. As influential mechanisms to manage environmental uncertainty and facilitate information exchange, Board interlocks are created by directors who are affiliated with more than one firm via employment or board service and allow the board to capture a diversity of strategic experiences. One critical corporate decision that may be influenced by interlocks and strategic diffusion is diversification (i.e., in which products and markets to compete). Directors draw on their own experiences with diversification strategies at other firms to help guide and manage ongoing strategic decision-making. There is broad scholarship on interlocks and the individuals who create them, with extant research reporting that some firms are more likely to imitate or learn from their interlock partners than others. Prior findings suggest that the conditions under which information is transmitted via interlock, such as an individual director’s experience with diversification strategies at other firms, may make that information more influential to the focal firm’s own strategic decision-making related to diversification. A more holistic framework captures factors related to the individual interlocking director, the board and firm overall and the context surrounding these linkages and relationships, helping to promote future research. Understanding the social context surrounding board interlocks offers opportunities to more deeply examine how these interconnections serve in pursuit of the board’s fundamental purpose of protecting shareholder investment from managerial self-interest. Overall, integrating multi-level factors will offer new insights into the influence of board interlocks on firm strategies on both sides of the partnership. Expanding knowledge of how inter-firm linkages transmit knowledge influential to board decision-making can also improve our understanding of board effectiveness and corporate governance.

Article

Board Processes and Performance: The Impact of Directors’ Social and Human Capital  

Morten Huse

What do we know about actual board behavior and board performance? How can we develop our knowledge about board processes and board members’ capabilities? As a research field grows into maturity, we learn to see nuances, and the vocabulary used becomes richer and more detailed. However, the development of a consistent and nuanced language in research about board processes and performance is lagging behind. How have research streams and individual scholars influenced how we do research today, and why are these stories not included in most of the published literature reviews on this topic? What distinguishes research about boards and governance from various disciplines? How do we find research about board processes and board capital, and how has groundbreaking research on the human side of corporate governance developed? Groundbreaking research of Myles Mace was conducted more than half a decade ago, and we need to understand what has taken place after the seminal 1989 contribution of Zahra and Pearce. Research about actual board behavior and processes were not for decades published in leading management and strategy journals. Most published research about board processes and board capital is formulaic, leans on proxies rather than direct observation, and has only incremental if any practical contributions. A message is thus that we should strive for more groundbreaking studies that challenge existing knowledge and practice, including our research practice. A research agenda about board processes and board capital should be influenced by some of the following suggestions: • It should go beyond formulaic and incremental studies. We should challenge existing wisdom and practice and search for alternative ways of doing research. • It should include more processual studies rather than archival data studies using proxies. • We should learn from the scholars doing groundbreaking research before us. • We should learn by comparing experiences from various types of organizations. • We must include lessons and publications not found in leading English-language journals. • We should apply a sharing philosophy and a programmatic approach in which we as researchers contribute to developing future generations of scholars.

Article

Business Groups as an Organizational Model  

Asli M. Colpan and Alvaro Cuervo-Cazurra

Business groups are an organizational model in which collections of legally independent firms bounded together with formal and informal ties use collaborative arrangements to enhance their collective welfare. Among the different varieties of business groups, diversified business groups that exhibit unrelated product diversification under central control, and often containing chains of publicly listed firms, are the most-studied type in the management literature. The reason is that they challenge two traditionally held assumptions. First, broad and especially unrelated diversification have a negative impact on performance, and thus business groups should focus on a narrow scope of related businesses. Second, such diversification is only sustainable in emerging economies in which market and institutional underdevelopment are more common and where business groups can provide a solution to such imperfections. However, a historical perspective indicates that diversified business groups are a long-lived organizational model and are present in emerging and advanced economies, illustrating how business groups adapt to different market and institutional settings. This evolutionary approach also highlights the importance of going beyond diversification when studying business groups and redirecting studies toward the evolution of the group structure, their internal administrative mechanisms, and other strategic actions beyond diversification such as internationalization.

Article

Career Development and Organizational Support  

Melinde Coetzee

The complexity of modern careers requires personal agency in managing career development and employability capital as personal resources for career success. Individuals’ employability capital also serves as a valuable resource for the sustainable performance of organizations. Individuals’ ability to proactively engage in career self-management behaviors through the use of a comprehensive range of self-regulatory capabilities, known as career metacapacities, contributes to their employability capital. Organizational career development supports initiatives that consider individuals’ proactivity in light of conditions that influence their motivational states, and availability of personal resources helps organizations benefit from individuals who bring information, knowledge, capacities, and relationship networks (i.e., employability capital) into their work that ultimately contribute to the organization’s capability to sustain performance in uncertain, highly competitive business markets. Career development support practices should embrace the individualization of modern-day careers, the need for whole-life management, and the multiple meanings that career success has for individuals.

Article

Categorization Theory  

Judith A. Clair and Mary M. Struzska-Tyamayev

Categorization, the process of placing or separating into classes or groups, is a socially meaningful process and has been studied across a variety of disciplines, including the organizational studies field. Organizational scholars have focused on implications of social categorization (classification of another person as part of a group in organizational life), self-categorization (identifying the self as part of a group or category), and, increasingly, categorization systems (the norms and structures shaping and legitimizing the categories themselves) for individuals, group functioning, and organizational outcomes. All three elements are interconnected, as how one categorizes the self is linked to how one is socially categorized by others in organizational life, while categorization systems used in organizations provide the context for this process. Categorization, in its various forms, plays a key role in diversity and inclusion dynamics within organizations, as it can have positive and negative consequences. Among the most discussed negative outcomes is the potential for categorization to serve as a precursor to interpersonal or systemic forms of bias in organizations. Once categorized, a person may experience stigmatization or work discrimination based on the category assigned. Categorization is associated with unique forms of bias; for instance, if one is perceived to be a-prototypical for a category (e.g., a poor fit), the person may resultingly experience social penalties or work-based negative consequences for not exemplifying the group’s core qualities well enough. In turn, this can generate negative personal and interpersonal effects at work and undermine organizational efforts to build inclusion. For instance, if one does not fit a “leader” prototype well enough, they may have a more difficult time claiming the role of leader. However, categorization also allows for the individual and organizational creation of meaning and understanding of the social world, group cohesion, interpersonal congruence, and ultimately the coordination and structuring of institutional diversity and inclusion efforts. There are many avenues for advancing understandings of categorization and its effects. In particular, opportunities are rich for studies that explore implications of a growing number of people with intersected, multiple, and/or non-normative categories at work and in organizations. The growth of more complex categories has implications at multiple levels of analysis—for people, group functioning, and organizations seeking to build a more inclusive workplace. Also, with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and computerization, categories drawn upon and the processes of categorization, and their implications, are intimately linked to nonhuman forces. There are ample opportunities for organizational research in this domain, a chance to explore and understand the subject beyond the bounds of traditional computing disciplines.

Article

Chinese Leadership  

Lynda Song, Dangzhu Zhang, Bei Lyu, and Yiyi Chen

Leadership is universally acknowledged as a pivotal subject within both academic discourse and practice. Numerous well-established leadership theories have emerged through research conducted in Western cultures, giving rise to valid inquiries into their relevance in diverse cultural contexts. Given China’s rapid economic growth and pivotal position in the world, it is important for organizations to explore Indigenous leadership theories that prove effective in the Chinese context. Chinese Indigenous leadership contains unique elements that are deeply rooted in the rich Chinese cultural heritage and intricate internal and external management environments. Specifically, Chinese philosophies place a significant emphasis on prioritizing interpersonal ethics as the cornerstone of behaviors and advocate viewing and understanding the world through a holistic and dynamic standpoint. Building on this foundation, a theoretical framework for Chinese Indigenous leadership theories that are centered on ethics and morality (including Character-Performance-Maintenance (CPM)leadership theory, transformational leadership in the Chinese context, paternalistic leadership, fraternalistic leadership, ethical leadership, and Tao-oriented leadership) and characterized by a holistic dynamic balance perspective (including differential leadership, paradoxical leadership, dialectical leadership, crisis leadership, and vigilant leadership) is presented. Furthermore, an extensive review and analysis of the origins, definitions, dimensions, existing research findings, and future research prospects of established Chinese Indigenous leadership theories are conducted. These theories hold the potential to provide an alternative approach to addressing issues related to unethical nature, DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) matters, and the VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) environment. In order to advance the understanding of leadership dynamics, future research could adopt multimethod approaches, employ interdisciplinary perspectives, and foster cross-national collaborations. Such collective efforts are expected to further enrich this fascinating field.

Article

Content and Text Analysis Methods for Organizational Research  

Rhonda K. Reger and Paula A. Kincaid

Content analysis is to words (and other unstructured data) as statistics is to numbers (also called structured data)—an umbrella term encompassing a range of analytic techniques. Content analyses range from purely qualitative analyses, often used in grounded theorizing and case-based research to reduce interview data into theoretically meaningful categories, to highly quantitative analyses that use concept dictionaries to convert words and phrases into numerical tables for further quantitative analysis. Common specialized types of qualitative content analysis include methods associated with grounded theorizing, narrative analysis, discourse analysis, rhetorical analysis, semiotic analysis, interpretative phenomenological analysis, and conversation analysis. Major quantitative content analyses include dictionary-based approaches, topic modeling, and natural language processing. Though specific steps for specific types of content analysis vary, a prototypical content analysis requires eight steps beginning with defining coding units and ending with assessing the trustworthiness, reliability, and validity of the overall coding. Furthermore, while most content analysis evaluates textual data, some studies also analyze visual data such as gestures, videos and pictures, and verbal data such as tone. Content analysis has several advantages over other data collection and analysis methods. Content analysis provides a flexible set of tools that are suitable for many research questions where quantitative data are unavailable. Many forms of content analysis provide a replicable methodology to access individual and collective structures and processes. Moreover, content analysis of documents and videos that organizational actors produce in the normal course of their work provides unobtrusive ways to study sociocognitive concepts and processes in context, and thus avoids some of the most serious concerns associated with other commonly used methods. Content analysis requires significant researcher judgment such that inadvertent biasing of results is a common concern. On balance, content analysis is a promising activity for the rigorous exploration of many important but difficult-to-study issues that are not easily studied via other methods. For these reasons, content analysis is burgeoning in business and management research as researchers seek to study complex and subtle phenomena.

Article

Coordinating Knowledge: A New Lens to Understanding the Role of Technology in Episodic Coordination  

Elena Karahanna and Jennifer Claggett

Previous research in coordination lacked a practical explication of the metaknowledge used to enact coordination, which is particularly problematic as more coordination processes become (or attempt to become) digitized. One can better understand this meta knowledge by focusing on the coordination episode. The authors of this article define coordinating knowledge as knowledge that facilitates the exchange of information between two or more actors in order to achieve a shared goal by guiding (a) the timing, (b) the selection of actors, (c) the content, and (d) the method of the exchange. By integrating four bodies of literature (structured mechanisms, domain expertise, team familiarity, and transactive memory systems) that provide important insights into coordination the authors anatomize the framework into 14 specific types of coordinating knowledge that can impact how a coordination episode is enacted and its outcomes. Specifically, coordinating knowledge about triggers refers to knowledge indicating a need to initiate a coordination episode and may take the form of time-scheduled triggers, event-sequence triggers, and emergent triggers. Coordinating knowledge about actors refers to knowledge that helps select with whom to coordinate and may take the form of role, assignment, or individual knowledge about actors. Coordinating knowledge about content refers to knowledge that either helps select or present content shared during the coordination episode and may take the form of predetermined content selection or presentation, emergent content selection, recipient-tailored content selection, and shared understanding. Finally, coordinating knowledge about method refers to knowledge that helps select the appropriate medium of communication for a coordination episode and may take the form of predetermined method selection, media-fit method selection, or recipient-tailored method selection. Coordinating knowledge is conceptualized as a profile construct with meaningful combinations of coordinating knowledge that can be used to address different coordination dependencies and other contingencies. This conceptual framework affords a new understanding of how coordination is enacted and opens avenues to future research to explore how the presence and utilization of specific types of coordinating knowledge are likely to impact coordination performance. By explicating and elaborating upon coordinating knowledge, scholars and practitioners will be better positioned to design information systems to aid in the exchange of information by embedding different types of coordinating knowledge. Thus, the coordinating knowledge lens will be useful in understanding the evolving role of technology in coordination processes.

Article

Corporate Boards and Performance  

Jill Brown

In a new era of corporate governance defined by increasing shareholder empowerment, scrutiny from external stakeholders, and governance failures, there has been a movement toward redefining corporate governance models and the roles of boards. As a result, researchers and practitioners are left wondering what it means to be an effective board, and how a board can operate in the best interests of a firm’s stakeholders in this current environment. Exploring the expanded roles and demands of directors grounded in shareholder and director primacy debates, as well as reviewing theories and contingencies that link corporate boards to task, group, firm, and enterprise-level outcomes, a research agenda is identified that might better identify the parameters of board effectiveness.

Article

Corporate Ethics  

Thomas Donaldson and Diana C. Robertson

Serious research into corporate ethics is nearly half a century old. Two approaches have dominated research; one is normative, the other empirical. The former, the normative approach, develops theories and norms that are prescriptive, that is, ones that are designed to guide corporate behavior. The latter, the empirical approach, investigates the character and causes of corporate behavior by examining corporate governance structures, policies, corporate relationships, and managerial behavior with the aim of explaining and predicting corporate behavior. Normative research has been led by scholars in the fields of moral philosophy, theology and legal theory. Empirical research has been led by scholars in the fields of sociology, psychology, economics, marketing, finance, and management. While utilizing distinct methods, the two approaches are symbiotic. Ethical and legal theory are irrelevant without factual context. Similarly, empirical theories are sterile unless translated into corporate guidance. The following description of the history of research in corporate ethics demonstrates that normative research methods are indispensable tools for empirical inquiry, even as empirical methods are indispensable tools for normative inquiry.

Article

Crowdsourcing Innovation  

Linus Dahlander and Henning Piezunka

Crowdsourcing—a form of collaboration across organizational boundaries—provides access to knowledge beyond an organization’s local knowledge base. There are four basic steps to crowdsourcing: (a) define a problem, (b) broadcast the problem to an audience of potential solvers, (c) take actions to attract solutions, and (d) select from the set of submitted ideas. To successfully innovate via crowdsourcing, organizations must complete all these steps. Each step requires an organization to make various decisions. For example, organizations need to decide whether its selection is made internally. Organizations must take into account interdependencies among these four steps. For example, the choice between qualitative and quantitative selection mechanisms affects how widely organizations should broadcast a problem and how many solutions they should attract. Organizations must make many decisions, and they must take into account the many interdependencies in each key step.

Article

Diversity Climate in Organizations  

Elissa L. Perry and Aitong Li

Although defined in numerous and sometimes inconsistent ways in the literature, diversity climate can be described as employees’ shared perceptions of the extent to which their organization values diversity as reflected in the policies, practices, and procedures that the organization rewards, supports, and expects. Diversity climate studied at the individual level (individual perceptions of the impact of the work environment on the individual’s own well-being) is referred to as psychological climate. When it is conceived of and studied at the group or organization level (employees’ shared perceptions of their work environment aggregated to the unit level), it is referred to as group- or organizational-level climate. Two consistent criticisms raised in recent reviews continue to plague diversity climate research. These can most simply be stated as a lack of clarity about what diversity climate is and is not, and inconsistency in how diversity climate is measured and aligns (or does not) with how it has been conceptualized. Despite these criticisms, there is evidence that diversity climate can positively impact individuals’ (especially minority group members’) work-related attitudes (e.g., organizational commitment, satisfaction) and unit-level outcomes (e.g., performance). As a result, diversity climate is both practically relevant to organizations and conceptually meaningful to researchers.

Article

Emotional Intelligence and Its Measurement  

Richard E. Boyatzis

Emotional intelligence (EI) is used in organizational training, coaching, and graduate schools. Despite its acceptance in practical applications, researchers continue to argue about its validity. EI can be defined “as a constellation of components from within a person that enable self-awareness of and management of his/her emotions, and to be aware of and manage the emotions of others.” EI seems to exist at the performance trait or ability, self-schema and trait, and behavioral levels. Based on this multilevel view, all the conceptualizations of EI and the different measures that result are EI. Research on the behavioral level of EI—its assessment, strengths, psychometric validity, and challenges—complements that on other approaches, which have already been the subject of many academic papers.