Abstract
A glance at Group & Organization Management’s “journal description” statement makes it clear that GOM publishes research on a wide range of issues relating to the study of organizations. A single issue of GOM can include articles that span the areas of organizational behavior, human resource management, strategic management, and entrepreneurship. Because of the broad focus of GOM, when we, as the editors of the Special Conceptual Issue, announced this year’s call for proposals, we were unsure about what we would receive. Over the course of the year, however, the issue began to take shape, and we are pleased with the set of relevant and interesting articles that comprise the 2021 Special Conceptual Issue.
When reading articles on a broad set of “cutting edge” topics including psychological contract violations, i-deal negotiations, CEO dismissals, gig work, workplace hazing and gossip, neurodiverse and virtual team leadership, and knowledge withholding, hiding, and hoarding a question that any reader might ask is, “what in the world is the common theme among these articles?” An answer to this question is at the “roots” or “foundations” of the topics of interest. In terms familiar to organizational scholars, this takes us to the foundational theoretical principles that guide our discovery. From this perspective, we see that each of the articles featured in the 2021 Special Conceptual Issue highlights the social nature of organizational phenomena. This idea, of course, is not new. Scholars working in various micro and macro areas of organizational studies, such as Lewin (1951), Katz and Kahn (1966), Weick (1979), and Salancik and Pfeffer (1978), have long asserted that organizations are primarily social phenomena.
These foundational works provide the solid theoretical “cutting board” on which we can begin to slice through the emergent topics on 21st century organizations. Some of the articles featured in this year’s Special Conceptual Issue address topics that are inherently social in nature, such as workplace gossip, hazing, and knowledge sharing, given that they occur between organizational members. Others address topics that have not traditionally focused on social dynamics as central aspects of the focal phenomena, such as i-deals, gig work, and CEO dismissal, but incorporate social dynamics into their theorizing and conceptual frameworks in order to build a pathway for future research to explore this important aspect of organizational phenomena. Despite the diverse set of topics covered within this issue, the articles all incorporate a variety of social theories and concepts, such as social networks, social exchange, social information processing, social influence, structuration, social comparison, social capital, prosocial motivation and behavior, and relationship quality. Taken together they serve as a reminder about the enduring truth of the foundational idea that an organization is an “identifiable social identity pursing multiple objectives through the coordinated activities and relations among members and objects” (Weick, 1979, p. 3).
Costa and Coyle-Shapiro’s article “What Happens to Others Matters: An Intra-individual Processual Sensemaking and Dual-Path Approach to Coworkers’ Psychological Contract Breach” advances a conceptual framework that focuses on the social properties of psychological contracts. Psychological contract research has recently started to consider the social context in which employees’ psychological contexts are embedded. Costa and Coyle-Shapiro build on this premise by exploring the role of social information and interpersonal cues regarding coworkers’ psychological contract violations as factors that may shape a focal individual’s own psychological contract. Their conceptual model outlines the intrapsychic and cognitive processes related to a focal individuals’ psychological contract when a negative disruption happens to a coworker. Their work builds a foundation for new avenues of inquiry into the complex intraindividual sensemaking process associated with psychological contracts, as well as the individual, social, and contextual factors that play a role in that process.
The social aspect of organizational phenomena is a theme that also appears in “Integrating I-deals and Negotiation Research: Opening New Inquiry” by Simosi, Rousseau, and Weingart. This work focuses on how we can extend our understanding of i-deals by using negotiation research and theory to inform our understanding of the dynamics operating in the creation of i-deals. Recognizing that i-deals research tends to be treated as a black box from which individualized arrangements emerge, these authors pull back the curtain on how people develop mutually agreeable work arrangements by considering the interactions that lead to the creation of i-deals. They apply a negotiation lens to provide insight into the i-deal negotiation process across the pre-negotiation, negotiation, and post-negotiation phases of i-deal creation. In addition to exploring negotiation topics relating to framing, power, and strategies/tactics employed in i-deals creation, the authors also emphasize that social considerations play a role in the creation and negotiation of i-deals. These include factors such as the i-deal seeker’s standing relative to other employees, the role social networks play in the information gathering process that precedes an i-deal negotiation, social exchange or reciprocity expectations, as well as whether i-deal arrangements are judged as fair and equitable by third parties such as coworkers and whether such perceptions influence i-deal implementation. Simosi and colleagues outline a robust agenda for future research that has the potential to enrich our knowledge of i-deals by better understanding the negotiation processes that lead to the creation of such arrangements.
Addressing another topic that is inherently social in nature, Strik, Segers, and Hamstra’s “Antecedents of Knowledge Withholding, Hiding, and Hoarding: A Systematic Review & Integrative Framework” offers a systematic review of the literature on knowledge hiding. Here, the authors advance an integrative framework leveraging the theories of interdependence, social exchange, and social identity to explain why people withhold, hide, or hoard their knowledge. Strik and colleagues emphasize that knowledge withholding behaviors are relational in nature and therefore involve the interrelations between people’s goals, interests, and identities in organizations, as well as the expectations that people have of their exchange partners. Their work provides a strong theoretical foundation for future research into the antecedents of knowledge withholding, as well as what groups and organizations can do to promote desired knowledge-related behaviors and outcomes.
On a different but related theme, “An Integrative Definition and Framework to Study Gossip” by Dores Cruz, Nieper, Martinescu, Testori, and Beersma addresses workplace gossip, which is an omnipresent aspect of social life within organizations. These authors provide a systematic review of the gossip literatures from multiple disciplines as a foundation from which they introduce a broad, integrative definition of gossip as well as a dimensional scaling framework that incorporates multiple characteristics including gossip valence (from negative to neutral to positive) and formality (from informal to intermediate to formal). In doing so, they provide much needed conceptual scaffolding for future research on the topic of gossip, as well as insight into how gossip in organizations should be managed.
Exploring what has been referred to as “the best kept secret of the workplace,” Thomas, Cimino, and Meglich focus on workplace hazing, which is a widespread, yet little researched, organizational practice. In their article “Workplace Hazing: Toward an Organizational Science of a Cryptic Group Practice,” the authors depict hazing as a dynamic, meso-level social phenomenon where individuals’ behavior is a function of the complex interaction between personal and situational factors. They develop a conceptual model that depicts hazing’s antecedents from the perspective of hazees and hazers, as well as group characteristics that influence workplace hazing. They also outline potential individual and group-level outcomes of hazing, and consider the temporal nature of hazing by conceptualizing it as a recursive phenomenon. Their work provides a solid foundation for organizational scholars seeking to study this phenomenon.
Focusing on a gig work, a work arrangement that is growing both in prevalence and scholarly interest, Watson, Kistler, Graham, and Sinclair highlight characteristics of gig work that include social, job design, as well as job resource and demand factors. Their article “Looking at the Gig Picture: Profile Differences in Gig Workers’ Demands and Resources,” identifies primary and secondary characteristics that distinguish different forms of gig work, proposes a gig worker typology, and advances propositions about the different job demands and resources that various gig worker profiles experience. The social aspects of gig work feature prominently within their propositions focusing both on job demands, such as gig workers’ tendency to experience alienation and high levels of emotional labor, as well as job resources such as workplace social support from organizational members (i.e., managers and coworkers). Their work provides a theoretical foundation for future research to better understand how the job demands and resources that different types of gig workers experience influence a variety of health, motivational, and other traditional employment outcomes.
Berns, Gupta, Schnatterly, and Steele’s article “CEO Dismissal: A Multidisciplinary Integration and Critical Analysis” offers a comprehensive and systematic review of the literature on CEO dismissal, a significant organizational milestone that has substantial implications for organizations and their members. They offer a multilevel organizing framework that synthesizes the known antecedents and outcomes of CEO dismissal, as well as factors that play a contingent role in the nomological network. Their review and future research agenda makes clear that CEO dismissal involves issues that extend beyond traditional factors such as firm performance and CEO indiscretion to include social considerations such as characteristics of the nature of the relationship between the CEO and the top management team as well as the CEO’s connections to powerful others. This conceptual paper identifies numerous areas of future research opportunities across four key levels of analysis – CEO, board of directors, firm, and external.
The article “Reconceptualizing Leadership From a Neurodiverse Perspective” by Roberson Connally, Quigley, Vickers, and Bruck offers a compelling effort to reconceptualize leadership by incorporating a neurodiverse perspective. Neurodiversity refers to a set of pervasive developmental disorders, such as autism spectrum disorder and Asperger syndrome that can all generate a set of behaviors which are commonly indicated by deficits in communication and social behavior. At first glance, this article seems to depart from the social theme seen in the issue’s other articles by focusing on the flipside of the coin. However, the article’s conclusions have important implications for our understanding of organizations as social phenomena. The authors argue that the focus on the social and interpersonal aspects of leadership in prior leadership theory and research has shifted the conversation away from the leadership behaviors and skills at which neurodiverse individuals may excel. Leveraging critical disability theory, these authors develop an alternative perspective that emphasizes the cognitive strengths associated with neurodiversity. They advance a model and propositions addressing how neurodiverse characteristics may in fact lead to cognitively oriented leadership behaviors, which can positively affect leader and follower outcomes, as well as contextual factors that may facilitate the emergence of leadership in neurodiverse individuals. Their theorizing and model offers a starting point for leadership scholars to explore many unanswered questions relating to the leadership capabilities of diverse individuals, and thus inclusion. The potential to apply these insights across a wide range of organizational issues is profound.
Finally, Yeliz Eseryel, Crowston, and Heckman’s article, “Functional and Visionary Leadership in Self-Managing Virtual Teams” presents a theory of leadership in self-managing virtual teams. Their conceptual model depicts leadership in this setting as a process that results in the creation, reinforcement, and evolution of shared mental models and shared norms that influence team member behavior towards the accomplishment of shared goals. Applying structuration and leadership theories, they theorize that successful self-managing teams require both functional (to support the team’s regular operations) and visionary leadership (to influence changes to the structure that guides team behavior). They offer the compelling proposition that successful self-managing virtual teams will exhibit a paradoxical combination of widely shared, distributed functional leadership complemented by strong, concentrated, and centralized visionary leadership. They also incorporate a temporal perspective by proposing that there is a relationship between functional and visionary leadership that evolves with continued team interaction. Their conceptual model has the potential to stimulate interesting research questions relating to leadership behaviors and consequences in self-managing virtual teams.
It is often tempting to think there is nothing new in the conceptualization of organizations as social phenomena. However, as we cut through some of the emergent and most challenging issues of today’s organizations, we see that a solid theoretical foundation goes a long way toward a new understanding of today’s issues. The articles in the 2021 Special Conceptual Issue offer fresh new perspectives, broaden our thinking, and outline exciting opportunities for future theoretical development and empirical testing. We hope these conceptual papers will inspire interesting avenues for future research.