How a dynamic way of thinking can challenge existing knowledge in organizational behavior

Abstract

Traditionally, most research conducted in the fields of organizational psychology and organizational behavior (OB) has adopted a differential perspective by focusing on between-person differences in psychological constructs, often measured at a single point in time. For instance, scholars have examined which individual difference characteristics (e.g., general mental ability, personality traits) best predict job performance (Schmidt & Hunter, 1998), job attitudes (Meyer, Stanley, Herscovitch, & Topolnytsky, 2002), or leadership success (Bono & Judge, 2004). The emergence of multilevel modeling in the 1990s (Klein & Kozlowski, 2000) has led to a rapid growth in experience sampling and daily diary studies, which mostly investigated within-person variability in psychological constructs across time, as well as within-person associations among variables (Beal & Weiss, 2003). For instance, an early diary study found within-person relationships between employees’ daily recovery during leisure time and next-day work engagement and proactive behavior (Sonnentag, 2003). Up until recently, the vast majority of studies (including most experience sampling and diary studies) did not adopt a dynamic or process perspective by examining the role of change and stability in psychological constructs over time (Roe, 2008). Fortunately, the past decade has seen an increase in theory development and empirical studies that adopt a dynamic way of thinking and, by doing so, sometimes challenge existing knowledge in the field of OB. This trend may be due to an increased interest in the role of time and temporal development in organizational research (Ancona, Goodman, Lawrence, & Tushman, 2001; Mitchell & James, 2001; Shipp & Cole, 2015; Sonnentag, 2012; Zacher, 2015). The goal of this chapter is to selectively highlight such dynamic research, including studies on change and stability over time in: (a) personality and emotions, (b) attitudes and wellbeing, (c) motivation and behavior, (d) career development, (e) job design, (f) leadership and entrepreneurship, (g) teams and diversity, and (h) human resource management. We conclude this chapter with a discussion of implications for future theory development and empirical research. To set the stage, in the following section, we first describe what we mean by “a dynamic way of thinking.”