Research in Organizational Behavior最新文献

Learning requires acquiring and using knowledge. How do individuals acquire knowledge of another culture? How do they use this knowledge in order to operate proficiently in a new cultural setting? What kinds of training would foster intercultural learning? These questions have been addressed in many literatures of applied and basic research, featuring disparate concepts, methods and measures. In this paper, we review the insights from these different literatures. We note parallels among findings of survey research on immigrants, expatriate managers, and exchange students. We also draw on experiment-based research on learning to propose the cognitive processes involved in intercultural learning. In the first section, we focus on acquiring cultural knowledge, reviewing longstanding literatures on immigrant acculturation and expatriate adjustment investigating antecedents of intercultural adjustment and performance. In the second section, we focus on displaying proficiency, examining how newcomers to a cultural setting deploy their knowledge of it in order to adjust their behavior and judgments. We draw upon findings about individual differences and situational conditions that predict performance to suggest training for optimal use of cultural knowledge by adapting behaviors and judgments according to situational factors.

In this chapter, we put forth the premise that people's motivated tendency to justify and defend their external systems has important, and largely unexplored, implications for the field of organizational behavior. Drawing on recent theoretical and empirical work emerging from System Justification Theory (Jost & Banaji, 1994), we propose that people's desire to view prevailing structural arrangements in a positive light may uniquely contribute to our understanding of the psychology of people in organizational settings. We begin by specifically highlighting System Justification Theory's implications for: organizational change, employee citizenship behaviors, and integration of a diverse workforce. We then review empirical work on the situations in which people's system-justification motive is likely to be particularly pronounced and discuss how these situations may manifest in organizational contexts. Following this, we describe several streams of research on the consequences of the system-justification motive, with a focus on the implications of these findings for organizational members’ perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors in the workplace.

Over the past generation, sexual minorities—particularly lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) persons—have gained increased visibility in the public arena. Yet organizational research has lagged behind in recognizing and studying this category of organizational members. This article offers a critical review of this growing body of research. More specifically, we identify and discuss four dominant scholarly frames that have informed LGBT organizational research from the late nineteenth century to date. The frames include a “medical abnormality,” “deviant social role,” “collective identity,” and “social distinctiveness” view of sexual minorities. We argue that these frames have profoundly shaped the scope and range of organizational scholarship devoted to sexual minorities by showing that scholars using such contrasted frames have been drawn to very different research questions with respect to sexual minorities. We document and discuss the main and contrasted questions asked within each of these frames and show how they have both enabled and constrained LGBT organizational research. We conclude by calling for more attention to the frames organizational scholars adopt when studying sexual minorities, but also for more research on both minority and majority sexual orientations in organizations.

An enormous amount of research on person perception exists. This literature documents how people form impressions of one another and how these impressions influence behavior. However, this literature surprisingly has not been extended to people perception—how people visually perceive and judge groups (e.g., teams, classrooms, boards, crowds) rather than individuals. We propose a model of people perception processes, including three stages of Selection, Extraction, and Application (the SEA model). We integrate this model with literature from organizational, social, cognitive, and visual sciences to describe the important role of people perception in organizational and social behavior. We focus our discussion on organizational and social phenomena such as group tone, group hierarchy, and group evaluation.

We examine the challenges of governance facing organizations that pursue a social mission through the use of market mechanisms. These hybrid organizations, often referred to as social enterprises, combine aspects of both charity and business at their core. In this paper we distinguish between two ideal types of such hybrids, differentiated and integrated, and we conceptualize two key challenges of governance they face: accountability for dual performance objectives and accountability to multiple principal stakeholders. We revisit the potential and limitations of recently introduced legal forms to address these challenges. We then theorize about the importance of organizational governance and the role of governing boards in particular, in prioritizing and aligning potentially conflicting objectives and interests in order to avoid mission drift and to maintain organizational hybridity in social enterprises. Finally, we discuss future research directions and the implications of this work for rethinking traditional categories of organizations, namely business and charity.

Moral character can be conceptualized as an individual's disposition to think, feel, and behave in an ethical versus unethical manner, or as the subset of individual differences relevant to morality. This essay provides an organizing framework for understanding moral character and its relationship to ethical and unethical work behaviors. We present a tripartite model for understanding moral character, with the idea that there are motivational, ability, and identity elements. The motivational element is consideration of others – referring to a disposition toward considering the needs and interests of others, and how one's own actions affect other people. The ability element is self-regulation – referring to a disposition toward regulating one's behavior effectively, specifically with reference to behaviors that have positive short-term consequences but negative long-term consequences for oneself or others. The identity element is moral identity—referring to a disposition toward valuing morality and wanting to view oneself as a moral person. After unpacking what moral character is, we turn our attention to what moral character does, with a focus on how it influences unethical behavior, situation selection, and situation creation. Our research indicates that the impact of moral character on work outcomes is significant and consequential, with important implications for research and practice in organizational behavior.

Ethics research developed partly in response to calls from organizations to understand and solve unethical behavior. We examine two approaches to mitigating unethical behavior: (1) values-oriented approaches that broadly appeal to individuals’ preferences to be more moral, and (2) structure-oriented approaches that redesign specific incentives, tasks, and decisions to reduce temptations to cheat in the environment. This paper explores how these approaches can change behavior. We argue that integrating both approaches while avoiding incompatible strategies can reduce the risk of adverse effects that arise from taking a single approach and leverage the strengths of both approaches.

Organizational leaders and scholars have long regarded social sexual behavior in the workplace as deviant, harassing in nature, and something that organizations must eliminate to ensure maximal performance. Regardless of this perspective, however, social sexual behavior is an inescapable feature of human interaction that cannot be completely controlled in organizations. Moreover, there are many aspects of social sexual behavior that have not been considered or granted enough research attention to entirely warrant the broad assumption that social sexual behavior is always problematic to organizations and individuals. In the current paper, we highlight these under-researched or ignored facets of social sexual behavior. First, we consider the potential buffering effects that consensual social sexual behavior at work can offer to those involved, in terms of protecting them from the negative impact of workplace stressors. Next, we discuss the ways in which social sexual behavior is used as a tool of social influence at work. Finally, we consider the role of social sexual behavior at work as a precursor to the development of romantic relationships among employees. Throughout this discussion, we highlight both the potential benefits and drawbacks of engaging in social sexual behavior at work rather than adopting the perspective that all social sexual behavior at work is harmful. We encourage future research to consider all angles when investigating social sexual behavior at work, so as not to be completely detached from the reality that social sexual behavior can be consensual and sometimes enjoyed.

Many organizational policies and practices are based on the view that people's behavior needs to be inhibited to protect against their selfish basic nature. Indeed, a fundamental assumption of theories ranging from social exchange to economic models of organizational behavior is that individuals are primarily oriented to gain good outcomes for themselves. This chapter describes a program of research that raises serious questions about these ideas by showing that disinhibition—prompted by reminding people of times when they behaved without worrying about what others thought—can often lead to more helping behavior, decisions for the greater good in response to dilemma problems, and greater rejection of self-advantageous unfairness. These findings suggest that most people are fundamentally pro-social, interested in securing good outcomes for both themselves and others. This pro-social attitude manifests itself more readily in actual behavior and attitudes when the person in question is freed from some of his or her inhibition. These findings have implications for how one might enhance the full potential of employees in organizations, stimulate helping and creative behavior in teams, improve decision making in organizations, and how we should understand reactions to organizational change.

In the field of organizational behavior, the term “diffusion” has come to be implicitly paired with the concept of innovation and a peculiar set of conceptual choices. We explore how this came about, and examine the evolution of the concept “diffusion” from its inception in the English language through its use in the natural and social sciences to its current meaning in organizational research. A sensemaking perspective on researchers’ cognition helps us explain the changing meaning of the concept, and alerts researchers to the subtle but far-reaching effects of revisions in a field's conceptual language. Even though the field of organizational studies ostensibly treats diffusion as a neutral phenomenon, it implicitly narrates diffusion as a mechanical and positive process that should be welcomed and encouraged. The implications of this reframing become even more important with the increasing focus on innovation in recent diffusion studies. The diffusion of new products among consumers and the diffusion of market institutions around the world are things of a rather different nature and consequence, but treating them as implicitly equivalent “innovations” that “diffuse” naturalizes and hence legitimates them. We conclude by noting implications of our findings for exploring the evolution of meaning for other concepts, and their utilization in research on organizations.