Leadership Styles and Psychological Empowerment: A Meta-Analysis

Psychological empowerment has become a popular construct in organizational research and practice. Leadership ranks high among the best predictors of employees’ psychological empowerment, yet little is known about which leadership styles prove more effective than others. This meta-analysis investigates the effects of four leadership styles on psychological empowerment. More specifically, we test whether empowering leadership evokes more psychological empowerment than transformational leadership, servant leadership, or transactional leadership. We found that empowering, transformational and servant leadership contribute almost equally to psychological empowerment. No relationship was found with transactional leadership. In an explorative manner, we tested the effects on the different dimensions of psychological empowerment. We found that the leadership styles had a weaker influence on the competence dimension of psychological empowerment. We also investigated the effects of several moderators on the relationships with psychological empowerment: country culture (power balanced freedom (PBF)), study design (cross-sectional vs. multi-wave studies) and publication status (published vs. unpublished). We found no moderating effects of culture, which indicates the universally empowering effects of the leadership styles. The relationships between leadership and empowerment were somewhat weaker when data were collected at different measurement points, and publication bias does not seem to be an issue in this research field.

The Grounded Theory Methodology in Organization Studies Within Qualitative Research

It is believed that the grounded theory (GT) approach works best for researchers who are concerned about the gap between academic and practical research because of the importance they place on applied research. The chapter aimed to explain the GT methodology and identify its application in organizational research context. In this regard, the theory-research-development-practice cycle, the factors affecting the choice of organization research methodology, and the types of qualitative research methods have been studied by comparing four qualitative methods of case study, GT, phenomenological study, and content analysis. Also, in this regard, the four main GT schools including Glaserian classic GT, Straussian GT, Charmazian constructivist GT, and Clarkeian situational GT, as well as the GT process involving the phases of data collection, coding, memo-ing, sorting, and validation are discussed in detail.

Management and Organizational Research: Structural Topic Modeling for a Better Understanding of Theory Application

In management and organization research, theory development is often linked with developing a new theory. However, regardless of the number of existing theories, most theories remain empirically untested, and the progress in understanding the application of theories has been scarce. This article discusses how theories are applied in existing management and organization research studies. This study applies the Structural Topic Model to 4636 research papers from the S2ORC dataset. The results reveal twelve research themes, establish correlations, and document the evolution of themes over time. The findings of this study reveal that the theoretical application is not consistent across research themes, theories are primarily used for descriptive and communicative properties, and most research themes in management and organization research are more concerned with discovering phenomena rather than with understanding and forecasting them.

A Review of Measurement Equivalence in Organizational Research: What's Old, What's New, What's Next?

The study of measurement equivalence has important implications for organizational research. Nonequivalence across groups or over time can affect the results of a study and the conclusions that are drawn from it. As a result, the review paper by Vandenberg & Lance (2000) has been highly cited and has played an important role in understanding the measurement of organizational constructs. However, that paper is now 20 years old, and a number of advances have been made in the application and interpretation of measurement equivalence (ME) since its publication. Therefore, the goal of the present paper is to provide an updated review of ME techniques that describes recent advances in testing for ME and proposes a taxonomy of potential sources of nonequivalence. Finally, we articulate recommendations for applying these newer methods and consider future directions for measurement equivalence research in the organizational literature.

On the Issue of Applied Psycholinguistics in Organizational Research

This publication discusses the use of psycholinguistic tools in organizational research. The example of a comprehensive study of managerial culture in a business organization has been considered, the pilot part of which was a problem-targeted survey of respondents among top managers. The respective textual results were reduced to lemmas and their frequency analysis was carried out. The predominant n-grams in the texts were also identified. These categories were used to study and assess the discursive field of managerial culture in the organization. The results of cross-analysis of discourses became the basis for the development of a hypothesis regarding the leadership deficit among the managers of the organization, the causes and consequences of this deficit. The formulated assumptions were confirmed by the results of the main part of the study, which included differential psychological testing and individual interviews with respondents.

The sensory imperative

With this essay, we identify and resist a sensory imperative in management and organizational research and beyond. We define the sensory imperative as an uncritical embrace of the idea that the senses offer a unique and attractive methodological and political position for studying managerial and organizational life and for challenging dominant forms of knowledge production. By falling in with this imperative, the turn to the senses in management and organization studies risks losing sight of its own mediations. We propose three ways of regaining sight of these mediations, which, we argue, come together as an analytical sensorisation – a study of, rather than with, the senses.

The Use and Misuse of Organizational Research Methods ‘Best Practice’ Articles

This study explores how researchers in the organizational sciences use and/or cite methodological ‘best practice’ (BP) articles. Namely, are scholars adhering fully to the prescribed practices they cite, or are they cherry picking from recommended practices without disclosing? Or worse yet, are scholars inaccurately following the methodological best practices they cite? To answer these questions, we selected three seminal and highly cited best practice articles published in Organizational Research Methods (ORM) within the past ten years. These articles offer clear and specific methodological recommendations for researchers as they make decisions regarding the design, measurement, and interpretation of empirical studies. We then gathered all articles that have cited these best practice pieces. Using comprehensive coding forms, we evaluated how authors are using and citing best practice articles (e.g., if they are appropriately following the recommended practices). Our results revealed substantial variation in how authors cited best practice articles, with 17.4% appropriately citing, 47.7% citing with minor inaccuracies, and 34.5% inappropriately citing BP articles. These findings shed light on the use (and misuse) of methodological recommendations, offering insight into how we can better improve our digestion and implementation of best practices as we design and test research and theory. Key implications and recommendations for editors, reviewers, and authors are discussed.

Oral History and Organizational Research: Challenges of Building Knowledge about the Past

Oral history has been increasingly used in management research in recent years, bringing to the forefront the view of individuals about past organizational phenomena. However, this use has not yet fully explored the construction of knowledge about the past. Instead, it has focused on studying the present and, therefore, hardly distinguishes oral history from qualitative methods such as case studies and in-depth interviews. How then should we use oral history and its historiography that has made it quite distinctive in history? How should we use individuals’ views to construct new knowledge of the past? This paper addresses these two questions, advocating for the use of oral history both as a theoretical-methodological approach and subfield of history, as well as firmly engaged with historical organizational studies. To that end, we review the trajectory of oral history, then we analyze 16 Brazilian papers on oral history, highlighting the distinctive characteristics of the approach, and, finally, we present research possibilities in historical organizational studies.

Moments of Meaningfulness and Meaninglessness: A Qualitative Inquiry Into Affective Eudaimonia at Work

Meaningful work (MW) is an important topic in psychological and organizational research with theoretical and practical implications. Many prior studies have focused on operationalizing MW and distinguish between the attributes of a job that make it meaningful, such as task variety or significance, and the affective experience of meaning during work, such as the feeling that what one does at work is meaningful. However, most empirical research focuses on the former definition and utilizes quantitative scales with deductive questions that omit what people find important in their experiences. To address this, we conduct a qualitative investigation of psychological narratives focusing in-depth on the quality and content of feelings of meaningfulness and meaninglessness during experiences at work—crucially, without any framing around task attributes. We introduce the term affective eudaimonia to describe these experiences. Overall, our results corroborate many existing thematic findings in the MW literature, such as the importance of connecting and contributing to others and avoiding confinement. We also offer new findings: Although the way that people give language to meaningless narratives is more descriptive, vivid, and experiential in tone than meaningful narratives, meaningless narratives are also more structurally static and constrained. We use these results to inform practical suggestions to promote day-to-day experiences of meaning at work and provide a basis for further academic discussion.