Organizational Hybridity

In many ways, research on organizational hybridity seeks to understand how some organizations mix together elements analytically considered opposed to or in tension with one another. Scholars of organizational hybridity have studied how such unconventional mixing of organizational elements is possible, how this impacts organizational functioning, and how it shapes organizational relations to various internal and external stakeholders. Since the mid-1980s, organizational scholars have used a range of theoretical lenses to shed light on these overarching questions posed by organizational hybridity. Each lens with its unique conceptual tools and assumptions has focused on distinct, yet often connected, aspects of organizational hybridity. For example, organizational forms research has emphasized questions concerning the emergence of hybrid organizations. Identity and institutional logics research has focused on tensions between the distinct elements of hybrids. Categories research has primarily investigated external evaluations of hybridity. Publication activity within different theoretical lenses has varied over time. While much work on organizational hybridity early on used organizational form lenses, more work from an identity perspective followed, and recently institutional logics has offered a much-used meta-theory in hybridity research. Along with the waxing and waning popularity of theoretical lenses over time, a shift has occurred from primarily considering hybrid organizations to attending to hybrid organizing. That is, while early work conceived of organizational hybridity as a matter of type (effectively suggesting differences between hybrids and nonhybrids), more recent work understands hybridity as a matter of degree (some organizations have more while others have less hybrid characteristics). Notwithstanding some cross-fertilization between theoretical lenses and overlaps, different streams of hybridity research have developed in parallel. As such, organizational hybridity as a concept has been (and continues to be) used in different ways in the literature. The aim here is to offer useful resources to navigate the burgeoning literature on organizational hybridity. While necessarily painting the literature with a broad brush, this article offers brief introductions to specific research streams. It lists key references in each section that will allow readers to further pursue each stream. Although varied empirical contexts and theories have been and continue to be pertinent to organizational hybridity research, work on social enterprise and from institutional theory lenses has been particularly vibrant in the recent expansion of the field. This article acknowledges and follows this trend in the literature.

Sports Settings in Management Research

In recent years, scholars have increasingly engaged with the use of sports settings to advance management theory. This stream of literature departs from the ‘Sport Management’ conversation, as it aims to move beyond the appreciation of the mere empirical sport phenomenon to advance a theoretical contribution with broader generalizability to other settings. The purpose of this bibliography is to present an organized overview of some of the relevant empirical works which can act as guides to scholars interested in conducting management research using sports data. Sports settings are becoming increasingly popular among management scholars due to the large availability of fine-grained data, well-defined performance metrics, and transparency of changes in strategies and processes. Also, sports settings are considered to be relatively controlled environments, which resemble laboratory conditions. These factors make sports data particularly suitable for quantitative studies, which have been so far more common than qualitative ones. Yet sports data can also ideally suit qualitative research. For example, sporting events are incredibly well documented and often collect multiple informants’ interviews impromptu, thus making them excellent settings for archival, historical, and in-depth case studies. This bibliography aims to provide readers with selected examples of both excellent quantitative and qualitative studies in different sports settings. The first section of the bibliography presents some past literature reviews on how sports data has been used in management research and some suggestions on future research topics in sports settings. Following this, the bibliography summarizes the sports settings which are most popular in management research. We show that especially the various US major league sports (baseball, basketball, football, ice hockey) have been prominent settings for management research. In addition to US major sports, other popular sports settings included in this bibliography are soccer, motorsports, national sports organizations (NSOs) and the Olympics. The bibliography also includes a section on the less common sports that have been used in previous research and a section on studies examining other actors in sports than players and managers.

Certified B Corporations and Benefit Corporations

Over the past decade, Certified B Corporations and Benefit Corporations, commonly known as B Corps, have emerged as a global phenomenon. Both organizational forms are for-profit businesses. Whereas Certified B Corporations have been accredited for their environmental, social, and governance (ESG) practices, Benefit Corporations are a new legal form, currently available in thirty-eight states and jurisdictions in the United States (US) as well as in British Columbia (Canada), Colombia, Ecuador, and Italy. Both types were promulgated by B Lab, a US-based nonprofit organization. Founded in 2006 in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, B Lab has sought to institutionalize business as a force for good. At present, certification is available to any business worldwide, and approximately 3,700 companies in seventy-four countries are currently certified. Prominent Certified B Corporations include Ben & Jerry’s, Danone North America, and Patagonia. Examples of Benefit Corporations include Data.World, Kickstarter, and Plum Organics. Overall, the B Corp movement’s radical aspiration to redefine business has garnered substantial attention from policymakers, media, businesses, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and academe. This article provides an overview of burgeoning scholarly work—ranging from general references and cutting-edge theoretical work to accumulating empirical findings and key pedagogical resources. A core focus is on enumerating the variety of theoretical perspectives that have been taken and the central research themes in extant work, including interdisciplinary publications. We close by discussing exemplary teaching materials and introducing other resources, such as the B Academics research community and available data sets for research.

Influence Strategies/Tactics in the Workplace

This article is a selective guide through the literature on influence tactics, which is grounded in the power-influence approach to leadership, most popularly known as bases of social influence/power. A major premise of the theory is that the exercise of influence is the essence of leadership. The theory deals with reciprocal influence processes in leadership—that is, leader power over subordinates and that of subordinates over the leader. In reality, the direction of influence/power may be downward (supervisor to subordinate), upward (subordinate to supervisor), lateral (coworkers to coworkers), or outward (customer). Though the two terms—“power” and “influence”—are used interchangeably, they are conceptually different. Power is defined as the ability to influence, whereas influence is power in action or the demonstrated use of power, and it is viewed as the process of producing behavioral or psychological effects in a target person. One may have power, but he or she may not feel like using it. That is, the use of power is influence. Though influence and power are conceptually distinct, they are often used interchangeably. Power is also confused with authority. Whereas power is the capacity to influence, authority is the power associated with position or chair. This bibliography begins with a description of the foundation of knowledge and general overviews and textbooks. Next, it discusses the emergence and types of influence tactics. Finally, it summarizes the empirical evidence concerning the antecedents and outcomes of influence tactics, as well as the cultural context of influence.

Employee Ownership

Narrowly defined, Employee Ownership (EO) is a mechanism for employees to have a financial stake in the enterprise. It can take many forms, including Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs), worker-owned cooperatives, perpetual trusts, profit sharing, Employee Stock Option Plans, gain sharing, Employee Stock Purchase Plans (ESPPs), grants of restricted stock units (RSUs) and performance-based equity shares, phantom stock, and mutual companies. As this practice has developed, the term has come to mean both financial and psychological engagement in the enterprise. Contrary to the academic ideal of theory leading to practice, theories regarding EO have been derived often from practice. Early studies that looked at only financial engagement produced mixed results relative to organizational performance. More recent studies that have studied simultaneously the impact of financial and psychological engagement have provided strong evidence that collectively there is a significant impact between them and organizational performance. EO with a high psychological engagement has also been referred to as shared capitalism, shared entrepreneurship, and democratic capitalism. Regardless of the terminology when done well, they have produced positive results for the organization, employee-owners, and society. One reviewer of a book on EO compared it to a Swiss Army knife because the authors claimed that it could increase worker productivity and commitment, reduce income and wealth inequality, and improve firm performance, sustainability, and employment stability. EO in practice is not always capable of perfectly achieving its goals, and many of the practitioners talk about it being a journey. Academics working on understanding EO and how, when, and where it works may be able to help practitioners achieve these results and more by suggesting the conditions and contingencies under which it works or does not work to achieve firm-level, employee-level, and society-level outcomes. Before proceeding, one thing that may distinguish this bibliography from some of the others in this collection is the number of practitioner sources. EO predates the formalization of management as an area of academic interest. Even after the establishment of management as an area of academic interest, EO appears to have developed more from the practice of business than from academic theory. When practitioners do acknowledge academic theory as a source of guidance, they tend to blend multiple theories rather than a single overarching theory of EO.

Organizational Paradox

Organizational paradox offers a theory of the nature and management of competing demands. Historically, the dominant paradigm in organizational theory depicted competing demands as trade-offs or dilemmas that could be resolved by choosing one option. In the late 1960s, scholars such as Joan Woodward, Paul Lawrence, and Jay Lorsch introduced contingency theory, suggesting that individuals resolve these tensions by taking the context and environment into account. Paradox theory offers an alternative approach, suggesting that these tensions cannot be resolved. By depicting competing demands as tensions that are not only contradictory, but also interdependent and persistent, paradox theory argues that actors need to accept, engage, and navigate tensions rather than resolve them. Foundational work on paradox in organizations emerged starting in the late 1970s and 1980s. This work drew from rich insights across a variety of disciplines, including Eastern philosophy (Taoism, Confucianism), Western philosophies (Hegel, Heraclitus), psychodynamics (Jung, Adler, Frankel), psychology (Schneider, Watzlawick), political science (Marx, Engel), communications and sociology (Taylor, Bateson), and negotiations and conflict resolution (Follett). More recent work has advanced foundational building blocks toward a theory of paradox. Underlying the theory of paradox is ontologies of dualism—two opposing elements that together form an integrated unity—and dynamism— ongoing change. Scholars have defined paradox as tensions that are contradictory, interdependent, and persistent, noting their dynamic, everchanging, cyclical nature. Some scholars describe the origins of paradox as inherent within systems, while others highlight their social construction through cognition, dialogue, and rationality. Still others explore the relationship between the inherent and socially constructed nature of tensions, depicting tensions as latent within a system, becoming salient through social construction and external conditions. Moreover, some scholars focus more on understanding the poles of paradox, while others depict the ongoing dynamic interaction and evolution. As paradox theory continues to grow and expand, scholars have also added complexity to our understanding, emphasizing paradoxes as nested across levels and as knotted and interwoven across various tensions, while also taking into account the power dynamics, uncertainty, plurality, and scarcity of systems within which paradoxes emerge. This article identifies scholarship that depicts these varied approaches and ideas, providing the foundations of paradox theory for scholars new to this field and in-depth analysis for those seeking to expand their understanding. Section 1 offers foundational work. Section 2 introduces early scholarship that launched the field. Section 3 includes work describing foundational building blocks toward a theory of paradox. Section 4 highlights research that recognizes the nested nature of paradox and describes how this theory has been applied across different levels. Section 5 includes papers that address the meta-theoretical and multi-paradigmatic aspect of paradox theory, noting how these ideas have been applied across phenomena and across theoretical lenses. Section 6 describes papers that draw on the varied methodological traditions associated with paradox. Finally, section 7 identifies several handbooks and special issues that offer an introduction to or integration of paradox theory.

Strategy Implementation

Research on strategy implementation seeks to understand what activities organizations and their constituents engage in to put a formulated strategy into practice, what prompts a particular set and sequence of implementation activities, and what effect they have on the realization of a strategy and on organizational outcomes. Strategy scholars generally agree that deliberate and coordinated efforts to guide the translation of strategy from abstract plan and policy to organizational and behavioral reality are an integral aspect of strategic management and crucial for a strategy to improve an organization’s performance. Many also recognize that implementation is a dynamic and complex process that requires a degree of flexibility and iterative adjustment to respond to feedback or pushback from internal and external stakeholders. The strategy implementation literature is loosely held together by a shared phenomenological interest, and it has attracted an eclectic set of contributions from or made reference to diverse management subdisciplines beyond strategy, including organization studies, human resource management, operations management, accounting, and project management. Overall, theoretical advancement has been slow, and many of the frameworks and guidelines for implementation that are common in the practitioner literature have limited empirical evidence to support them. Likewise, many of the conceptual ambiguities, such as the demarcation between strategy formulation and implementation, and methodological challenges, such as the measurement of implementation outcomes, have not prompted systematic agendas or programs of research. This is a research area that offers plenty of opportunity for scholarly contributions. Please note that for a select few management techniques (e.g., total quality management, lean management, kaizen) and strategic vehicles (e.g., strategic alliances, mergers and acquisitions) specialized implementation research has accumulated. However, this article focuses on the nonspecialized domain, that is, on research that aims to develop a general body of knowledge related to implementation that is applicable for a wide range of strategies. Research from specialized domains is only selectively cited.

Dynamic Capabilities

As a relatively young, yet flagship discipline of strategic management, dynamic capabilities research has emerged as one of the central perspectives exploring the foundations of the achievement of sustainable competitive advantage, especially in the context of dynamic environments. Dynamic capabilities are deeply rooted in, and sometimes seen as an extension of, the resource-based view of the firm. The notion that competitive advantage both stems from the exploitation of current capabilities and the development of new ones was already vaguely conceptualized by prominent contributors of the resource-based view such as Edith Penrose and Birger Wernerfelt. However, the idea that there are special capabilities—dynamic capabilities—enabling organizations to build, integrate, or reconfigure their internal and external resource and competence base, was formerly conceptualized in the late 1990s as a separate yet connected stream of research (see Teece, et al. 1997—cited under Seminal Papers—which is titled “Dynamic Capabilities and Strategic Management”). The dynamic capabilities perspective is also strongly connected to evolutionary economics. This is why the field has focused for some time on the exploration of semi-automatic and path-dependent routines as the foundation of dynamic capabilities. However, proponents of the behavioral theory of the firm have criticized this approach and integrated the deliberate human element in the dynamic capabilities perspective (for an overview of the theoretical assumptions underpinning the dynamic capabilities perspective, see the article “Dynamic Capabilities and the Role of Managers in Business Strategy and Economic Performance”—Augier and Teece 2009, cited under Conceptual Refinements). As a result, various important debates emerged in the community and the field has been generally criticized for its ambiguity, inconsistency, and conflicting assumptions. This is exemplified by the important number of diverging conceptual contributions to the field, still up to this day, and by the relatively late materialization of empirical work. Nevertheless, the vast number of contributions illustrates the necessity to consider dynamism, which underlies the concept of dynamic capabilities, as a key component of competitive advantage and organizational adaption (see the separate Oxford Bibliographies in Management article “Organizational Adaptation”). The key contributors of the dynamic capabilities perspective in management research are, among others, Kathleen Eisenhardt, Constance Helfat, Margaret Peteraf, David Teece, and Sidney Winter. To support scholars to move toward a theory of dynamic capabilities, this bibliography provides an overview of the field, its origin and developments, while highlighting the conceptual and empirical problems that remain to be solved.

Identity Work in Organizations

As research on identity has expanded exponentially, the research on identity work has followed suit. Scholars of identity work focus on the underlying dynamics of identity with the recognition that one’s sense of self at a given time and in a given context is the result of an effortful, though not necessarily conscious, identity construction process. As research on identity work has grown, scholars have identified a wide array of ways in which individuals develop, grow, change, and exit their various identities. Further, while presumably all identities may be worked upon, some specific identities—such as gender, entrepreneur, manager, or professional—have been emphasized in the existing organizational literature. In addition, while, up to this point, the emphasis in the identity work research has typically been identifying the nature of changes to the self, a growing body of literature points to the individual, relational, and organizational implications of identity work.

Organizational Climate

The study of organizational climate has had a long history that in many ways mirrors the development of the fields of organizational psychology and organizational behavior, and demonstrates the critical role of the environment in individual and organizational effectiveness. High levels of interest in organizational climate, largely coming from researchers in psychology, contributed to the initial rise and early progress in our understanding of the construct in the late 1960s through the 1970s. A variety of concerns related to the definition and measurement of climate, along with the rise in interest in climate’s sibling construct of organizational culture, resulted in waning interest through the 1980s and much of the 1990s. However, with increasing sophistication in and understanding of multilevel theory and measurement in the late 1990s through the 2000s came a rebirth of interest in climate, with a particular emphasis on focused climates (e.g., safety climate or service climate) that continues to this day. This bibliography provides an overview of research on organizational climate, including climate measurement, the most common types of climate that are found in the research literature, and the major research findings on organizational climate.