Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior - Volume 10, 2023

This article describes my journey as an organizational behavior scholar, including reflections on the state of the field of organizational scholarship. I organize the article into two main sections. First, I provide my autobiographical review, beginning with my early years and ending with the five universities where I have been employed in my career. Second, I provide a set of observations about the state of the organizational sciences, focusing specifically on the two areas of my most significant focus—personality and leadership—as well as offering some general observations about the field. The organizational sciences have seen many positive advances: Research is more rigorous theoretically and methodologically, and more concern is devoted to replication and research ethics. However, partly owing to prioritizing these advancements over other concerns, new problems have developed, and other long-standing concerns have been exacerbated. I discuss my own changing perspectives on these issues and present some thoughts on how they might be addressed.

Burnout refers to a work-related state of exhaustion and a sense of cynicism. In contrast, work engagement is a positive motivational state of vigor, dedication, and absorption. In this article, we discuss the concepts of burnout and work engagement and review their antecedents and consequences. We look back at our inaugural Annual Reviews article (Bakker et al. 2014) and highlight new empirical findings and theoretical innovations in relationship to job demands–resources (JD-R) theory. We discuss four major innovations of the past decade, namely (a) the person × situation approach of JD-R, (b) multilevel JD-R theory, (c) new proactive approaches in JD-R theory, and (d) the work–home resources model. After discussing practical implications, we elaborate on more opportunities for future research, including JD-R interventions, team-level approaches, and demands and resources from other life domains.

Since its renaissance in the 1990s, psychological safety research has flourished—a boom motivated by recognition of the challenge of navigating uncertainty and change. Today, its theoretical and practical significance is amplified by the increasingly complex and interdependent nature of the work in organizations. Conceptual and empirical research on psychological safety—a state of reduced interpersonal risk—is thus timely, relevant, and extensive. In this article, we review contemporary psychological safety research by describing its various content areas, assessing what has been learned in recent years, and suggesting directions for future research. We identify four dominant themes relating to psychological safety: getting things done, learning behaviors, improving the work experience, and leadership. Overall, psychological safety plays important roles in enabling organizations to learn and perform in dynamic environments, becoming particularly relevant in a world altered by a global pandemic.

Over the past decade, hundreds of studies have been published on employee voice and silence. In this review, I summarize that body of work, with an emphasis on the progress that has been made in our understanding of when and why employees choose to speak up or remain silent, as well as the individual and organizational implications of these choices. I identify underexplored issues, limitations in how voice has been conceptualized and studied, and promising avenues for future research. Although there has been notable progress in our knowledge of voice and silence, numerous key questions remain, and there are opportunities for the literature on voice to adopt a broader view of that construct. One of the objectives of this review is to motivate and guide research that will address those questions and explore that broader view.

Individual and team creativity and innovation are essential for organizational effectiveness and success. The typology we developed in 2014 has stimulated much research in the past decade. We review this body of work and structure our article around the four quadrants described in our typology. We then revisit and update the eight research recommendations we proposed previously, identifying rich opportunities for developing theory and conceiving empirical studies. Finally, we highlight four desirable directions that help to chart the path for conducting frame-breaking research and accelerating theoretical breakthroughs.

We review the research on the psychology of entrepreneurship of the last decade. We focus on two key topics in entrepreneurship research: action and process. Combining action and process in a model of the psychology of entrepreneurship, we present the action theory process model of entrepreneurship and use it as a guiding framework for the review. We discuss theories of action, such as effectuation/causation, bricolage, theory of planned behavior, and action theory. Furthermore, we adopt a process perspective to discuss antecedents of actions in terms of cognition, motivation, and emotion and how they develop during the entrepreneurial process. The process perspective considers recursive relationships and dynamic changes in actions and their antecedents over time. We conclude that the action theory process model is a useful starting point to explain the psychological dynamics of entrepreneurship.

Although traditional views of workplace stress assume that all job demands have deleterious consequences, research indicates that some job demands may benefit employees. Notably, the Challenge–Hindrance Stressor Framework (CHSF) proposes that, although job demands that constrain, hinder, or thwart personal growth and achievement (hindrance stressors) have negative effects on work-related outcomes, job demands that provide the potential for personal growth and achievement (challenge stressors) have positive effects on these outcomes. Despite the attention generated by the CHSF, several criticisms and limitations hinder the potential of this framework. Thus, this article reviews our current understanding of the CHSF, addresses important criticisms about the nature and effects of challenge and hindrance stressors, and discusses how future research should approach conceptual and methodological challenges to lay the foundation for the next iteration of this framework—CHSF 2.0. Building on this new framework, we discuss some implications for cross-cultural research and for practitioners.

There is no situation where leadership is more important than during a crisis, and yet crisis leadership is a relatively underdeveloped field. This article explores what we know and what remains unknown about crisis leadership. We begin with an overview of what crises are, including different types and key dynamics of crises. We then review four leadership theories that offer insights into crisis leadership before elucidating five key competencies for crisis leadership. Three distinct avenues for future research are proposed, including exploring the distinctions and intersections of crisis leadership and crisis management, the cross-national and intercultural implications for leading through crises, and the role of ethics in leading well through crisis. Crises are increasingly frequent and complex, warranting a concerted effort to research, teach, and develop good crisis leadership.

Meta-analysis provides a powerful tool for integrating findings from the research literature and building statistical models to explore trends and inconsistencies in the research base. Meta-analysis starts with a process for translating results from each study into an effect size that represents all findings in a common metric. Statistical models are then applied to estimate the mean, variance, and moderators of effect size. This article explores several key decision points in conducting a meta-analysis, including issues in obtaining a common metric, accounting for psychometric artifacts, and choosing an appropriate statistical model. It provides recommendations for choosing among alternate approaches and reporting results to ensure transparency.

Self-awareness—how we see ourselves and the effects we have on our environment—influences our behavior and the type of person we want to become. This article examines recent research and areas of practice that address the meaning of self-awareness and how it develops over time. We build on extant comprehensive reviews of the literature to define self-awareness and its accuracy, measurement, and effects, including the dark side of being overly introspective. We offer a framework to integrate theory-based processes. We present the results of a literature search of educational interventions aimed at increasing mindfulness through reflection, feedback, and coaching. We conclude with calls for research and implications for practice in areas of measurement, tracking changes, interventions, and self in relation to others in areas of societal impact, self-presentation on digital media, and promoting self-awareness in relation to organization and team membership.

Emerging from distinct perspectives, decent work and meaningful work are fundamental aspects of contemporary work with profound implications for individuals, organizations, and society. Decent work reflects basic workplace conditions to which all employees are entitled, whereas meaningful work is aspirational, reflecting significance at work. Following a conceptual and empirical review of scholarship on decent work and meaningful work, we draw from psychology of working theory to connect the two constructs. We argue that need satisfaction serves as the primary connector, and societal context, organizational conditions, and individual practices (in order of effectiveness) promote access to each type of work. We suggest future research directions broadening the available scholarship and methods used, promoting a focus on the complex intersection of macrolevel and psychological factors as well as interdisciplinary approaches in determining the quality of work, and engaging in intervention research to improve the way in which people live and work together.

Technology has changed the way that organizational researchers obtain participants for their research studies. Although technology has facilitated the collection of large quantities of data through online platforms, it has also highlighted potential data quality issues for many of our samples. In this article, we review different sampling techniques, including convenience, purposive, probability-based, and snowball sampling. We highlight strengths and weaknesses of each approach to help organizational researchers choose the most appropriate sampling techniques for their research questions. We identify best practices that researchers can use to improve the quality of their samples, including reviewing screening techniques to increase the quality of online sampling. Finally, as part of our review we examined the sampling procedures of all empirical research articles published in the Journal of Applied Psychology in the past 5 years, and we use observations from these results to make conclusions about the lack of methodological and sample diversity in organizational research, the overreliance on a few sampling techniques, the need to report key aspects of sampling, and concerns about participant quality.

The growth in virtual work is reshaping how leaders interface with their followers: Face-to-face interactions are increasingly being supplanted by virtual exchanges. To advance understanding of the implications of leading in this changing environment, we apply functional leadership theory to synthesize the findings of the virtual leadership research that has been conducted across different leadership perspectives and levels of analysis. We identify four traditional leadership functions that empirical research suggests have a stronger effect on follower need satisfaction in virtual settings and highlight a new function—facilitate the use of technology—as particularly germane to virtual leadership. Our review reveals several promising future research directions, including the need to examine the effects of leadership along the full spectrum of virtuality and to consider the unique challenges that leaders may encounter in hybrid work environments. We also outline important practical implications for organizations, leaders, and their followers.

The increasing societal awareness of employee mental health issues, especially within the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, has led to a great deal of research examining the occupational predictors and outcomes of mental ill health. The consequences of employee mental illness can be significant to organizations, whereas providing employee mental health resources may offer a competitive advantage. This article provides a review of the definitions of employee mental health, the costs of employee mental illness to organizations and to society as a whole, and the role of the workplace in promoting positive mental health, preventing mental illness, intervening to address employee mental ill health, and accommodating employees experiencing mental health challenges. We present recommendations for future research and implications for practice.

It is difficult to draw definitive conclusions about the workplace impact of race from the organizational psychology and organizational behavior literature. Topical coverage is spotty and the findings are fragmented, with little existing theory to orient, integrate, and reconcile them. Consequently, it is unsurprising that public opinion is highly divergent about the influence of race at work, and practitioners are left largely unassisted in determining evidence-based approaches to leveraging this form of difference among their personnel. To fill this void, we review the relevant findings through the lens of organizational justice to help clarify the impact of race on organizational experiences. Our findings suggest that justice indeed varies as a function of race, the magnitude of differences depends on the type of justice, and there are several potentially fruitful areas for additional inquiry.

Innovation, and the creative thinking that provides the basis for innovation, is of great value for organizations. In this article we describe what is needed for people to think creatively, noting that creative thinking is a complex, albeit voluntary, activity involving performance on certain types of problems. The ways leaders influence peoples’ willingness to engage in, and ability to solve, creative problems are then described. Leaders of creative efforts must not only motivate creative work but also actively contribute to creative problem-solving both by engaging followers in creative problem-solving and by establishing the conditions that allow creative problem-solving at the individual, team, and firm levels. The implications of these observations for leader assessment and leader development are discussed.

It is difficult to fathom how an organization could be successful without its employees engaging in self-reflection. Gone would be its personnel's capacity to problem-solve, learn from past experiences, and engage in countless other introspective activities that are vital to success. Indeed, a large body of research highlights the positive value of reflection. Yet, as both common experience and a wealth of findings demonstrate, engaging in this introspective process while focusing on negative experiences often backfires, undermining people's health, well-being, performance, and relationships. Here we synthesize research on the benefits and costs of self-reflection in organizational contexts and discuss the role that psychological distance plays in allowing people to harness the potential of self-reflection while avoiding its common pitfalls.

Environmental sustainability has become an ethical and strategic imperative for organizations, and more and more employees are interested, encouraged, or instructed to act in environmentally sustainable ways. Consequently, organizational scholars have increasingly studied individual-level antecedents of employee pro-environmental or employee green behavior (EGB). We argue that, to advance this literature and to inform effective interventions, research should investigate how EGB, as a compound performance domain, is associated with antecedents and consequences at multiple levels (i.e., individual, team, work context, organization, society). Accordingly, we pursue three interrelated goals with this review. We first present a comprehensive review of research on EGB, including definitions, theoretical frameworks, methodological approaches, and empirical findings. Second, we develop an integrative conceptual model of EGB as the core of organizational environmental sustainability. Third, we conclude with recommendations for future theory development and methodological improvements, as well as practical implications for employees, leaders, and human resource management.

The use of structural equation modeling (SEM) has grown substantially over the past 40 years within organizational research and beyond. There have been many different developments in SEM that make it increasingly useful for a variety of data types, research designs, research questions, and research contexts in the organizational sciences. To give researchers a better understanding of how and why SEM is used, our article (a) presents a review of SEM applications within organizational research; (b) discusses SEM best practices; and (c) explores advanced SEM applications, including instrumental variable methods, latent variable interactions and nonlinear measurement models, multilevel SEM, cross-lagged panel models and dynamic structural equation models, and meta-analytic SEM. We conclude by discussing concerns and debates that are both methodological (i.e., cross-validation and regularization) and theoretical (i.e., understanding causal evidence) as they relate to SEM and its application in organizational research and beyond.