Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior - Volume 5, 2018

This article reflects my observations about major changes in organizational behavior (OB) during my 50 years working in the field. I begin with a brief description of my personal journey as foundational for my perspective. I then discuss how the field has changed structurally and focus on the contributions of the Academy of Management (AoM) and the increasing diversity of our members, especially the increasing number of women, minorities, and people from countries other than the United States. The next section covers major research content changes in the field including positive scholarship, leadership, affective constructs, ethics, and the general well-being of those who toil in the organizational trenches. Additionally, there is a section on how the utilization of new statistical procedures and research methods has greatly expanded our ability to investigate and test complex theories and hypotheses about behavior in organizations. The discussion section highlights both the positive aspects of these developments along with some concerns about the future.

Although scholars in the field of organizational behavior have raised concerns about a lack of contextual appreciation, there has been a recent embrace of contextual thinking in the organizational sciences. In this review, I discuss several recent theories and measures of context. The added value of a contextual approach is illustrated by how context can shape personality, how it affects the emergence of work designs, and how it benefits the study of organizational demography. Future research topics include context cue sensitivity, the way context is shaped, the mediators of context effects, and the breadth and limits of contextual impact. A recurrent theme is that although context enables a demarcation of what is distinctive about situations, it also permits integration across research areas and levels of analysis, identifying what they have in common as settings for organizational behavior.

The promise and perils of heterogeneity in team member characteristics has been and continues to be one of the central questions in research on management teams. We review the literature on member heterogeneity within management teams, with a focus on summarizing and integrating research on both horizontal member differences (i.e., diversity) and vertical member differences (i.e., inequality)—two streams of research that have been largely separate in past research. We find that the overwhelming majority of research on management team heterogeneity has focused on horizontal differences, though there are few clear and consistent themes in empirical findings within either stream. We also find that horizontal and vertical differences are inter-related, such that the effects of diversity can depend critically on the degree of inequality within a team, and vice versa. Moreover, we find that our ability to clearly account for the effects of vertical and horizontal differences in management teams has been limited by a confusion of definitions and conceptualizations that hamper our ability to compare theoretical arguments and empirical findings across studies. We organize various conceptualizations of heterogeneity into six types based on whether a given conceptualization is concerned with horizontal or vertical differences (diversity or inequality) and whether it is focused on the differentiation, dispersion, or concentration of member differences. The result is a framework with three types of diversity (separation, variety, and skew) and three types of inequality (stratification, steepness, and centralization). Finally, we summarize different approaches to operationalizing each of these types. The conclusions and recommendations of this review can help to bring clarity and focus to research on member heterogeneity within management teams, or groups and teams of any sort.

This review addresses the three basic principles of person–environment fit theory: (a) The person and the environment together predict human behavior better than each of them does separately; (b) outcomes are most optimal when personal attributes (e.g., needs, values) and environmental attributes (e.g., supplies, values) are compatible, irrespective of whether these attributes are rated as low, medium, or high; and (c) the direction of misfit between the person and the environment does not matter. My review of person–job and person–organization fit research that used polynomial regression to establish fit effects provides mixed support for the explanatory power of fit. Individuals report most optimal outcomes when there is fit on attributes they rate as highest, and they report lowest outcomes when the environment offers less than they need or desire. Linking these findings to individuals' abilities and opportunities to adapt, I reconsider fit theory and outline options for future research and practice.

Over the past 30 years, conservation of resources (COR) theory has become one of the most widely cited theories in organizational psychology and organizational behavior. COR theory has been adopted across the many areas of the stress spectrum, from burnout to traumatic stress. Further attesting to the theory's centrality, COR theory is largely the basis for the more work-specific leading theory of organizational stress, namely the job demands-resources model. One of the major advantages of COR theory is its ability to make a wide range of specific hypotheses that are much broader than those offered by theories that focus on a single central resource, such as control, or that speak about resources in general. In this article, we will revisit the principles and corollaries of COR theory that inform those more specific hypotheses and will review research in organizational behavior that has relied on the theory.

How do self-direction and personal values influence career outcomes? Such questions have been central in research on the protean career—a career process characterized by the exercise of self-direction and an intrinsic values orientation in the pursuit of psychological success. This article provides an integrative review, with a focus on three empirically supported protean processes—identity awareness, adaptability, and agency. In addition, we discuss the role of protean careers in the contemporary work environment, clarify definitional and measurement issues, recommend research directions, and provide practical implications for organizations. Our underlying assumption throughout this discussion is that the elements of a protean career orientation (PCO) are basic elements of human needs for growth and meaning. In addition, we discuss how protean careers can be beneficial for organizations. In particular, we identify the “Protean Paradox” as a phenomenon that merits further investigation. More specifically, the protean paradox is a process by which greater levels of individual self-direction and values orientation, thus serving the purpose and interests of the individual, can also have a positive influence on the groups and organizations in which they work. Our recommendations for future research and practice promote these qualities in the contemporary world of work.

Laws designed to reduce employment discrimination and to regulate labor standards have a strong impact on the management of human resources in organizations. This article examines in detail the development and enforcement of antidiscrimination laws in the United States; it also considers comparable laws and policies in the European Union (EU). A significant body of research focuses on the standards that are used to determine whether particular policies or practices are discriminatory, and if so, whether they are sufficiently job-related to be legally permissible; here, I examine key themes in this research. This article also examines emerging issues, such as determining who is an applicant and who is an employee, and it explores the role of the legal environment in impeding the application of scientific knowledge to advance the practice of human resource management (HRM).

Despite an extensive history of research on status (the prestige, respect, and esteem that a party has in the eyes of others), the time is ripe for a new review of the status literature given a fairly recent trend to study the dynamic nature of status, that is, not just how individuals acquire status, but also how they maintain or lose it over time. Greater understanding of dynamic status processes better informs our predictions about individuals' behavior and group outcomes as a function of the kinds of status interactions that play out over time.

Transfer of training is one of the oldest topics of interest to industrial and organizational (I/O) psychologists. Drawing on several meta-analytic studies and recent empirical work, we first synthesize what is now reliably known with respect to the generalization and retention of learned knowledge and skills to work contexts. The second part of our review focuses on what is unknown—the significant gaps in our knowledge where we believe new directions in our research strategies are warranted. We offer three prescriptions: (a) going one step beyond most existing studies to offer greater precision in our specification and measurement of variables and interventions, (b) connecting the dots by focusing on transfer criteria and transfer trajectories, and (c) shifting the operative paradigm of research to examine contemporary learning from a problem-centered perspective. There is ample opportunity to increase the yield on enormous organizational investments in training if transfer scholars and practitioners are fully informed of what is known and prepared to systematically confront the unknown in new and innovative ways.

Women in the United States are making historic progress in business leadership, with research linking women's leadership representation to positive outcomes. However, men still dominate US leadership, raising several key questions. Is the United States closing the leadership gender gap? What organizational barriers perpetuate the gap? What facilitates women's leadership? We synthesized and extended US literature to develop a multilevel organizational model of Barriers And Facilitators of Female Leader Empowerment, called the “BAFFLE” Female Leadership Model to highlight the baffling complexities and limited success in solving the US leadership gender gap. The review found that literature narrowly focuses on barriers and offers limited insights about how to facilitate female leader empowerment while simultaneously addressing systemic, entrenched organizational barriers. We also used the World Economic Forum (WEF) Global Gender Gap Index to provide global perspective on the US leadership gender gap. Finally, we summarize findings and implications for practice and scholarship.

We review recent literature in the organizational sciences that uses some form of physiological measurement. We organize our review in terms of the underlying constructs that physiological measures were intended to assess. The majority of such constructs represents stress, health, or arousal, although these constructs are often studied in an attempt to understand a diverse set of other phenomena. The majority of the studies we discuss use peripheral measures of the autonomic nervous system or biological indicators of various physiological subsystems, such as the cardiovascular, metabolic, or immunological. Advances in instrumentation and biological assaying methods have made the use of physiological measures more feasible, and in some cases, affordable for researchers without specialized training in physiology. The significant challenges we discuss mostly concern issues of sampling and timing, as well as the careful selection of physiological indicators to fit the theoretical demands of the research.

For decades, the accepted view in organizational psychology was that job satisfaction and job performance were unrelated. However, recent years have found increasing evidence that satisfaction, while not strongly related to task productivity by individuals, is more closely related to a different kind of contribution, which is referred to as organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). Furthermore, research in the past two decades has enriched the theoretical and empirical knowledge base of OCB, examining its relationship to culture, attitudes, personality, mood state, stress, and organizational performance.

Pervasive forms of worldwide communication now connect us instantly and constantly, and yet we all too often fail to understand each other. Rather than benefiting from our globally interconnected reality, the world continues to fall back on divisiveness, a widening schism exacerbated by some of the most pronounced divisions in history along lines of wealth, culture, religion, ideology, class, gender, and race. Cross-cultural dynamics are rife within multinational organizations and among people who regularly work with people from other cultures. This article reviews what we know from our scholarship on cross-cultural interaction among expatriates, negotiators, and teams that work in international contexts. Perhaps more important, this article outlines what we need to learn—and to unlearn—to be able to see diversity as an asset in helping individuals, organizations, and society to succeed rather than continuing to understand it primarily as a source of problems.

This article updates our understanding of the field of job insecurity (JI) by incorporating studies across the globe since 2003, analyzes what we know, and offers ideas on how to move forward. We begin by reviewing the conceptualization and operationalization of job insecurity. We then review empirical studies of the antecedents, consequences, and moderators of JI effects, as well as the various theoretical perspectives used to explain the relationship of JI to various outcomes. Our analyses also consider JI research in different regions of the world, highlighting the cross-cultural differences. We conclude by identifying areas in need of future research. We propose that JI is and will continue to be a predominant employment issue, such that research into it will only increase in importance and relevance. In particular, we call for in-depth research that carefully considers the rapid changes in the workplace today and in the future.

The study of diversity in work groups and organizations has become a significant domain of inquiry. However, the overall consensus in this literature seems to be that a direct relationship between diversity and performance-based outcomes is tenuous at best. To break this impasse, we propose a structural-emergence model that emphasizes how the embedding structural context has substantial implications for the very meaning, salience, and content of diversity in teams. We then discuss how emergent processes that are a function of the structural context can take symmetric and asymmetric forms at the level of dyads within the team. In this way we provide a framework that takes into account both top-down and bottom-up effects of diversity in teams. The structural-emergence model also has important implications for how teams may be led and team tasks designed, and it provides avenues to build an actionable agenda for theory and research.

Over the last 15 years, there has been growing fascination among scholars in studying “dark behaviors” and “dark traits,” especially as they are expressed in organizational contexts. One taxonomy of dark traits that has garnered special interest is the dark triad (DT), which is comprised of three toxic and malevolent traits: psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism. This chapter offers a review of DT research, with a particular focus on research relevant to the organizational sciences. We begin with a definition of personality in general and the traits of the DT in particular, including a discussion of the clinical and subclinical variants of these traits. We then review literature linking the DT traits to an array of organizational outcomes, discuss how the DT traits may be assessed, and conclude with recommendations for future work.

Computer-aided text analysis (CATA) offers great promise for scholars who aspire to capture the beliefs, cognitions, and emotions of individuals as reflected in their narratives and written texts. We review advancements in the use of CATA in organizational studies and highlight the increased momentum towards incorporating rigor when using CATA. We review key CATA software and note the variance in possibilities of approaches when extracting meaning from languages. We then outline the potential for this technique to build knowledge surrounding organizational psychology and organizational behavior. Specifically, we highlight specific research streams that might benefit from the use of CATA and highlight cross-cultural perspectives that might further advance the use of this technique.

Conflict is an emotional enterprise. We provide an integrative synthesis of theory and research on emotional dynamics in conflict and negotiation at three levels of analysis: the individual, the dyad, and the group. At the individual level, experienced moods and emotions shape negotiators' cognition and behavior. At the dyadic level, emotional expressions influence counterparts' cognitive, affective, and behavioral responses. At the group level, patterns of emotional experience and/or expression can instigate cooperation, coordination, and conformity, or competition, conflict, and deviance. Intrapersonal (individual-level) effects of diffuse moods can be explained by affect priming and affect-as-information models, whereas effects of discrete emotions are better explained by the appraisal-tendency framework. Interpersonal (dyadic- and group-level) effects of emotions are mediated by affective (e.g., emotional contagion) and inferential (e.g., reverse appraisal) responses, whose relative predictive power can be understood through the lens of emotions as social information (EASI) theory. We offer a critical assessment of the current literature, discuss practical implications for negotiation and conflict management, and sketch an agenda for future research.