Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior - Current Issue

My research journey was completely unexpected. I never envisioned becoming a professor, or still working after more than 40 years. I discuss this journey in terms of how events unfolded without much planning, in hopes of encouraging others to accomplish more than they believe they can. Since I have had a long career, I also discuss some ways in which the field of management has changed and how these present challenges to our field in the future. It is my contention that the field benefits most from good scholars doing good work on topics that interest them, and not by scholars learning how to game the system or worrying too much about which journals “count.” I also discuss some differences I experience being associated with both the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) and the Academy of Management. I conclude on an optimistic note pointing out various efforts to address some of the challenges I outlined.

Despite recognition of the harmful effects of common method bias (CMB), its causes, consequences, and remedies are still not well understood. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to review our current knowledge of CMB and provide recommendations on how to control it. We organize our review into five main sections. First, we explain the harmful effects of CMB (why it is bad). Second, we discuss the complexity caused by the fact that there are multiple sources of CMB, several of which are likely to be present in any study. Third, we present evidence that the conditions under which CMB is likely to occur are relatively widespread, and fourth, we explain why CMB is not easy to fix. Finally, we identify several avenues for future research.

We review theory and research on how work events and experiences influence employee well-being, with a particular focus on the day-to-day effects of positive events and experiences. Then we discuss how employees can amplify the beneficial effects of work on well-being by savoring and reflecting upon positive events and experiences from work, and by capitalizing on them via interpersonal means, such as sharing work events and experiences with others. We integrate theory and research on savoring and interpersonal capitalization within affective events theory and the broader job demands–resources (JD-R) theory—and we explain how these approach-oriented agentic strategies that employees can easily use to derive additional psychological benefits from work experiences can extend JD-R theory. Specifically, we discuss how using these strategies can build additional resources, fulfill employees’ basic psychological needs, and make their jobs more meaningful, thereby enhancing well-being at the day-to-day level and in the long term.

The study of motivation in and of teams has flourished and expanded over the past few decades. We now have a better understanding of core motivational processes at the individual and team levels of analysis, along with cross-level processes through which individuals and teams influence each other. However, societal, cultural, economic, and technological changes have led to new forms of team-based designs and teaming strategies in work organizations. In this article we review five major changes to the nature of teams and teaming and identify fruitful avenues for future research that can generate new and important knowledge about the motivation of individuals in teams as well as the motivation of team systems as wholes.

Drawing on 50 years of research, this article defines workaholism as involving high motivation (e.g., being driven to work due to internal pressures) as well as high effort expenditure (e.g., having persistent thoughts about work when not working and working beyond what can reasonably be expected). Workaholism can be distinguished from concepts such as work engagement, work passion, and Type-A behavior, and valid workaholism measures are available. Regarding its antecedents, demographic and personality factors are weakly related to workaholism. Work-related factors (such as the presence of an overwork culture and high job demands) are more important. Workaholism may have adverse outcomes for a worker's mental and physical health, well-being, and family life. Workaholics do not perform better (but may well perform worse) than others. Although many interventions have been put forward to address workaholism, the effects of these are usually unclear. We conclude with a short agenda for future research.

Leadership emergence is an inherently dynamic process whereby certain individuals come to be seen as leaders by others, some of whom will choose to follow them. The circumstances under which leadership emergence occurs depend on the persons involved, their interactions, and the context. Yet leadership research has too often viewed leadership emergence from a static and entity perspective, where some individuals are assumed to have qualities that predispose them to lead, without explaining how and why emergence occurs. Alternatively, we apply a typology that examines leadership emergence across levels of analysis (event, individual, dyadic, group, and organizational) and forms of emergence (global, compositional, and compilational). We examine representative theories of leadership emergence at the intersections of these considerations to demonstrate the utility of adopting a multilevel and dynamic perspective. Additionally, we offer recommendations for applying this typology to advance future theory and research into leadership emergence.

Despite important advances, gender-based discrimination continues to hinder women's career progress. This review examines the role that gender stereotypes play in promoting gender bias and discrimination. After reviewing what is known about the content of gender stereotypes and examining both their descriptive and prescriptive aspects, we discuss two pathways through which stereotypes result in discrepant work outcomes for women and men. First, we consider how the characterization of women as communal but not agentic conflicts with the perceived demands of many male gender-typed jobs and fields, thus promoting perceptions of women's lack of competence in those areas. Second, we consider how norms about how women should and should not behave cause women to incur penalties when they exhibit counter-stereotypical attributes and behaviors at work. Our review further focuses on the conditions that foster or undercut gender bias and discrimination and uses this knowledge as a foundation for proposing strategies to promote more egalitarian organizational processes.

Remote work is typically characterized as work that is done at some physical distance from the office. Existing research has shown that the main elements of this characterization—physical distance and the office—are far more complex than most people realize. This review develops a framework that refracts the concept of remote work into four types of distance—psychological, temporal, technological, and structural—and three objects from which one can be distant—material resources, social resources, and symbolic resources. We then use this refraction framework to answer five questions about the way remote work is changing the future of work: (a) Who will work remotely? (b) Where will people work remotely? (c) When will people work remotely? (d) Why will people work remotely? and (e) How will people work remotely? After demonstrating how existing research can help us answer these questions, we discuss important avenues for future investigation.

The relationship between work attitudes such as satisfaction and commitment and behaviors such as task effort, citizenship behavior, absenteeism, job search, and turnover is a perennial focus of organizational research. Over time we have learned a great deal about why, how, and when attitudes predict work behavior, but new questions and theories continue to proliferate. With this review, we aim to synthesize existing organizational literature on attitudes and behavior, focusing on how the field can be organized using principles from Ajzen & Kruglanski's (2019) theory of reasoned goal pursuit. The accumulated evidence answers longstanding questions while simultaneously raising new ones related to the link between general attitudes and specific behavior; the proximal effect of intentions; the role of goals, social contexts, and behavioral control; and the dynamic processes among attitudes, environments, and behavior. We also suggest applications of our organizing framework to enhance future work attitudes and behavior research.

Reputations are immensely consequential for both people and organizations. Yet research on reputations in the workplace is fragmented across a number of literatures. In this article, we first review conceptual and definitional issues surrounding the study of reputations in the workplace. We then summarize several theoretical frameworks for studying reputations drawing from the literature on accuracy and errors in person perception, surveying the Realistic Accuracy Model, Self-Other Knowledge Asymmetry model, impression management, socioanalytic theory, social cognition, stereotypes, gossip, and culture. We present the Trait-Reputation-Identity model as a framework for integrating these disparate literatures. Next, we discuss broad areas where workplace reputations may impact individual and organizational outcomes including job performance, career success, and well-being. We conclude by offering a number of observations regarding the state of the literature on reputations and prospects for contributing to organizational psychology and organizational behavior.

Religion and spirituality strongly influence how most people experience the world, and opportunities to integrate faith and work abound. Yet research on religion, spirituality, and the workplace continues to have somewhat limited impact on mainstream organizational psychology and organizational behavior research. We review the most recent generation of research in this area. We describe high-level trends in the literature and summarize consistent patterns of results linking these constructs with usually beneficial attitudinal, behavioral, and other types of criterion variables. We identify four challenges that hamper progress in this area of research: conceptualizing and measuring core constructs, finding coherence amid theoretical diversity, integrating multiple levels of analysis and explanation, and navigating religion and spirituality in organizational practice. All of these challenges point to paths forward that may usher in a new wave of scholarship using meaning systems as an integrative framework, and practices that foster inclusion, integration, and both individual and organizational well-being.

Models of work design emerged in the twentieth century to address workplace changes created by the industrial revolution. However, the world of work is currently undergoing a new, profound revolution in terms of technological, demographic, and environmental changes, leading to a new economy, within which organizations and employees must function. The field of work design currently includes robust theories with a deep understanding of how work design affects employee outcomes, many with relevance to this new economy. However, the new economy also includes issues never before considered (e.g., algorithmic management and gig and lone work), and the field of work design must tackle the implications of these emerging issues. In this article, we review the general findings on work design and then examine a range of contextual, economic, technological, and diversity issues and their relevance to work design. We conclude with an agenda for future work design research and implications for work analysis and work design interventions and policies.

More than half of the global population now uses social media. This technological ubiquity has transformed the way that individuals communicate and engage with the world around them, and consequently has had drastic effects on modern work. In the 20 years since early social media platforms such as LinkedIn and Myspace were first launched, much research on the consequences of social media has been conducted in the fields of organizational psychology and organizational behavior. In this article, we review this body of literature, highlighting the ways that social media has changed modern work, both in changing organizational behavior and human resource management and in changing the nature of work itself. We detail ethical, legal, and practical challenges that have arisen in this changing landscape and conclude with recommendations for additional research on this topic.

The emergence of gig work (e.g., freelancing, rideshare driving, food and parcel delivery, travel nursing, virtual assistantship) and the gig economy challenges organizational researchers to consider how they should revise traditional theories of work behavior to consider the dynamics of new work arrangements. As a prime example that is central to this review, organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) is a form of job performance whereby motives stem from the quality of work relationships with direct supervisors, coworkers, and other organizational agents. However, gig workers experience very different work relationships and may perform OCB for different reasons (if at all). In this review, we address the question of how OCB theory should evolve to be relevant to gig workers. We summarize traditional motives for OCB performance and review current research describing and classifying gig work. We conclude by (a) identifying gig worker citizenship (GWC) as a form of citizenship behavior that better fits the reality of gig work and (b) offering a revised model of how OCB motives may help predict GWC performance.

Global talent management (GTM) refers to management activities in a multinational enterprise (MNE) that focus on attracting, motivating, deploying, and retaining high performing and/or high potential employees in strategic roles across a firm's global operations. Despite the critical importance for individual and firm outcomes, scholarly analysis and understanding lack synthesis, and there is limited evidence that MNEs are managing their talent effectively on a global scale. In this article, we review the GTM literature and identify the challenges of implementing GTM in practice. We explore how GTM is aligned with MNE strategy, examine how talent pools are identified, and highlight the role of global mobility. We discuss GTM at the macro level, including the exogenous factors that impact talent management and the outcomes of GTM at various levels. Finally, we identify some emerging challenges and opportunities for the future of GTM.

Economic sources of stress are some of the most pervasive and significant in adults’ working lives. However, while the link between economic stress and health is well established, some forms of economic stress have received disproportionately less attention than they warrant in organizational psychology and organizational behavior scholarship. In this review, we identify five important domains of economic stress: financial stress, financial deprivation, unemployment, underemployment, and job insecurity. We review each area of literature, focusing on its antecedents, theoretical mechanisms, and consequences. We then highlight an emerging body of research that studies economic stress as a multilevel phenomenon and present a framework for economic stress interventions that discusses primary, secondary, and tertiary interventions at the individual, organizational, and community levels. We conclude by identifying several important directions for future economic stress research.

The goal of person-centered methods is to identify subpopulations of individuals based on within-group similarity of data relative to between-group variability. In this article, we provide an overview of specific person-centered methods, thus shifting the attention from studying relations between variables to studying relations between people or entities of interest. Next, we present a selective and critical review of recent research utilizing person-centered modeling approaches, highlighting key trends in the organizational psychology and organizational behavior literature from both the methodological and the conceptual perspectives. Lastly, we conclude with reflections and recommendations, highlighting several areas that need careful consideration when conducting person-centered research.

Norm violations can not only cause harm but also contribute to the well-being of organizations. During the last several decades, two different foci of research on workplace norm violations have generated a host of empirical studies on both constructive and destructive norm-violating behavior (NVB). However, the two closely related bodies of literature have remained in almost complete isolation from each other. Our conceptual review seeks to kindle a new perspective to better understand the general concept of NVB in organizations by combining the bifurcated silos of both constructive and destructive NVB. By conducting a systematic literature review of research on workplace NVBs over the past 30 years, we synthesize the major research findings on both constructive and destructive deviance into a general framework and examine the major antecedents, moderators, mediators, and outcomes as they fit within the major theoretical perspectives. Moreover, we study the commonalities of constructive and destructive NVB, focusing especially on the overlapping and dynamic relationships between the two concepts. To conclude, we propose new lines of inquiry for future research to assist academics and practitioners in understanding and managing different forms of organizational norm violations.

This article provides a critical review of developments in the literature on career success. We review work from both the organizational psychology (OP) and organizational behavior (OB) disciplines, highlighting the different perspectives, strengths, and weaknesses of each area, and attempt to reconcile these perspectives on career success to suggest productive new research directions. First, the article reflects on conceptualizations of objective and subjective career success and their relative value to the field. We then discuss several categories of career success predictors drawn from economic, sociological, and social-psychological perspectives used in OP and OB. These include human capital, internal and external labor markets, sponsorship and social capital, stable and malleable individual differences, and career self-management behaviors. We provide research suggestions within each of those sections as well as an integrative research agenda built around several emerging issues and theoretical perspectives, encouraging future research on the implications of sustainable careers, career shocks, marginalized group experiences, and alternative employment arrangements for career success.