Academy of Management Annals

When a person expresses an emotion at work, the way others respond can influence the work-related outcomes of the expresser, the responder, and their surrounding team and organization. Growing literature has generated insights into how, when, and why different emotion-response strategies influence work outcomes. However, this area of research is fragmented, with variance in labels, conceptualizations, and operationalizations, as well as a piecemeal treatment of context, leading to mixed findings. To provide coherence to this area of inquiry, we offer an integrative review of 220 articles, which form the basis for our inductive point of view. We develop a theoretical framework to show that the influence of emotion-response strategies on work outcomes depends on (a) the relative placement of the strategy within our two-dimensional landscape (characterized by the relative tendency of the strategy to get involved with and to change the expressed emotion) and (b) the specific nature of the context (including nexuses of contextual factors). Our framework yields several insights for future research, including the need to study discrete emotion-response strategies within a common theoretical landscape; to address “change bias,” as lower change-oriented strategies often positively affect outcomes yet remain understudied; and to provide more nuanced integrations of context.

Over the past two decades, necessity entrepreneurs—those who engage in entrepreneurship because of a belief that decent or desirable livelihood alternatives do not exist for them—have become increasingly visible in the entrepreneurship literature. During this time, however, necessity entrepreneurship—both the phenomenon and the theoretical construct—has acquired something of a bad name. As a phenomenon, necessity entrepreneurship is widely associated with capital constraints, marginal profits, and limited economic impact. As a theoretical construct, it is often seen as a crude and pejorative classification device. In this article, we take stock of this emerging body of research, providing an integrative account of extant research and a focused analysis of the main areas of discord within this literature. We set out specific pathways aimed at remediating incongruity between, on the one hand, how necessity entrepreneurship is defined and conceptualized and, on the other, how it manifests across the diverse array of real-world contexts that feature in this literature. We use these reflections to foreground an agenda for future research which is sensitized to the main concerns and critiques that have surfaced in this literature in recent years and to key shifts in the conceptual approach to which they have given rise.

Shareholder activism is an important driver of corporate change. Yet, the phenomenon has primarily been studied within disciplinary silos, providing only a partial understanding of the overarching process, the actors involved, the engagement approaches used, and the tangible outcomes of activism. Noting these limitations, the purpose of this review is threefold. First, we present an integrated account of the current state of cross-disciplinary knowledge on shareholder activism to identify what we know about different aspects of activist–firm engagements. Second, we use that account to develop a detailed map of the shareholder activism process, including how activists identify target firms, the engagement approaches used, the role of stakeholders’ varied reactions, and outcomes of activism campaigns. Third, after mapping this process, we propose that the cumulative interdependencies identified by shareholder activism researchers can be more fully understood as a complex, dynamic, and adaptive system. This system accounts for activists’ interdependence on other stakeholders, dynamic feedback loops whereby current campaigns affect future engagements, and strategic adaptive behaviors by firms and stakeholders over time. We use our system-level view of activism to identify a roadmap for future research that can more fully unpack the implications of shareholder activism on organizational and societal outcomes.

Management scholars and practitioners have a longstanding interest in expertise and its benefits for individuals, organizations, and markets. However, today, experts and expertise also face a significant and broad crisis of credibility, authority, and trust in society. In order to better examine, understand, and realize the potential of expertise in and around organizations, our field is overdue for a comprehensive review of recent work on the concept. With an integrative review of the past two decades of management research on expertise, we map out this fragmented field and outline three perspectives on the concept. A “realist perspective” sees expertise as a substantive ability of individuals, a “constructivist perspective” sees expertise as socially constructed quality of collective actors, and a “situationist perspective” sees expertise as a situated enactment involving human and nonhuman actors. These perspectives make different assumptions about the nature of expertise and therefore reach different conclusions about its benefits and problems. By teasing out similarities and differences across the perspectives, we work toward greater construct clarity and develop six integrative opportunities for future research. We conclude with suggestions about how each of the three perspectives can help us better understand the crisis of expertise.

Research in management and organizational studies has emphasized the importance and the double-edged nature of (a)typicality. Organizational objects that are atypical within a context - in terms of features, characteristics, or behaviors- tend to generate skepticism and encourage rejection by eliciting confusion among relevant audiences, including investors, employees, customers, and partners. However, atypicality is also often cited as a vital source of competitive advantage, as atypical actors and products can attract significant attention, innovate, and even promote structural change in a field. While research aimed at reconciling this inconsistency has accumulated rapidly, this literature has remained fragmentary and scattered across several disciplines, resulting in mixed views, conceptualizations, and perspectives. In this article, we systematically reviewed 129 papers to advance a conceptual model that helps to establish a comprehensive organizational perspective on atypicality. We a) identify three perspectives on atypicality: cognitive, normative, and innovative, b) develop an integrative framework that elaborates on the sources, consequences, and boundary conditions of atypicality, and c) highlight avenues for future studies on this topic. We hope that this review on atypicality will encourage and inform future scholarship in this fascinating domain and elucidate novel opportunities for unleashing the generative potential of this important construct.

In contrast to the prevailing interindividual and interactionist perspectives on (un)ethical behavior, recent research has demonstrated that employees can dynamically transition between ethical and unethical behavior as part of an intraindividual moral self-regulation process. We review over 300 empirical studies that examined within-person processes (e.g., moral licensing, moral cleansing, and slippery slope) as explanations for a variety of organizationally relevant behaviors (e.g., [un]ethical behavior, organizational citizenship behaviors, and counterproductive work behaviors). From our review, we develop a multistage model that integrates the influences of individual traits and contextual factors with intraindividual moral self-regulation processes. Combining findings from diverse research domains (e.g., management, psychology, marketing, and economics), we emphasize the importance of these factors in understanding the evaluation of initial and compensatory (un)ethical behavior, the selection of targets for compensatory behavior, and shifts in moral reference points. In doing so, we highlight conceptual, empirical, and methods-related contributions to this literature, and we identify paths for future research that integrates different perspectives on behavioral ethics.

Research on multisided platforms has emphasized how platform owners accumulate significant power over other platform actors, such as producers and customers, arguing for the need to balance such power with accountability. We review two perspectives on platform accountability: (a) a bottom-up, emergent perspective that focuses on the collective action taken by lower-powered platform actors such as producers (e.g., gig workers, app developers) to enhance rule adequacy and push back against platform owners’ power; and (b) a top-down, institutional perspective that emphasizes preventing extractive opportunism and maintaining a level playing field among different platform actors by enabling legal, regulatory, and governance changes. The bottom-up perspective’s overarching focus is on procedural (rule-focused) fairness, while the top-down perspective’s focus is largely on distributive (outcome-focused) fairness. While both perspectives are important, they have limitations regarding platform accountability, especially given the power and informational asymmetries inherent among platform actors. Therefore, synthesizing across literatures, we provide a framework for platform accountability that accounts for both procedural and distributive fairness, and is based on a fundamental premise: multisided platforms require multisided accountability systems. Thus, our review proposes an approach for enforcing platform accountability that has the potential to rebalance the power between high-powered and low-powered platform actors.

Urgent societal issues require corporations to make changes and contribute solutions. Insider social change agents are uniquely poised to propel this work. Operating from within their workplaces, they can advance changes that are linked to external social concerns but have purposes distinct from the organization’s core strategies and operations. They undertake mobilization activities, making local moves that aim toward more broadly impactful changes. These efforts form the micro-foundations of organizational approaches to positive social change. We review and integrate five streams in which such insider social change agents have increasingly appeared: employee activism, issue selling, tempered radicalism, micro-corporate social responsibility, and social intrapreneurship. Our framework maps the features of change efforts, with elements of persons, issues, places, activities, and outcomes. With a shared framework, researchers can better characterize the multiplicity of insider change efforts and ascertain how they compare, collaborate, or compete. Research will benefit from taking a more integrative view, especially toward the aim of understanding how local efforts aggregate to broader social impacts. To understand how change is inhibited or supported, future research can theorize blockers of societal change alongside insider social change agents and look to the ecosystem level for reciprocal and amplifying processes.

Crowdfunding, or soliciting small contributions from large and dispersed crowds through online platforms, is an increasingly indispensable strategy for established firms, young ventures, and aspiring entrepreneurs alike. Synthesizing research in the fields of management, entrepreneurship, innovation, operations, information systems, and marketing, we conduct an integrative review of the crowdfunding research accumulated over the past decade. We aim to break down disciplinary silos to develop a framework that integrates insights across research communities. We identify three underlying dimensions that differentiate extant research: the goal of the campaigner, the role of the crowd, and the boundary of the crowdfunding event. Scholars have brought two perspectives to bear on these questions: an elemental perspective and a processual perspective. We outline an integrative model that takes account of crowdfunding as a process involving heterogeneous participants with idiosyncratic monetary and nonmonetary goals at different stages. Our multidisciplinary review of this expanding body of literature not only integrates dispersed insights but also, more importantly, stimulates a future research agenda that goes beyond the traditional boundaries of crowdfunding research.