You’re an organization development practitioner-scholar: Can you contribute to organizational theory?

Mainstream organizational theorizing and the work of organization development (OD) practitioner-scholars have followed somewhat separate paths during the past decades. Currently, however, as illustrated in the development of evidence-based management and as exemplified by Van de Ven’s Engaged Scholarship, there is considerable interest among management scholars in enhanced academic–practitioner relationships. The contemporary situation offers possibilities for OD practitioner-scholars to forge much stronger links between their work and academic theory by means of facilitating academic– practitioner forums and developing skills in theorizing about them. This paper suggests some means for doing this

The gap between academics and practitioners is a reflection of the underlying tensions of academic belonging.

Jean M. Bartunek and Sara L. Rynes note the recent spike in journal articles across management scholarship seeking to address the divide between academics and practitioners. Whilst there remains relatively little empirical research focused on the issue of a gap, significant attention has been placed on understanding the variety of reasons for the divide. But what is being written probably reflects gaps within academia itself more than it reflects gaps between practitioners and academics. Discussion of the gap often signals underlying tensions about how much and where particular academics feel they belong or not

Loyal after the End: The Endurance of Organizational Identification

This paper develops and tests a model of the role of organizational identification in members’ propensity to express loyalty to a defunct organization through participation in activities that sustain its most valued elements. It also identifies four antecedent factors to organizational identification that can explain its persistence after formal organizational membership ends as well as the effects of loyalty behaviors. Survey results were analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling procedures. The resulting model demonstrated strong fit with the data according to several goodness-of-fit indices

Dynamics and Dilemmas of Women Leading Women

Through examination of transcripts of the first five leadership succession discussions that occurred in a work group designed to empower teachers we explored dynamics and dilemmas associated with women leading a women\u27s group based on feminist principles. We addressed three research questions: How is leadership, as reflected in leadership succession processes, experienced in such a group? What dynamics are associated with leadership succession in this type of group? What are outcomes of the process for members? Results indicated that the experience of leadership shifted considerably during the first six years of the group, with reflective images of leadership moving from the mythical to the pragmatic, from the powerful to the less powerful. Dynamics evolved in ways that were partially consistent and partially inconsistent with organizational life-cycle literature. The group experienced ambivalence and tension surrounding the type of authority given to designated leaders. Members dealt with discomfort by shifting the focus of the group coordinator\u27s attention to external relations and by rotating internal leadership responsibilities. This approach resolved tensions associated with authority and increased members\u27 senses of their own power, even as it decreased the range of initiative-taking that was implicitly allowable within the group. This analysis of leadership succession in a women\u27s group with an empowerment agenda offers a salient case for the study of dilemmas likely to be present in many change efforts. Its results suggest that attempting to resolve contradiction and tensions is less helpful than acknowledging them and working within them

Context and how it matters: Mobilizing spaces for organization-community sustainable change

There are growing expectations that organizations should contribute to the sustainability of our planet. These have increased recognition of relationships between organizations and their external communities and what they might accomplish together. However, such recognition does not extend to appreciation of the contextual dynamics inherent in organization–community relationships that affect their ability to reach common ground in their joint efforts. In this essay we explore how interpretive, relational, and spatial contextual features previously addressed within organizations play roles in joint organization–community sustainability efforts. We present an example of the multi-decade development of a local foods economy in Cleveland, Ohio, USA, that has been spearheaded by multiple communities and organizations. We show how an Appreciative Inquiry Summit, one of a set of large group interventions developed by Organization Development consultants, made use of the contextual characteristics we discuss to foster shared overarching logics that enabled collaboration. We conclude with a research agenda designed to explore how relational, interpretative, and spatial contexts affect organization–community initiatives to accomplish sustainability, how planned change interventions might affect these contexts, and how such initiatives and their contexts unfold over time. </jats:p

Senior managers’ sensemaking and responses to strategic change

Our longitudinal study of the sensemaking and responses to strategic change of the senior management team of a UK multinational subsidiary provides unusual data that enable us to explore the complexity of senior team change related sensemaking. We show senior teams to be distinct interpretive communities rather than one homogeneous category of change agents, as typically portrayed in change literature, who at times of center-led strategic change occupy a complex dual recipient/change agent role. By adopting a narrative approach, we show the shared sensemaking of such a team to be impacted by the locally differentiated nature of its interpretive and relational contexts, leading to context specific interpretations of center-led change and locally distinct responses, with consequences for change outcomes. We found that because of their dual role, senior managers construct two sets of interwoven and interacting change narratives which mediate the relationship between the wider organizational change and local change actions. Our analysis reveals how these evaluations of change, accompanied by affect, evolve over time and how they impact action. These findings contribute to existing theories of sensemaking and change by addressing the previously undertheorized relationship between senior management teams’ sensemaking and their responses to strategic change

Review research as scientific inquiry

This article and the related Feature Topic at Organizational Research Methods were motivated by the concern that despite the bourgeoning number and diversity of review articles, there was a lack of guidance on how to produce rigorous and impactful literature reviews. In this article, we introduce review research as a class of research inquiries that uses prior research as data sources to develop knowledge contributions for academia, practice and policy. We first trace the evolution of review research both outside of and within management including the articles published in this Feature Topic, and provide a holistic definition of review research. Then, we argue that in the plurality of forms of review research, the alignment of purpose and methods is crucial for high-quality review research. To accomplish this, we discuss several review purposes and criteria for assessing review research's rigor and impact, and discuss how these and the review methods need to be aligned with its purpose. Our paper provides guidance for conducting or evaluating review research and helps establish review research as a credible and legitimate scientific endeavor