The Occupational Information Network (O*NET) is a database of occupational descriptors sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor. Since its release around the turn of the century, O*NET has taken on a broad and important role in management and organizational research as a key data source for occupational characteristics. It is common practice for researchers to combine or adapt descriptors from O*NET’s content model to measure constructs that O*NET does not capture directly (e.g., job complexity, emotional labor demands). This practice has enabled a great deal of research and poses potential extensions to O*NET’s content model, but has also come with challenges, including the proliferation of redundant measures with varying levels of validation. The purpose of this review is to synthesize the studies using O*NET-based measures and curate a database of measures with considerable evidence supporting their validity. In doing so, we contribute to the literature in three ways: (1) we introduce an extended content model that we call “O*NET Plus” and offer it as an expanded organizing framework for occupational description; (2) we review evidence for the psychometric soundness of O*NET Plus measures, highlight those with considerable evidence, and amass these measures in a central location to offer a “one-stop-shop” for researchers looking to leverage O*NET Plus; and (3) we offer guidance and implications for further expansions to O*NET Plus.
Contexts of adversity generate a wide range of challenges that expose entrepreneurs to compounding hardship yet paradoxically stimulate entrepreneurship as a means of regaining control. Existing research often portrays adversity in two distinct ways, either as a one-time disruptive event or as a persistent condition of the same underlying hardship, overlooking how adversity increasingly unfolds as chronic adversity compounded by multiple acute shocks—a setting that characterizes the lived reality of many entrepreneurs in today’s turbulent world. In such contexts, entrepreneurial resilience is not oriented toward recovery or thriving but toward enduring recurring crises, resource scarcity, and persistent uncertainty. We conducted an inductive, longitudinal study of 32 displaced entrepreneurs living in conflict-affected regions of Iraq. Our analysis reveals a process model of rhythmic resilience in a context of chronic adversity compounded by acute shocks. We show that resilience unfolds through dynamic cycles of withdrawal, reengagement, and adaptation over time that sustain survival across household, venture, and community levels. Yet these processes entail difficult trade-offs, giving rise to a resilience–survival paradox in which entrepreneurs protect survival at the expense of personal well-being, business growth, and social ties.
Stakeholder theory emphasizes value creation for diverse stakeholders, yet it offers limited guidance for understanding how value is created when a firm’s and a stakeholder’s values differ. We reconceptualize firm–stakeholder relationships as dynamic processes in which value accumulates through the engagement and resolution of value dissonance. Drawing on tonal harmony from music theory, we develop a framework that treats dissonance not as a defect to be eliminated but as generative pressure for value creation. The framework evaluates value dissonance at the issue level and aggregates tension at the relationship level, enabling systematic assessment of where firms can productively intervene. We then theorize three mechanisms through which firms convert dissonance into value: managerial intervention, structural resolution, and timing. Our central insight is that value emerges from the sequenced movement between tension and release. This dynamic perspective advances stakeholder theory by explaining how value can be created across the full stakeholder portfolio, including relationships that firms might otherwise avoid, suppress, or attempt to force into alignment.
We identify a divide between two schools of thought in leadership behavior research. The classical behavioral school (CBS) categorizes leadership behaviors based on their latent functions and meanings—task, relations, change, and moral—with the aim of achieving intersubjective agreement among evaluators. In contrast, the neo-behavioral school (NBS) focuses on the observable forms and manifestations of behavior—choices, embodiment, interactions, textual markers, and temporal patterns—in the pursuit of objective description. In this article, we conduct a metasynthesis to systematically describe, evaluate, and integrate these two schools. We identify their distinct research logics, showing that CBS categories enable cross-contextual generalization but conflate behavioral description with evaluative judgment, thereby risking causal indeterminacy and limiting actionability. Conversely, NBS approaches enable causally well-determined analyses of what leaders concretely do but risk reductionism and limited generalizability of meaning when studied in isolation. Building on this analysis, we identify school-specific best practices and distinguish limitations that can be mitigated within each school from those that require cross-school integration. We then develop an integrative framework that assigns distinct causal roles to concrete behavioral manifestations and to evaluations of their function and meaning, explicating how leadership behaviors acquire meaning across contexts and how CBS evaluations emerge as downstream consequences of NBS-specified behavioral aspects and various contextual factors. Finally, we propose a generative research agenda that advances leadership behavior research across schools of thought. The framework also has practical implications, enabling behaviorally grounded leadership development through actionable feedback, as well as more equitable and evidence-based leadership selection anchored in observable behavior.
Compared to fathers, mothers take significantly more time off work after childbirth to care for infants and are more likely not to return to paid employment. To better understand these gendered outcomes, research on return-to-work after childbirth has grown exponentially. We conduct an interdisciplinary, systematic review of 303 articles to illuminate and compare the factors influencing mothers’ and fathers’ return-to-work decisions and their outcomes. This research reveals a complex web of factors that affect return-to-work and provides comprehensive evidence of the gendered dynamics that parents face. Based on this review, we synthesize existing research and explore alternative theoretical explanations for the persistent gender disparities in return-to-work. In this process, we identify and evaluate four key theoretical lenses, outlining the themes they address, their underlying assumptions, and their potential limitations: 1) the economic and human capital lens, 2) the resource and support lens, 3) the gender role and identity lens, and 4) the health and well-being lens. We conclude by highlighting the remaining gaps in understanding and propose a novel capability-based research agenda to guide future policy, organizational strategies, and support for families navigating return-to-work decisions after childbirth.
Social support is widely promoted as a key organizational response to employee mental health challenges, yet management research has often overlooked how different sources of support—such as coworkers, line managers, senior leadership, and professional service providers—vary in their effects on employee recovery. This oversight is especially consequential for employees managing common, diagnosable mental health conditions for whom recovery depends on changes in maladaptive cognitive and behavioral processes that are frequently activated in work contexts. To address this limitation, we conducted an interdisciplinary meta-synthesis of 96 review articles spanning management, clinical psychology, psychiatry, and occupational health. Anchored in Beck and Haigh’s Generic Cognitive Model, we develop the Integrated Work Support Model (IWSM), which explains how distinct sources of social support influence activating work situations, maladaptive beliefs, and maladaptive behaviors over time for employees with common mental health conditions. Our synthesis distinguishes the roles of primary, secondary, and tertiary interventions, clarifying when organizational actors can mitigate triggering work conditions, when clinical expertise from professional service providers is required to directly change maladaptive processes, and how social support from actors internal to the organization can enhance—but not substitute for—therapeutic intervention. By integrating clinical theory with management scholarship, this review advances a process-based understanding of social support, specifies role-differentiated responsibilities for organizational actors and professional service providers, and offers actionable guidance for designing social support systems that promote recovery while avoiding unintended harm.
Management research is frequently criticized for lacking practical relevance. Using voluntary turnover as a mature and managerially consequential research domain, we review 324 articles published between 2000 and 2023 and systematically extract 493 distinct practical recommendations. In advancing prior assessments of the relevance problem, we consider practical relevance at the recommendation-level of analysis, evaluating each recommendation along two core dimensions: data support (grounding in the study’s own empirical findings) and translatability (actionability for managers). We further situate recommendations within the turnover management process by coding for timing, level of action, and managerial goal of the recommendation. Our findings suggest that the relevance problem is less serious in the turnover research than commonly portrayed in the “relevance literature” regarding the management research in general. Although most studies included turnover management recommendations, only a small subset was both strongly grounded in the study’s evidence and readily actionable, with such high-quality guidance most concentrated on pre-hire interventions aimed at reducing overall turnover rates. In contrast, one of the gaps we detected was that such high-quality guidance is rarer for later-stage turnover management interventions focusing on reducing dysfunctional turnover. By contrasting high versus lower quality recommendations, we develop a five-step framework to help management scholars translate empirical findings into clear, context-sensitive, and actionable managerial guidance. Overall, we contribute to management scholarship by offering a more precise recommendation-level assessment of the relevance problem for use across areas, by identifying content-based gaps inhibiting improvement of practical relevance within the turnover research, and by improving the communication of practical recommendations in research articles.
Robustness analysis assesses the fragility or stability of empirical findings by testing whether research findings remain stable across alternative, justifiable analytical choices. Understanding the robustness of empirical results is important both for management scholars to build reliable theories and for management practitioners to derive appropriate practical implications for decision-making. Yet, the management field currently faces three problems in designing and reporting robustness analysis: terminological confusion, fragmented recommendations across isolated topics without integration, and a lack of systematic evidence on actual reporting practices. This paper clarifies the concept of robustness analysis and distinguishes it from related credibility-enhancing practices. Using a framework encompassing six key dimensions of robustness (i.e., methods, measurements, covariates, preprocessing, subsampling, and statistical specifications), we review and synthesize the currently fragmented recommendations for each dimension. Next, to systematically review the reporting of robustness practices, we develop a hybrid Generative AI-assisted coding approach enabling the analysis of a larger volume of articles than feasible with human coding alone. In a systematic review of 1,706 articles containing 2,770 quantitative sub-studies published in seven leading management journals (2020–2025), we find that reporting of robustness analyses is often done narrowly and inconsistently, scattered across multiple article sections, and using different terms. Our findings reveal gaps between recommended and documented practices, between macro and micro domains, and across time periods. Based on the review results, we offer recommendations for conducting and reporting robustness analyses.
Exits are key events in the life cycles of entrepreneurial ventures. Venture exits have immense practical impacts on a variety of stakeholders, including founders, employees, organizations, resource providers, and broader ecosystems. As a result, the phenomenon of venture exits is of interest to a broad community of scholars across fields such as general management, entrepreneurship, finance and accounting, strategy, economics, organizational behavior, and psychology. We examine the multidisciplinary literature on venture exits, including initial public offerings, acquisitions, buy-outs, secondary sales, and related exit events, by analyzing 317 research articles published from 1991 to 2025. We integrate extant findings into a unified model describing the pre-exit, exit execution, and post-exit phases across multiple units of analysis: the individual, venture, resource provider, and environment. We identify common themes, predominant tensions, and important gaps, laying the foundation for a reinvigorated research agenda. Central to this agenda is embracing a process perspective that considers the fluidity of the actors, interests, and resources shaping venture exit decisions and outcomes. Grounded in our review, this perspective offers new insights into venture exits while creating opportunities to meaningfully challenge and advance existing approaches and theories.
Control conditions are essential to establishing causal relationships in experimental management research, yet they receive little attention compared to treatments. This study thus examines the current state of control-condition selection and design in top-tier management journals, reviewing 958 experiments from 421 study papers published from 2021 to 2023. Our review shows that researchers use true and pseudo-control conditions. True control conditions—such as no-treatment, all-but-treatment, and treatment-as-usual controls—provide a baseline for interpreting the effect of the treatment condition. In contrast, pseudo-control conditions (e.g., opposite-treatment-level or alternative-treatment designs) allow relative comparisons across conditions without providing a baseline. Notably, 20% of the studies we examined presented causal claims that were not supported by their designs, opening the risk of their results being misinterpreted and their effect sizes being exaggerated. These issues were further exacerbated by a lack of method transparency and construct validity. In response, we offer guidelines not only for primary study researchers to support the selection and design of control conditions, thereby enhancing transparency and yielding valid interpretations of causal claims, but also for research synthesists, reviewers, and editors to evaluate the same.
As seven of nine planetary boundaries are breached, management scholars face an urgent challenge: how can organizations address complex social-ecological crises that transcend traditional organizational boundaries and objectives? Responding to this need, researchers have leveraged a plurality of systems perspectives, yet current approaches remain nascent and fragmented. In this paper, we review 25 years (2000–2024) of empirical sustainability management research across 17 leading journals. We identify core systems properties—interrelatedness, nestedness, non-linearity, and emergence—that collectively illuminate four critical systems-wide dynamics: equilibrium, disequilibrium, adaptation, and organized systems change. This systematic review offers scholars a unified framework for theorizing and addressing critical sustainability challenges facing organizations, society, and the planet.
Across management disciplines, there is growing recognition that understanding organizational futures—that is, how organizations engage with futures—is integral to comprehending contemporary organizing and strategizing processes. In this paper, we conduct an in-depth scoping review aimed at organizing and synthesizing the rapidly expanding and fragmented literature on organizational futures across the strategy, entrepreneurship, innovation, and organization studies disciplines over the past several decades. Our survey identifies several research streams in these areas that we classify into three main categories: future seeking, shaping, and becoming. Furthermore, we identify three subcategories within each main group—anticipating, adapting, and non-adapting under future seeking; enacting, designing, and narrating within future shaping; and perpetuating, making/performing, and wayfinding/improvising inside future becoming—and review the key scholarship associated with each of these. In so doing, we provide a comprehensive and coherent map intended to enable this recently flourishing and perennially vital domain of research to move forward systematically. We also envision our review as a platform that facilitates the development of more prospectively-oriented (i.e., forward-looking) theorizing. Finally, we highlight many frontiers to explore in future work, that include more closely examining the role played by imagination, power and affect in the emergence of organizational futures.
Students’ financial behaviour is a factor influencing not only their academic success and psychological well-being but also their long-term socioeconomic stability, making it essential to understand the psychological mechanisms that shape responsible money management. Since formal financial knowledge alone does not automatically lead to better financial behaviour, financial education initiatives need to be enhanced. It is beneficial to incorporate components into interventions that purposefully strengthen not only practical skills but also psychological resources - namely, students' self-regulatory capacities and financial confidence. Mindfulness, which enhances awareness and self-regulation, together with financial self-efficacy, which reflects confidence in managing financial tasks, may jointly shape students’ financial behaviour. The aim of the study was to investigate whether the relationship between mindfulness and financial behaviour in college students is mediated by financial self-efficacy and whether this indirect effect differs by gender. The sample of the study was 708 students (594 females, 114 males) from the College of Business Administration (Latvia) enrolled in short-cycle higher professional education programmes. Quantitative data were collected through a survey encompassing scales for measuring financial behaviour (shortened OECD INFE Financial Behaviour measure), mindfulness (Cognitive and Affective Mindfulness Scale – Revised, by Feldman et al., 2006), and financial self-efficacy (Financial self-efficacy scale by Loke & Choi, 2015). Mediation analysis with 5,000 bootstrap samples revealed that financial self-efficacy statistically mediated the association between mindfulness and financial behaviour (B = 0.27, 95% CI [0.18, 0.38]), indicating partial mediation. Moderated mediation analysis showed no gender differences in the indirect effect of mindfulness on financial behaviour via financial self-efficacy (Index = −0.01, 95% CI [−0.27, 0.21]). There were no gender differences in measures of mindfulness, financial behaviour and financial self-efficacy. Findings highlight the potential importance of mindfulness and financial self-efficacy in promoting responsible financial behaviour among students of both genders, as well as the underlying pathways through which these factors may operate. The results suggest that interventions aiming to foster sustainable financial behaviour may benefit from incorporating components that strengthen self-regulatory capacities and financial confidence, highlighting the need for further research to deepen understanding of these relationships and their practical implications.
In recent years, a rapidly growing number of management scholars are using computational linguistics (CL) to analyze vast corpora of naturally occurring organizational language. Yet the rapid adoption of CL methods has outpaced the development of shared standards for linking theoretical constructs, linguistic data, and computational measurement. We synthesize 353 articles published in leading management journals for 2013–2025, identifying four recurring challenges shaping the credibility of CL-based research: misalignment between constructs and textual corpora, unnecessary model complexity, the opacity of large language model workflows, and insufficient transparency in reporting. Building on these patterns, we develop four integrative design principles—construct-language fit, minimal sufficient complexity, LLM sensitivity and auditability, and disclosure-as-assessability—and identify key research implications that reposition CL as a theoretically consequential lens for management scholarship.
The use of earnings conference calls in management research has exploded over recent years, yet insights remain fragmented due to differing assumptions about how calls should be analyzed and interpreted. To synthesize this work, we review 207 articles across management, accounting, and finance journals and map how prior studies have drawn on specific call components—structural attributes, prepared remarks, and question-and-answer exchanges. Building on this anatomical mapping, we inductively identify three epistemic roles through which earnings calls have been mobilized in management research: communicative disclosure (“window”), performative communication (“stage”), and communicative trace (“fingerprint”). Each role reflects distinct assumptions about how earnings calls reveal, enact, or encode managerial and organizational phenomena, and each highlights different opportunities for future theorizing. By making these inferential logics explicit, our framework provides a conceptual foundation for more precise and cumulative use of earnings conference calls as a data source in management scholarship and outlines promising areas for future research.
This research evaluates how the adoption and use of artificial intelligence (AI) in digital marketing has impacted the socio-cultural change in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The consumer attitudes towards AI are considered as the mediating factors. The active development of technologies based on AI, including programmatic advertising, chatbots, and personal recommendations, has radically transformed the consumer experiences. It made a significant contribution to the socio-cultural change in the multicultural environment of the UAE at the same time. However, there is little known about the overall impacts of AI marketing on the social norms, cultural values, and traditions. The research employed a quantitative, cross-sectional design. It is based on positivism philosophy. 120 UAE consumers were surveyed who engaged with AI-based marketing systems. A structured online questionnaire was used to gather data which was analyzed using frequency distribution and regression statistics. The variables of importance were the adoption of AI in marketing, attitudes of consumers toward AI and the perceptions of sociocultural transformation. The results indicate that the exposure to AI-generated marketing, interaction with chatbots, and personalized contents affect consumer trust. It further impacts the attitudes in a measurable way when exposed to them frequently. The respondents are cognizant of the applicability and utility of AI marketing. However, the issues of data privacy and disconnection exist on a scale. The sociocultural changes are mediated by positive attitudes of consumers to AI to support modernization and emphasize the necessity to adopt culturally attentive marketing choices. The research highlights the need to balance technological innovation and cultural preservation. It further provides information to businesses and cultural organizations operating in the changing digital environment in the UAE.
