Our recent review of the institutional trust literature provides a promising springboard for future studies of institutional trust development and decline. Specifically, our definition of institutional trust, our identification of the central role that institutional logics play in shaping institutional trust assessments, and our classification of cognitive frames that stakeholders use in gathering and processing institutional trust information provide scholars with new lenses to use in exploring institutional trust phenomena. Together, these ideas, combined with a focus on abductive empirical exploration, can lead scholars to generate new and more accurate observations about how stakeholders assess institutional trustworthiness and how institutional trust dynamics manifest across analytical levels and contextual environments. By providing a new approach to examining institutional trust formation, erosion, and repair, scholars are now poised to move institutional trust research toward new ways of understanding how institutional trust dynamics emerge and evolve.
There is growing consensus that organizational research must extend its impact beyond academia and bridge the gap between scholarly knowledge and managerial practice. While some view this divide as inevitable due to differing languages and knowledge systems, others advocate for collaboration. This Guidepost paper supports and extends this latter perspective, promoting collaborative phenomenon-driven research as a pathway to bridge the scholar-practitioner gap and enable timely, impactful engagement. We argue that collaborative phenomenon-driven research produces both theoretical contributions ("knowledge outputs") and practical learning and policy influence ("knowledge outcomes"). Centering the phenomenon, rather than specific theories, we outline three key steps and the skill sets essential for collaborative learning and broader relevance.
Collaborative knowledge platforms like Wikipedia influence how individuals understand and interpret issues, yet how the meaning of issues is co-constructed on such platforms is poorly understood. Drawing from a longitudinal study of the discussion of inequality on Wikipedia's "Capitalism" page, we uncover the process of collective meaning making around contentious issues on collaborative knowledge platforms. Incorporating insights from research on framing and argument structure, we demonstrate how new frames of inequality gain traction on the page. Through an analysis of the frontstage framing contests and backstage negotiations between opposing editors, we find that factors such as emotivity and the characteristics of the frame articulator that can support frame traction in other settings work against it at Wikipedia. Instead, we show how frame traction on these platforms is supported by external social movement activity that stimulates the creation of discursive resources that advance specific frames and the addition of subjective qualifiers that make claims advancing certain frames more palatable to opposing editors. We discuss the implications of these empirical discoveries for research on collaborative platforms and for wider scholarship on collective meaning making around contentious issues.
Previous research has examined the origins and benefits of curiosity, attributing it primarily to an inherent human capacity. However, there has been limited theoretical or empirical exploration of how organizations can shape work environments to encourage employees to be more curious. This article pioneers a fresh perspective by examining how curiosity can be constantly provoked and sustained in organizations. Using an inductive study of a highly creative organization in the gastronomy industry, we discover two types of provocations: codified and uncodified. Together, these provocations encourage individuals to challenge each other and consider novel interpretations. Moreover, our findings reveal a specific mechanism-"stretching"-aimed at sustaining the curiosity engine by continually renewing provocations and preventing them from potential monotony and rigidity. We also discover "relaxing practices," which help to alleviate the curiosity pressure among team members. Through the dynamic interplay between provocations and stretching, curiosity becomes an agentic force that extends beyond the confines of individual minds to impact the entire organization. Our discoveries reveal new research puzzles on curiosity, which are likely to stimulate further theorizing regarding its role in organizations.
This study explores whether firms benefit from hiring former consultants as managers-a phenomenon that has been frequently observed among top managers across industries but rarely addressed in existing management theory. Despite anecdotal evidence about executives with consulting backgrounds in successful firms, concerns persist regarding the transferability of consultants' skills to specific firm contexts. Leveraging unique population-level data from 99,927 manufacturing and service firms in Sweden, we employ a multistep empirical strategy to better understand the conditions and effects of hiring managers with consulting experience. Applying fixed-effects regressions and a Heckman-type selection model with a dynamic panel estimator, our methodology enables comprehensive evaluation of the value of former consultants as managers. First, we analyze the hiring stage, revealing that former consultants are recruited to counter declining firm growth. Second, we explore whether former consultants drive changes within hiring firms, and find that the number of reorganizations increases after hiring them. Finally, we assess whether such changes are valuable, and find that reorganizations induced by the hiring of former consultants yield superior firm performance. Given that the same is not true for managers with traditional career backgrounds, our findings have important implications for theory linking managerial qualities to performance effects.
