Most strategies designed by managers to increase organizational diversity have failed or backfired. Why? For instance, why have executives in nearly all Fortune 500 firms decided to use diversity training, even though this diversity strategy generally does not work and has actually been linked to less (not more) diversity? To address this puzzle, I introduce Intuitions-at-Work Theory (IWT), which proposes that organizational behavior is fundamentally driven by two types of intuitions: reactive intuitions and proactive intuitions. Reactive intuitions are people's intuition-driven behavioral responses to triggers in their organizational environments - including traditional economic incentives (i.e., external rewards/penalties), psychological nudges (e.g., framing), and behavioral organization (e.g., how behaviors are structurally arranged across people or sequenced within individuals). Proactive intuitions are people's intuition-driven behavioral strategies for creating, designing, and reshaping the organizational environment and its triggers - especially in ways that leverage other people's reactive intuitions - to achieve their goals. IWT argues that managers often choose diversity strategies that fail for the same reason they often choose motivational strategies that fail: their proactive intuitions are systematically biased toward strategies that feel "salient" (rather than "subtle"), strategies that feel "positive" (rather than "negative"), and strategies that feel "certain" (rather than "uncertain") - even when those strategies are suboptimal. IWT challenges and integrates prior theoretical frameworks by proposing that people are both intuitive decision makers who (mis)react to their organizational environments and also intuitive choice architects who (mis)design those environments. This gives rise to a causal loop between intuitions and diversity in organizations, where diversity triggers intuitions and intuitions shape diversity. But because proactive intuitions are biased toward strategies that feel "salient," "positive," and "certain," managers' proactive intuitions and targets' reactive intuitions will be systematically misaligned, leading to three paradoxes: powerful diversity strategies (e.g., diversity reminders just before hiring decisions) can feel too subtle to use, good diversity strategies (e.g., joint evaluation where candidates are assessed side-by-side) can feel too bad to use, and reliable diversity strategies (e.g., anonymizing resumes) can feel too unreliable to use. Strikingly, executives - those with the most power to shape organizations - appear to exhibit the worst proactive intuitions of any sample population studied to date. IWT highlights that diversity researchers and management scholars must expand beyond investigating what works to also investigating intuitions about what works and how to align intuitions with what works.
Inequality is pervasive, challenging people and organizations. Yet we lack a clear picture of how people navigate inequality in everyday social and organizational life. I propose a theory of stereotype negotiation—whereby people use voice (linguistic expression), body (nonverbal expression), and culture (expressed preferences) to counter stereotypes applied to their own social identity group and comply with stereotypes applied to their audience’s social identity group. I first synthesize research on the function, content, and costs of stereotypes. I then construct a behavioral, multi-level model of stereotype negotiation, including individual, interpersonal, and institutional antecedents and consequences. I close with a future research agenda to nuance our understanding of how people, as informed and agentic actors, navigate an increasingly diverse and unequal world: one interaction at a time.
The platform economy is an increasingly large segment of the contemporary economy that continues to attract workers, drawing on narratives of self-empowerment and entrepreneurship that are idolized within American culture. Yet, the realized lived experiences of workers are often anything but that of a flourishing entrepreneur, with many describing economic precarity, invasive and unpredictable algorithmic control, and demanding hours. What keeps people invested in returning to platform work? We label this observed contradiction the platform paradox, and we theorize how this paradox is continuously regenerated through neo-normative control, a modern form of workplace control that encourages workers to express their ‘authentic’ selves, individuality, and emotions in ways that align with organizational goals. Drawing on extant scholarship, we identify three neo-normative control mechanisms—framing self-as-product, whole self-integration, and hyper-gamification—that support platform workers in experiencing themselves as independent entrepreneurs while also increasing their control by the platform and its algorithmic management system. We illustrate how these controls collectively contribute to adverse consequences on two core work experiences: worker skill and worker time. We propose future research directions to further unpack this paradox and for the field of platform scholarship at-large, discussing implications for inequality.
Gender research in organizational behavior has primarily focused on understanding and addressing the disadvantages women face in masculine work environments. While this body of work has been essential to understanding gender inequality in the workplace, it has left a critical gap: examining how masculinity both shapes and constrains men’s experiences and outcomes. This paper reverses the traditional focus of gender research in organizational behavior by arguing that masculinity is not only a source of advantage; it is also a system of traits, expectations, and values that imposes psychological and social costs on men. Drawing from interdisciplinary research across organizational behavior, psychology, and sociology, we argue that aspects of masculinity—such as stoicism, risk-taking, aggression, self-reliance, ambition, and dominance—are simultaneously organizationally rewarded as well as personally harmful. These expectations contribute to men’s poorer mental health, weaker social support networks, higher rates of self-harm, and greater exposure to physical danger. Moreover, while these aspects of masculinity are thought to drive organizational and societal growth, success, and power, they can also produce exclusionary cultures that undermine employee well-being. This paper argues that gender equity efforts must account for how masculinity shapes men—not only in the ways it enables their power but also in the ways it restricts their well-being. Addressing the double-edged nature of masculinity is not a diversion from gender progress but rather is an essential step toward creating healthier individuals, organizations, and societies.
Workplace inclusion is fundamental to fostering diversity and equity in organizations, yet it remains inconsistently defined and operationalized in the literature. This paper integrates research on the psychology of belonging with social network analysis to propose a framework that bridges organizational practices of inclusion, meso-level network dynamics, and individual experiences of belonging. We define inclusion as the organizational structures, policies, and practices that foster a sense of individual belonging; we conceptualize belonging as stemming from an individual's experience of value, reciprocity, and fit. And we argue that organizational practices of inclusion shape individuals’ experiences of belonging in part by re-shaping the social networks that comprise their daily interactions. Drawing from social network research, we posit key structural indicators of individual-level belonging, including network centrality, bidirectional ties, and structural equivalence, which shape employees’ experiences within organizations. Applying this framework, we then highlight how employees from marginalized groups are disproportionately excluded from informal networks, restricting their access to information, mentorship, and advancement opportunities, and changing the affordances of network positions. We argue that social network analysis provides a potential tool to diagnose and address these disparities, enabling organizations to measure and intervene in structural barriers to inclusion. By linking organizational-level practices of inclusion to the richly theorized individual-level experience of belonging, with networks serving as the bridge, we provide a roadmap for future research and practical interventions that promote retention, well-being, and engagement among diverse groups of employees and advance a more coherent and actionable approach to fostering inclusion in the workplace.
Arbitrary social hierarchies permeate our working lives in ways not always visible, introducing anti-egalitarian norms which stymie productivity. Reviewing bodies of work that identify and describe systems of oppression, we develop a framework that illuminates the cascading influence of such socio-historical factors on organizational processes. We contend that the literatures converge on a single, sobering logic: because organizations are embedded in—and seek legitimacy from—broader socio-historical contexts, the same arbitrary hierarchies that stratify societies are naturally imported into organizational life. At the same time, individuals are motivated to obscure the influence of these hierarchies to reduce psychological distress. We leverage institutional theory and systems psychodynamics to map how organizations are at the crux of external pressures (from society) and upward pressure (from employees) which both perpetuate and obfuscate the replication of anti-egalitarian hierarchies in organizations. In doing so, we clarify the most appropriate applications of common terminology used to describe the experiences of disadvantaged groups (e.g., discrimination, marginalization, minoritization). Specifically, we redirect scholars’ usage of the term “microaggressions” away from the commonplace or subtle nature of the microaggression to highlight their origin in – and maintenance of – anti-egalitarian organizational power structures. We then utilize this framework to generate recommendations to help organizational leaders “stop the leak” or ameliorate the influence of anti-egalitarian hierarchies in their workplace.
Scholars and commentators alike have documented growing mistrust towards professions. Increasingly, the public is turning away from their prescriptions in favor of alternative, less formal guidance, fueling what has been labeled a crisis of professions. This article first sheds light on the nature of alternative claim-makers whose growing influence challenges professional experts’ standing. We present three types of such claim-makers and distinguish them based on how they muster support for their pursuits—lay experts (e.g., patient activists) who convince audiences based on extensive experiential familiarity with a particular domain, counter-experts (e.g., anti-vaccination advocates) who rely on a collection of counterevidence to disprove established knowledge in a domain, and neo-experts (e.g., sleep coaches) who build on the practical know-how developed via repeated interactions with their audiences in areas where formalized knowledge is scarce. We then argue for a need to re-link the ecologies of expertise and professions to better make sense of the relationships among all these experts. We detail the constitutive elements of both ecologies, their intersections, their temporalities, and why their frictions contribute to the crisis of professions. By surfacing the variety of experts and drawing attention to the interstitial actions and spaces between them, we spotlight the critical need to rethink who qualifies as an expert and the relative efforts needed for each expert-type to maintain its standing. Overall, our article more fully captures the threats and opportunities surrounding the erosion of professions today while raising timely implications for the future of professions, careers, and society.
Resistance against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), which is often referred to as “backlash,” undermines the effectiveness of DEI and may result in the harassment of marginalized group members, highlighting the need to effectively address it. Typically, scholars study anti-DEI resistance as an individual-level phenomenon. Yet, the current wave of anti-DEI resistance in the U.S. also includes organizational and government actions, including public accusations that DEI is “unAmerican” (The White House, 2025). Thus, anti-DEI resistance might be better understood as a multi-level phenomenon that involves profound disagreements about cultural values. To better understand anti-DEI resistance, we integrate the backlash literature with the culture cycle framework (Markus & Kitayama, 2010), which suggests that culture comprises individuals, interactions, institutions, as well as broader ideals and values. We argue that integrating these two literatures may provide a better understanding of: (1) the ideas and structures that guide DEI and anti-DEI resistance, (2) the multi-level nature of anti-DEI resistance, including how resistance at one level (e.g., individual actions) may affect resistance at another (e.g., organizational actions), (3) how ambivalent resistance (i.e., simultaneously supporting and resisting DEI) may emerge both within and across levels, producing changes in support for DEI over time, and (4) how to address anti-DEI resistance. We then draw on the seven principles of intentional cultural change (Hamedani et al., 2024)—an outgrowth of the culture cycle framework—to advance actionable and empirically supported interventions designed to remediate anti-DEI resistance and cultivate inclusive change. We conclude by offering directions for future research.
Prior research suggests that a firm's workforce age composition is a key factor influencing its performance through effects on technological adoption, organizational learning, employee job satisfaction, and turnover. However, the existing literature often assumes that the phenomenon of the "aging firm" - that is, an older workforce age composition within firms-primarily reflects broader demographic trends such as population aging or immigration patterns. This paper offers a new framework for understanding how firms may actively make strategic decisions about their workforce age composition. We argue that firms may, directly or indirectly, select a balance of younger and older workers based on a range of internal and external factors, including their production function (e.g., task requirements), human capital capabilities (e.g., hiring and training), and shifts in technology and policy (e.g., automation and retirement policy). By integrating these factors into a cohesive framework, we argue that a firm's workforce composition should result from a system of interrelated decisions that firms make that depend on their internal capabilities and evolve in response to external shocks.
Startups are increasingly central to job creation, innovation, and economic mobility, yet research on hiring inequality focuses predominantly on established firms and founders, overlooking the non-founder workforce. We develop a comprehensive framework for understanding how startup hiring practices affect labor market inequality. We propose that startups differ from mature firms in ways that make their hiring dynamics uniquely consequential for inclusion and exclusion. Integrating demand-side perspectives, we advance a four-part analytical framework organized around why, when, how, and who startups hire. We discuss how hiring motivations, timing, and methods interact to determine workforce composition, producing recursive effects that affect long-term diversity trajectories. Finally, we outline a research agenda highlighting the temporal, organizational, and contextual contingencies of startup hiring. By shifting attention from founders to employees and from supply-side to demand-side processes, this framework reconceptualizes startups as pivotal institutions in the reproduction and potential mitigation of inequality. It reveals how the architecture of opportunity in emerging ventures impacts the broader distribution of work and wealth.
The global rise of nationalism has distorted the neoliberal vision of a borderless world where the nationality of businesses would be rendered obsolete. While nationalism can promote social solidarity and progress, it also has the potential to deepen divisions and fuel conflict—realities that organizations cannot ignore. In this paper, we propose a theory of organizational nationalism, which positions organizations not merely as passive responders to nationalist institutional pressures or geopolitical risks but as active agents in shaping nationalistic beliefs, values, and policies. Through theorizing how organizational nationalism manifests and functions, we offer insights into how organizations harness nationalism to motivate employees, cultivate consumer loyalty, and secure sociopolitical legitimacy, and how such engagement may eventually become an organizational commitment that shapes its nationalist character. This perspective fills a critical void in nationalism research by emphasizing the intermediary role played by organizations between the state and individual levels of nationalism. It also offers a unifying framework for the fragmented literature on nationalism in business, which spans topics from state influence on organizational forms to managing “foreignness” in multinational corporations. We conclude by outlining a research roadmap and promising research methodologies in this area.
Evaluations play a critical role in the allocation of resources and opportunities. Although evaluation systems are a cornerstone of organizational and market processes, they often reinforce social and economic inequalities. The body of organizational research on inequality and evaluations is extensive, but it is also fragmented, siloed within specific contexts and types of evaluations (e.g., hiring, performance). As a result, we currently lack a systemic understanding of the conditions under which inequalities emerge. This paper provides a unifying framework to identify how gender and racial inequality is produced and reproduced in evaluations across professional contexts (e.g., digital platforms, entrepreneurship, traditional employment). Our framework categorizes the drivers of inequality into three main areas: prevailing beliefs in evaluative contexts, the design and structure of evaluation processes, and the characteristics of evaluators. Our approach not only sheds light on the common processes that exacerbate inequality but also underscores why an integrative framework is critical for both theoretical advancement and enacting effective reforms.
A key puzzle in social network research is why people have networks in theory but fail to extract resources from them in practice. We propose the concept of mobilization capacity—one’s efficiency in extracting resources from networks—to help explain this gap. Mobilization capacity involves several critical microprocesses that account for what often appears as error in network models, given that having a network structure does not precisely translate into attaining outcomes. The determinants of mobilization capacity arise at actor- and relational- levels. Actor-level determinants include the actor’s willingness to seek network resources and ability to accurately locate network resources. Relational determinants involve cooperative intent in the relationship and the ability to successfully exchange resources within that interaction. Using these dimensions, we consider how actors realize or degrade their structural potential as they attempt to capture value from their networks. We conclude with an illustrative example of the Matthew effect by describing how each component of mobilization capacity compounds structural advantage, with the structurally rich enjoying efficiencies in resource extraction and the structurally poor further disadvantaged, which increases inequality.
Scholarship on entrepreneurship in top management journals has disproportionately focused on elites, leading our field to develop a great deal of understanding about a select few in society. Collectively, this bias has led to deeper expertise on elite entrepreneurs relative to entrepreneurs with different backgrounds, such as those from marginalized populations. We note the conceptual and prescriptive limitations of this traditional focus and draw attention to the importance of integrating research involving individuals from marginalized populations to improve our theories and prescriptions. Centering our discussion on the relationship between entrepreneurship and employment, we explore the focus on elites in top management journals, highlight exceptions to this focus, and propose a set of research questions as a path to more integrated and robust scholarship on entrepreneurship as represented in top management journals. In particular, we explore ways that our field can better understand when and how employment leads to entrepreneurship, how to better theorize the relationship between one’s past entrepreneurial experience and subsequent employment, and how a richer set of entrepreneurial outcomes can be examined. In each of these cases, we argue that integrating marginalized populations is not merely a matter of representativeness but is essential for strengthening our conceptual frameworks and analyses.
How do individuals learn and perceive social norms across situations and groups? We propose a three-stage process of social norm perception in which individuals first enter situations with a prior expectation of social norms that may apply, then they encounter and weigh norm information, and finally they integrate this norm information with their prior expectation. In addition, we discuss definitions of social norms, the motivations for learning social norms, and different categorization schemes for different types of norms based on content. This framework further suggests implications for when social norms should be more likely to be misperceived, and what kinds of social norm information should be most influential in one’s perception of the norm.
As rapid organizational and technological change makes boundaries within workplaces more permeable, employees are gaining unprecedented access to new people and information. This both increases opportunities for collaboration and heightens the risk of attention overload. While scholars have investigated overload with respect to “what” employees attend to, little research has examined the challenges concerning “whom” to attend to, resulting in ambiguity that can undermine collaborative relationships. In this paper, we integrate and advance insights from organizational control and selective-attention research, building on those macro- and micro-level theories to better conceptualize collective attention when the potential target is a colleague (human) rather than information (nonhuman)—which we conceptualize as relational attention, i.e., attention-to-whom. Further, we propose a separate, meso-level theory of transactive control of relational attention, building on concepts of transactive behavior from other fields. By exploring how such transactive control works, we begin to define the conditions organizations need to cultivate—regarding mutually transparent availability, synchronous attentional allocation, and reciprocal attentional allocation—to reduce relational overload without sacrificing productive work relationships or other benefits of more permeable internal boundaries. In addition to shedding light on underexamined attention problems in the workplace, this model contributes to future research by forging multi-level connections between individual meta-attention, transactive control over relational attention, and more traditional forms of organizational control.
An age-old adage in psychology is that people’s behavior emanates from or is an expression of their motivation and their ability. We posit that work behaviors and attitudes also depend on employees’ perceptions of motivation and ability, pertaining to others and themselves. The processes through which perceptions of motivation and ability influence employees are conceptually distinct from effects attributable to their expressions of motivation and ability. Moreover, many theoretical frameworks emphasize either perceptions of motivation or perceptions of ability. We posit that there is considerable value in considering perceptions of motivation and ability, most notably their interactive effects on work behaviors and attitudes. Doing so may not only more fully account for employees’ behaviors and attitudes, but also may promote cross-fertilization between literatures, such as organizational justice and behavioral ethics on the one hand and status and power on the other. Whereas some of our assertions have been empirically supported, others take the form of hypotheses to be tested in future research. Practical implications also are discussed.
The portability of performance for individuals during a career transition is not straightforward. Differences between jobs can create a drag on performance; alternatively, the differences can be an input to creativity and innovation. In this paper, we develop a model of career transitions that centers around the concept of career frictions, which we define as the disrupting differences felt by individuals between a new role and career attributes accumulated through their prior work experience (i.e., knowledge, social relationships, and imprints and identity). We argue that experienced individuals bring their accumulated career attributes into new jobs, and that the relationship between these attributes and their post-transition routine and creative job performance is mediated by career frictions. Furthermore, we theorize that the way in which movers experience career transitions is moderated by cognitive fixedness, which influences how much friction an individual feels, and by socialization practices, which can smooth or leverage friction in order to determine an individual’s post-move routine and creative job performance. Our friction-based theory of career transitions holds that individual characteristics like cognitive fixedness and also contextual conditions like socialization practices affect the portability of performance, or the prospect of generating creative performance.
We consider how entrepreneurship and employment differentially shape opportunities for social mobility across people and contexts. Specifically focusing on changes in an individual’s social status, or vertical mobility, we propose three metaphors for studying entrepreneurship: (1) production (i.e., increased status); (2) preservation (i.e., maintained status); and (3) consumption (i.e., decreased status). Each metaphor features theoretical mechanisms that account for how founding an organization can facilitate inter-occupational transitions and, thus, enable status mobility. We offer a proposed research agenda for studying entrepreneurship’s role in social mobility processes, including mechanism-specific propositions at the individual and population levels of analysis as well as guidance on sampling and measurement.
