Heritage craft firms face a difficult dilemma: how to act as custodians of fragile traditions while staying viable in a rapidly changing world. This paper explores how such firms sustain endangered crafts by treating inherited knowledge not as static history but as living, working practice. Based on a qualitative multiple-case study of two passementerie (ornamental trimmings) workshops in France and Italy and a blade-grinding firm in France, we show how continuity arises from deliberate, everyday acts of custodianship. "Tangible knowledge" includes historical machines-valued for their versatility, accessible design, and durability-as well as archives that preserve technical memory and design continuity. "Intangible knowledge" involves tacit technical expertise and artistic capabilities transmitted through long-term training and embodied practice. Together, these material and human inheritances sustain both creative renewal and historical continuity. Beyond the context of endangered heritage crafts, these insights offer practical guidance for firms in sectors such as luxury goods, haute cuisine, bespoke manufacturing, and artisanal design-where preserving distinctive capabilities and long-term know-how is essential to sustaining relevance and value.
Despite a proliferation of research, the behavioral ethics literature remains fragmented, making it difficult for managers to translate findings into practice. A common pitfall is assuming that unethical behaviors that appear identical stem from the same cause and should be managed the same way. Our applied integration addresses this gap by synthesizing the literature into a cohesive, causally driven framework. We identify three core causal pathways-perceptual, regulatory, and calculative-that underlie unethical actions. This framework links these pathways to three distinct forms of misconduct: ethical errors (due to misperception), ethical lapses (due to self-regulatory failure), and ethical violations (due to deliberate calculation). By distinguishing unethical behaviors based on their causal roots, this framework provides a more precise diagnostic tool, enabling managers to implement targeted interventions and advance practical guidance for the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of workplace misconduct.
For years, performance management was a once-a-year event-an assigned performance rating, a form sent to human resources (HR)-and soul-crushing meetings that produced little value for managers, organizations, or employees. Our work over the past two decades has sought to replace that ritual with something closer to real conversation: regular check-ins, clarity about expectations, and explicit connections between individual and team performances and a firm's strategic goals. Through sustained teaching, cumulative research programs, and extensive outreach activities, these evidence-based ideas reached classrooms, government offices, corporate leadership teams, courts, and the media, shaping both managerial practice and public policy. The path was neither easy nor linear and included many rejections, frustrations, hurdles, and disappointments- particularly when phenomenon-driven insights challenged entrenched assumptions and publication norms. The "impact journey" begins with studying an important, consequential managerial problem and conducting rigorous and credible research. Critically, impactful and relevant research requires a two-way conversation with practitioners (i.e., "absorptive capacity") and deliberate dissemination across multiple outlets (i.e., "transformative capacity"). I describe remaining managerial challenges in performance and talent management, explain why they persist, outline how they can be addressed, and distill 14 lessons learned for improving scholarly relevance and sustained impact in performance management and other domains.
This essay explores a critical but underexamined challenge in systems change work: the disconnect between the long-term nature of meaningful impact and the short-term structures that shape how social and environmental efforts are funded, evaluated, and executed. Practitioners navigating complex problems feel this tension acutely, often making constrained decisions about feasibility, framing, and measurement under short-term pressures. The coauthors bring complementary expertise: one is an academic publishing on systems thinking in organization studies, aware of the literature's theoretical sophistication but practical blind spots; the other is a practitioner with a PhD in systems thinking and two decades of experience across military, governmental, and nonprofit contexts worldwide. While systems thinking is widely promoted in both academic and managerial domains, the lived realities of practicing it remain idealized and insufficiently studied. This essay identifies three practical challenges: (1) funding systems change on short timelines, (2) scoping and evaluating systems work in real time, and (3) navigating power asymmetries between funders, beneficiaries, and consultants. Without deeper inquiry into the organizational and relational conditions shaping systems practice, organizational scholars risk drifting from relevance, favoring short-term, easy-to-measure results over the deep, systemic changes needed to tackle complex problems. More evidence-based research by organizational scholars is urgently needed.
