An Integrated Model of Management: Why it Would be Valuable and How it Can be Built

Disciplines with strong paradigms, in which scholars reach consensus about their field’s most important theory, have greater stature and accumulate knowledge more efficiently. Yet the prevailing standpoint among management scholars is that a strong paradigm would be too abstract for an applied field, and would stanch the development of thousands mid-range theories that emerge organically each year (letting “a thousand flowers bloom”). I argue that this perspective rests on a misconception. Strong paradigms do not stifle the development of mid-range theories, but rather help scholars generate and refine them. Accordingly, the lack of a strong paradigm in organizational research is not a question to be pondered, but an opportunity to be seized. I outline a guide for building a unified theory composed of between eight and fifteen meta-constructs that explain the greatest amount of variation in the thousands of published findings in management journals. Modern tools can enable this unified theory to be “living” so it is automatically updated to reflect the latest research, helping scholars avoid informational constraint (when a strong paradigm quells “out-of-the-box” thinking) and normative constraint (when stakeholders have a vested interest in preserving, rather than updating, the unified theory).