We are delighted to present a special issue in Organization Management Journal (OMJ) that offers integrative and comprehensive summaries of several areas of inquiry within organizational management research. The goal of the issue is to provide OMJ’s readership with novel or critical findings from prior research, insights on emerging trends in scholarship and new directions for future exploration in organizational management.
The articles included in this special issue were curated from dozens of proposals with the following aims: provide maximum scholarly impact to the discipline of organizational management, represent diverse scholarly communities across micro and macro topics, as well as across subdisciplines and research foci, balance emergent topics with entrenched management theory and demonstrate a wide variety of review methodologies.
The eight articles in this review issue include emergent topics that reflect the rapidly changing organizational existence such as artificial intelligence and algorithmic decision-making, as well as established management concepts such as Resistance to Change and Transformational Leadership. There are articles focused on macro topics such as Strategic Factor Markets Theory, as well as microtopics such as contemporary workforce demographics including military-connected employees and millennials. We intentionally aimed for diversity in review approaches, including articles using critical review, integrative review, scoping review, systematic review, narrative review and umbrella review.
We are proud of the collection of articles we have assembled here and expect that each will have a significant impact on its community of scholars. Each team of authors worked hard through multiple rounds of rigorous review, and we would like to thank them for their diligence in responding to reviewers, their patience in dealing with the guest editors and their commitment to scholarship. We hope that our OMJ readers will agree that we have achieved the four aims listed above and will find the articles in this review issue insightful and helpful in their own research. Below, we offer a brief summary of each article in this issue:
The article “Strategic Factor Markets: A Critical Review, Insights, and Future Directions” offers a thematic framework of Strategic Factor Markets (SFM) theory through three dimensions, namely, firm capabilities, valuation and pricing of resources and cognitive processes. The framework also considers the relevance of AI in SFMs for each dimension. The paper provides a synthesis of SFM theory and weaves its foundational and contemporary aspects into an integrative framework.
Eric Dent and colleagues revisit Dent & Goldberg (1999) highly cited critical review of the resistance to change literature in their article “Still Challenging ‘Resistance to Change’.” After completing a narrative review of studies examining Resistance to Change from 1999 to 2024, they find that organizational change efforts and individual reactions to change are influenced by myriad factors. Leveraging Lewin’s (1951) field theory, they provide a Force Field Framework to organize multilevel factors that promote or enhance organizational change efforts against those that resist or hamper them.
In “Transformational Leadership and Leader-Member Exchange: A Critical Review’”, the authors conduct an umbrella review of meta-analytic studies of transformational leadership (TFL) and leader–member exchange (LMX) to examine the correlational relationship between the two constructs, as well as identify their similarities, explain their unique contributions and the reasons for their potential overlap. The review offers future research directions to refine the LMX and TFL literature by clarifying the definition of each construct and addressing inconsistencies in their measurement.
“Veterans and Military-connected Individuals in the Civilian Workforce: An Integrative Review and Research Agenda” uses thematic synthesis and conceptual mapping of 78 articles from 36 journals to find that military-connected individuals possess unique human capital that organizations often fail to fully leverage. By anchoring extant research in theories of human capital, social identity and person–environment fit, they provide recommendations for future study of this underexamined population, as well as recommendations for practice.
“Stereotype or Reality? A Gen-uine Review of Millennials’ Career Perspectives” examines research on the millennial generation’s careers using studies that span two decades from various countries. The authors juxtapose scholarly research on millennials with stereotypes of the generation commonly portrayed in the popular press. The article offers several key findings regarding the broader narrative of millennials’ career-oriented behaviors, as well as practical information for managers, human resources professionals and millennial employees.
In “Algorithmic Decision-Making in Organizations: A Systematic Review toward an Integrated Tension Alignment Framework,” the authors review algorithmic decision-making (ADM) studies in management literature and describe its antecedents, moderators, mediators and outcomes while grounding the concept in various management theories. The paper also identifies several mixed findings in ADM literature and puts forth an Integrative Tension Alignment framework to reconcile the tensions observed in ADM’s nomological network.
“AI in Innovation: Impacts on Management Functions” provides a systematic qualitative literature analysis using the POLC (planning, organizing, leading, and controlling) framework to examine how AI is influencing the innovation processes of the four major management functions. In answering the research question, “What are the impacts of AI on different management functions within organizations, and for what purposes can AI tools be used in innovation process management?”, the paper sheds light on the supporting, complementing and transformational roles of AI in decision-making, resource allocation, leadership and performance control.
“Generative AI-Enhanced Experimental Stimuli in Organizational Behavior Research: A Scoping Review” provides a synopsis of how Generative AI-enhanced stimuli has been used in OB research. The paper uses a PRISMA methodology for scoping reviews to assess the application of GenAI technology in behavioral experimental research designs. For OB researchers who wish to integrate AI into their experimental studies, this review offers insights into best practices and methodological challenges in the implementation of technology as well as ethical concerns relating to AI.
A final note of Thank You to our various participants and champions who made this issue possible. First and foremost, this issue would not have come to fruition without the curiosity, intellectual contributions and dedication of the authors. Furthermore, we would like to thank those authors who submitted to, but did not make it into, this special issue and wish them luck as they refine their intellectual contributions. We are exceptionally grateful to all the reviewers who offered their services throughout the yearlong review cycle, particularly those reviewers who offered their feedback and time on multiple occasions. Our sincere and utmost gratitude to OMJ’s Editors-in-Chief Robert Yawson and Vance Johnson Lewis, whose consistent support and guidance aided us in progressing smoothly through this journey. And finally, we thank Emerald Publishing for their hard work and determination in all of the behind-the-scenes effort that goes into publishing a journal issue.
We, the Guest Editors of this special Review Issue, Kenneth Sweet and Jestine Philip, welcome your thoughts or comments as you browse these articles. Thank you!
