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Kenan Institute 2025 Grand Challenge: Skills Gap
Research • Insight • Growth

organizational behavior

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Intersectionality has emerged as an important theoretical concept for examining intersecting social hierarchies and has garnered varying interpretations and applications in scholarly discourse. To help organize varied definitions of intersectionality that are commonly used in the social sciences, we propose a typology that distinguishes between primarypragmatic, and pluralistic intersectionality.

We use construal level theory to investigate how the way employees construe where work occurs—defined as work context construal—influences perceptions of harm and the ethical framing of risk-mitigating behaviors. We hypothesize that high-level (abstract) work context construals (vs. low-level, concrete ones) reduce perceptions of potential harm which, in turn, leads to framing risk-mitigating behaviors as less of an ethical obligation.

Scholars are increasingly recognizing that allyship affects allies themselves. Although existing scholarship covers a multitude of constructs, most of the literature focuses on social evaluations and their effects on allyship persistence. We posit that the dual focus on social evaluations and allyship persistence has limited the theoretical insights and applied relevance of scholarship on the consequences of allyship for allies.

As organizations face constant pressures to respond to changing situations and emergent demands, team members are frequently called upon to change their processes and routines and adapt to new ways of working together.

Scholars have traditionally treated motivation as a value-neutral state divorced from normative considerations. Yet, research across the social sciences suggests a growing moral imperative to love work, which carries with it the social expectation of intrinsic motivation.

Reviewing 25 years of research, we observed that the science of feedback at work is not yet a story of coherent and cumulative progress. Feedback is often generically defined, and assumptions substantially diverge. Consequently, insights often appear disconnected from the way feedback is practiced and experienced in organizations. We organize the literature by making three core assumptions explicit and identifying six distinct substreams of feedback research.

Kenan Institute Distinguished Fellow Josh Lerner of Harvard Business School says achieving resilience is difficult, in part because businesses are hard to change.

Management scholars are often interested in congruence effects, which they analyze using polynomial regressions and response surface analyses. They also more and more frequently conduct moderation analyses of these polynomial regressions to understand how response surfaces change as a function of a third variable. Our review of the literature in management and applied psychology that tested moderation of response surface models reveals three shortcomings of the current practices.

Prior research on organizational responses to normative pressures has cataloged a spectrum of strategies, ranging from accommodation to resistance, but more assertive responses have largely been overlooked. We expand the existing repertoire to include the more aggressive, targeted, and intertemporal response of organizational repression.

Heuristics play an important role in organizational decision-making. Although management and organizational scholars have contributed significantly to our understanding of heuristics in organizations over the past seven decades, the literature has become fragmented over time. Three parallel streams of research—(1) heuristics and biases, (2) fast-and-frugal heuristics, and (3) simple rule heuristics—have emerged with somewhat conflicting views on the origins, use, and implications of heuristics.

Heuristics play an important role in organizational decision-making. Although management and organizational scholars have contributed significantly to our understanding of heuristics in organizations over the past seven decades, the literature has become fragmented over time. We review and synthesize the literature and put forward an integrative process model of heuristics in organizations.

The Wall Street Journal details how MIT economist and Kenan Institute Distinguished Fellow David Autor rose to become one of the most influential scholars studying the U.S. labor market today.