Social entrepreneurship has emerged as a complex yet promising organizational form in which market-based methods are used to address seemingly intractable social issues, but its motivations remain undertheorized. Research asserts that compassion may supplement traditional self-oriented motivations in encouraging social entrepreneurship. We draw on research on compassion and prosocial motivation to build a model of three mechanisms (integrative thinking, prosocial cost-benefit analysis, and commitment to alleviating others' suffering) that transform compassion into social entrepreneurship, and we identify the institutional conditions under which they are most likely to do so. We conclude by discussing the model's contribution to and implications for the positive organizational scholarship literature, entrepreneurship literature, and social entrepreneurship literature.
In recent years, research on mindfulness has grown rapidly in organizational psychology and organizational behavior. Specifically, two bodies of research have emerged: One focuses on the intrapsychic processes of individual mindfulness and the other on the social processes of collective mindfulness. In this review we provide a pioneering, cross-level review of mindfulness in organizations and find that mindfulness is neither mysterious nor mystical, but rather can be reliably and validly measured, linked to an array of individual and organizational outcomes, and induced through meditative and nonmeditative practices and processes at the individual and collective levels. Our analysis of the combined literatures further reveals that although each literature is impressive, there is a significant need for multilevel mindfulness research that simultaneously examines individual and collective mindfulness and broadens its conception of context. This research agenda provides a more robust understanding of the antecedents, processes, and consequences of individual and collective mindfulness as well as more definitive evidence maximizing mindfulness and its benefits in practice.
Social entrepreneurship has emerged as a complex yet promising organizational form that utilizes market-based methods to address seemingly intractable social issues, but its motivations remain under-theorized. Research asserts that compassion may supplement traditional selforiented motivations in encouraging social entrepreneurship. We draw upon research on compassion and prosocial motivation to build a model of three mechanisms (integrative thinking, prosocial cost-benefit analysis, and commitment to alleviating others' suffering) which transform compassion into social entrepreneurship, and we identify the institutional conditions under which it is most likely to do so. We conclude by discussing the model's contribution to and implications for the positive organizational scholarship, entrepreneurship, and social entrepreneurship literatures.
A growing body of research unveils the ubiquity of ambivalence-the simultaneous experience of positive and negative emotional or cognitive orientations towards a person, situation, object, task, or goal-in organizations, and argues that its experience may be the norm rather than the exception. While traditionally viewed as something to be avoided, organizational scholars in fields ranging from micro-organizational behavior to strategy have made significant advances in exploring the positive outcomes of ambivalence. However, despite identifying benefits of ambivalence that are critical to organizing (e.g., trust, adaptation, and creativity), research remains fragmented and siloed. The primary purpose of this review is to advance research on ambivalence by reviewing, synthesizing and ultimately reconciling prior work on the negative consequences with promising emerging work on the positive-that is, functional and beneficialoutcomes of or responses to ambivalence. We significantly extend prior work by demonstrating that the myriad negative and positive outcomes of ambivalence may be organized around two key dimensions that underlie most research on the effects of ambivalence: (1) a flexibility dimension: inflexibility to flexibility, and an (2) engagement dimension: disengagement to engagement. We further discuss the mechanisms and moderators that can lead to the more positive sides of these dimensions, and suggest avenues for future research.
Emotion is a critical but relatively unexplored dimension of sensemaking in organizations. Existing models of sensemaking tend to ignore the role of emotion or portray it as an impediment. To address this problem, we explore the role that felt emotion plays in three stages of individual sensemaking in organizations. First, we examine emotion's role in mediating the relationship between unexpected events and the onset of sensemaking processes. We argue that emotion signals the need for and provides the energy that fuels sensemaking, and that different kinds of emotions are more and less likely to play these roles. Second, we explore the role of emotion in shaping sensemaking processes, focusing on how emotions make sensemaking a more solitary or more interpersonal process, and a more generative or more integrative process. Third, we argue that sensemakers' felt emotion plays an important role in concluding sensemaking, particularly through its effect on the plausibility of sensemaking accounts.
SummaryThis paper theoretically and empirically connects the literature on high-reliability organizations (HROs) to a broader set of organizations, which we call reliability-seeking organizations. Unlike HROs, which operate high-hazard technologies, reliability-seeking organizations operate in high-hazard environments. Reliability-seeking organizations are tightly coupled to their unpredictable and complex environments in such a manner that although the human mortality rate is low, the risk of small failures amplifying into organizational mortality is high. To cope with these environments, reliability-seeking organizations organize to remain open and flexible to emerging information and achieve the reliability demanded by their environmentsintensity of innovation. These organizations utilize skilled temporary employees, positive employee relations, and an emphasis on training to innovate, and, in turn, generate greater financial performance. We test these hypotheses using a sample of 184 initial public offering (IPO) software firms that conducted their IPO between 1993 and 1996 and our results are consistent with our theorizing. Firms that utilized these human resource practices innovated more frequently and firms with more innovations had higher stock prices over time. Our findings combine to suggest a theoretical model of structural antecedents of a different type of reliability-intensity of innovation.
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