Journal of Management Inquiry

The postwar literature has yielded important insights regarding developing collaborative leadership competencies in managers and collaborative leadership systems within organizations. However, the work of pre—World War II scholars and practitioners in this area has largely been overlooked. After introductory “interviews” with Mary P. Follett and Joseph Smith, we review their frameworks of collaborative leadership. Drawing on their frameworks of collaborative leadership, the authors propose an extension to Raelin’s (2006) framework of collaborative leadership and discuss the implications of this extended framework for current efforts in developing collaborative leadership in organizations

Institutional theory has energized a large and vibrant academic community, but it is largely unknown to managers and inconsequential with respect to the management of organizations. This is despite what the authors believe is an immense potential practical contribution. In this article, the authors suggest that institutional theory needs a gap year—a period in which core frameworks and insights from an institutional perspective are brought into contact with complex social problems. The authors focus on the study of institutional work and argue that an extended encounter with the world of participatory action research could lead to new answers to key questions and energize the development of institutional theory as both an academic and a practical project.

In this interview, Morley Winograd and Alan Glassman-two recognized experts on strategic planning and organization development in government agencies-explore the uniqueness of the public sector environment, highlighting both the complexity of the federal and multiple-level municipal relationships and the more common criticisms about public sector governance. Specifically, they remind us of (a) the often forgotten benefits of the nation’s deliberative democracy and the constant, yet arguably appropriate, tension between career civil servants and politicians, (b) the need to change the current problem-solving culture to spur innovation in government, and (c) the potential for strategic planning in the public sector to accelerate change and shift government’s focus from process to outcomes. Finally, they offer five pieces of hard-won advice to those attempting strategic planning in the public sector, and share optimism about the future based on the influx of the millennial generation into the public sector.

Management scholars study human phenomena filled with emotional upheaval. Though emotions in management may be legitimate topics of study, strong emotional reactions to such upheavals tend not to be. This is a missed opportunity. This article argues that heartbreak can help scholars analytically and emotionally connect with their data, the people they study, and shape the purpose of their work and life. Heartbreak can arise from the data themselves (if they touch us deeply) and through shared experience. Without it, scientific accounts may be less rich and potentially misleading. The author provides an example from her own research.

Research can provide heartwarming experiences which uplift researchers and participants, providing occasions for personal growth and change . Our article makes this case and illustrates heartwarming research experiences using examples from our own research.

This commentary supports Gail Whiteman’s suggestion that the field of organizational research and its community of practice would be strengthened if researcher emotions were acknowledged in organizational research. I go further and argue that emotions and values underpin all the professional choices made even by purportedly objective organizational researchers. Unless we acknowledge the values and emotions behind our choice of topics and include them in our focus, we cannot accurately apprehend the nature of the human artifacts we study nor yield knowledge that accurately describes them. Most importantly: absent the values and emotions dimensions, we cannot hope for organizational studies to be relevant to the problems faced by our organizations and institutions today.

Collectively, the articles in this dialogue show that the heart does matter in research. In this closing commentary, the author suggests that scholars also need to write more emotionally in order to adequately convey the richness of using your heart within research endeavors.

The interplay between emotion and learning is a continuing source of debate and inquiry in organization studies, attracting an increasing number of important contributions. However, a detailed understanding of the interaction between emotion and learning remains elusive. In an effort to extend the existing debate, this article offers an alternative approach that draws on the tradition of pragmatist philosophy, where emotion and learning can both be defined as dynamic processes that emerge in the relational context of social transactions. The mutually constructing interplay between these two processes is then illustrated with an example of a collaborative project in which anxiety, love, guilt, and hostility are all entangled in the learning process.

Knowledge is often tacit and “sticky,” that is, highly context-specific and, therefore, costly to transfer to a different setting. This article examines the methods used by firms to facilitate cross-site knowledge sharing by “thinning” knowledge, that is, by stripping knowledge of its contextual richness. An interview-based study of cross-site knowledge sharing in three industries (consulting, industrial materials, and high-tech products) indicates that highly developed knowledge-sharing systems do not necessarily involve extensive codification and recombination of personalized knowledge. Many multinational firms evidently conceive their knowledge-sharing systems with more modest objectives in mind than any large-scale “learning spirals” featuring iterative conversion of personalized knowledge into codified knowledge and vice versa. A typology of knowledge-thinning systems is derived by interpreting the field study results from the perspective of knowledge-thinning methods used in earlier eras of history. The typology encompasses topographical, statistical, and diagrammatic knowledge-thinning systems.

Since the 2003 article by Meckler and Baillie in this journal, a fruitful debate has taken place on the nature and attainability of objectivity in the study of organizations. The author argues that though it is impossible to know whether a theoretical claim is epistemically objective or not, it may be accepted as plausible when it is felt to be in some accordance with “the given”— empirical findings, subjective/intersubjective ideas, thoughts and feelings, and the opinions of and cultural categories used by others. Processes of resistance and accommodation occur during research as well as within scientific communities, enhancing the plausibility of certain theoretical claims over others. Accepted theories feed back into the research process as well as its subject matter, thereby affecting subjective/intersubjective judgments of plausibility. Openness, honesty, and responsibility are particularly important in the evaluation of the plausibility of theoretical claims.

The drive for tenure can be all consuming. And yet, actually attaining that goal often leads to just as great a challenge-successfully transitioning from “junior” to “senior” faculty member. Hambrick (2005) warns that recently tenured professors should not take their new status for granted by taking advantage of the system that granted their tenure. While true, I argue this transition represents an opportunity to do more than just add to the “I should” mentality that dominates pre-tenure life (“I should do this to get tenure”)—it provides the opportune time to reassess one’s career path and shift orientation toward being an “I want to” scholar. What type of scholar do you want to be? How do you want to achieve that goal? Framing the beginning of post-tenure life as a chance for renewal affords one the opportunity not only to improve oneself, but also improve our scholarly community.