Department of Leadership and Organizational Behaviour

Palgrave Macmillan Doi: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-3-031-96315-5.pdf

Academy of Management Annual Meeting Proceedings 2025(1) Doi: https://doi.org/10.5465/amproc.2025.12346abstract

Talent management continues to experience discord among organizations and scholars about whether to approach it inclusively for all employees or exclusively for a select few. We develop a nomological network by examining how 553 managers define talent and regard various talent traits, using social comparison theory (SCT) to make predictions about the organizational and individual drivers of these philosophies. Theoretical implications include integrating past models into an overarching concept and contributing to SCT, which demonstrates how it validly and reliably predicts managers’ philosophies. Practical implications include pre-identifying managers’ talent philosophies using our nomological network.

Academy of Management Annual Meeting Proceedings 2025(1) Doi: https://doi.org/10.5465/amproc.2025.26bp

The pursuit of employee well-being and humanistic organizing has been increasingly complex with the rise of algorithmic technologies in modern organizations. These technologies introduce new tensions and challenges in defining and achieving an “ideal” notion of well-being and genuine humanistic organizing. Our qualitative study explores employees’ prospective sensemaking processes as they are confronted with the potential of algorithmic technologies to shape an “ideal” notion of well-being which promises humanistic organizing. Using theatrical performances as a sense-giving device, we simulated and imposed a series of future scenarios where intrusive corporate well-being technologies aim to create “perfect and happy” employees, compelling participants to negotiate the implications of such a plausible reality. Our results, based on 6 theatrical performances and 16 focus groups of a total of 131 participants, demonstrate that these performances act as sensemaking triggers, prompting employees to anticipate and negotiate future implications of algorithm-driven employee well-being. Our study demonstrated that employees are not passive recipients of these narratives but are active agents in the sense-receiving process, engaging in sense-scrutinizing and questioning imposed wellbeing ideals. This study contributes to prospective sensemaking theory and algorithmic management literature (of which corporate well-being technologies are a specific application) and provides practical implications for designing a genuine humanistic future of work.

The Year in Tech, 2026: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review p. 129-141

The Oxford Compendium of Hope p. 777-793 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197618240.003.0046

Abstract How is hope important for leadership in today’s organizations? The chapter discusses traditions of research on leadership and hope in organizations to argue that we must move beyond an idea of mundane hope as self-centered attainment and having to an idea of fundamental hope as self-transcending receptivity to others and being. Confining hope to attainment of instrumental purposes, such as organizational performance and profit seeking, risks trivializing the phenomenon and may not only diminish fundamental hope but also work directly against it. This is evident within the study of environmental sustainability where many scholars have argued that a profit-first ethos has undermined the quest for socioecological well-being. Hope, like allied experiences of wonder and love, is irreducibly relational and rests upon the primacy of receptivity. Using the sustainability transformation of the global flooring company Interface as a case, the chapter charts a four-part framework for leading with and for fundamental hope in organizations.