Abstract
Introduction
Editorship and Milestones of Group & Organization Studies/Management
The journal’s trajectory reflects several broad shifts in management and organizational scholarship. In its early decades, GOM primarily published studies focused on organizational development and shaped by social psychological traditions, including group cohesion, conflict, interpersonal influence, and collective decision-making. These domains aligned with broader developments in organizational research that increasingly emphasized theoretically specified models and empirically testable mechanisms (Colquitt & Zapata-Phelan, 2007). As the field evolved, GOM expanded to incorporate a wider set of organizational processes—including cross-cultural and international management, strategic management, organization theory, leadership emergence, team cognition, identity work, and socioemotional dynamics (Earley, 1998)—mirroring developments across organizational behavior and organizational theory (Clark et al., 2014; Gardner et al., 2020). More recent special issues signal a broadening of the journal’s content to domains such as technology-mediated collaboration, future-of-work arrangements, and the interplay between work, identity, and family systems (Chang et al., 2025; Subramony et al., 2023). Across all periods, GOM has remained a multidisciplinary publication responsive to practitioner interests, theoretical advancements, methodological innovations, and emerging organizational challenges.
A defining feature of GOM’s evolution is its sustained focus on conceptual rigor. Editorial essays consistently emphasize the importance of theoretical contribution, positioning the journal as a venue that expects clear, well-specified constructs and attention to mechanisms underlying group and organizational phenomena (Baruch, 2010; Gardner, 2018; Griep, 2022; Zagenczyk, 2021). This orientation aligns GOM with the expectations expressed in high-ranking management journals regarding theory building, theory testing, and the cumulative development of knowledge (Colquitt & Zapata-Phelan, 2007). The journal’s archives therefore represent a rich historical record of how group and organizational scholarship has matured considering how its concepts have been defined, refined, and challenged; how methodological preferences have shifted; and how new domains of inquiry have emerged and stabilized.
Despite this significance, GOM has not yet been examined through a systematic, comprehensive bibliometric assessment that spans its full publication history. While previous commentaries and thematic collections offer valuable insights into specific areas—such as entrepreneurial emotion (Javadian et al., 2022), future-of-work dynamics (Subramony et al., 2023), and work–family research (Chang et al., 2025)—these analyses are limited in scope. They illuminate localized intellectual developments rather than an integrated view of the journal’s long-term trajectory. In contrast, other major scholarly outlets have benefited from broad retrospectives: a five-decade analysis of the Academy of Management Journal examined long-term patterns in theory building, theory testing, and scholarly impact (Colquitt & Zapata-Phelan, 2007), Journal of Management Studies reflected on the evolution of its intellectual identity (Clark et al., 2014), and The Leadership Quarterly has analyzed three decades of development through both qualitative and bibliometric criteria (Gardner et al., 2010, 2020; Lowe & Gardner, 2000). Such studies show that longitudinal bibliometric reviews provide a robust approach for clarifying a journal’s disciplinary position, intellectual foundations, and patterns of thematic change.
The absence of an equivalent evaluation for GOM motivates the present study. The primary objective of the present study is to offer the first panoramic bibliometric analysis of the journal from 1976 to 2024. Three motivations underpin this effort. First, a long-term overview is necessary to understand how GOM has shaped—and been shaped by—the scientific development of group and organizational research. Second, a systematic mapping of citation patterns, intellectual clusters, and research fronts is required to clarify the journal’s conceptual identity and identify its foundational knowledge bases. Third, a longitudinal thematic analysis can reveal emerging trends, stable domains, and periods of conceptual redirection, thus offering insights into the evolution of the field as reflected by GOM’s publications.
To meet these aims, the study employs established bibliometric approaches that have become standard in analyses of scientific journals. Performance indicators such as total publications, citation rates, and authorship patterns provide quantitative evidence regarding scholarly output and influence (Aria & Cuccurullo, 2017; Donthu et al., 2021). Science-mapping techniques—specifically co-citation analysis (Small, 1973), bibliographic coupling (Kessler, 1963), and co-word analysis (Callon et al., 1983)—enable the identification of intellectual foundations, conceptual communities, and evolving thematic structures. These tools have been effectively applied in related domains, including cross-cultural and strategic management, organizational behavior, entrepreneurship, and management studies (Kumar et al., 2022; Lampe et al., 2020), demonstrating their suitability for capturing the complexity of long-term disciplinary development.
By integrating these techniques, this study produces a comprehensive, evidence-based assessment of GOM’s scientific trajectory. It highlights the journal’s most influential contributions, identifies the networks of scholars and institutions shaping its development, and maps the evolution of its conceptual architecture. Through this analysis, the study contributes to understanding the role GOM has played in the broader management and organizational sciences and provides a foundation for reflecting on future research directions.
Literature Review
Bibliometrics
Bibliometrics refers to the quantitative study of scholarly communication through the statistical analysis of publications and citations. Introduced formally by Pritchard (1969), it provides a methodological foundation for examining how knowledge is produced and disseminated. Broadus (1987) emphasized its role in generating empirical indicators of scientific activity, while Rousseau (2014) framed bibliometrics as a systematic means of deriving reproducible measurements from bibliographic records.
The historical origins of the field are closely tied to early advances in citation indexing. Garfield’s (1955) formulation of a citation-based indexing system established the conceptual basis for measuring intellectual linkages among documents. This work later informed the development of the Impact Factor, which institutionalized citation analysis in journal evaluation and research assessment (Bensman, 2007). These innovations transformed citation practices into quantifiable evidence reflecting scholarly influence.
Bibliometrics has since expanded into a broader analytical framework supported by developments in information science and network analysis. Comparative investigations of major citation databases such as Web of Science (WoS), Scopus, and Google Scholar revealed differences in coverage and indexing that must be considered when interpreting citation-based indicators (Bar-Ilan, 2008). Ding et al. (2014) further demonstrated that network-centric measures—such as co-citation, bibliographic coupling, and collaboration networks—capture structural properties of scientific fields beyond simple productivity or impact counts. Glänzel et al. (2019) conceptualized bibliometrics as an integrated methodological architecture for analyzing science as a dynamic and interconnected system.
Methodological advances have also been supported by specialized software that enables large-scale data processing and visualization. Tools such as VOSviewer (Van Eck & Waltman, 2010, 2023; Yazdanjue et al., 2025) and bibliometrix (Aria & Cuccurullo, 2017) facilitate the construction of science maps, cluster detection, and the examination of thematic evolution. Recent applications illustrate how these tools can model conceptual structures, knowledge diffusion, and topic dynamics across time (Khorshidi et al., 2025).
These developments position bibliometrics as an essential methodological approach for journal-level analyses. By combining performance indicators with science-mapping techniques, bibliometrics enables a systematic assessment of GOM’s intellectual structure, research fronts, and long-term thematic development.
Bibliometric Studies in Business and Management
Bibliometric research has a long-standing presence in business and management scholarship, emerging in parallel with broader developments in economics, organizational science, and applied social sciences. Early contributions focused primarily on tracing the origins of disciplinary knowledge and identifying the institutional and authorial structures underpinning publication systems. Studies such as Cleary and Edwards’ (1960) examination of contributor origins in the American Economic Review and Henry and Burch’s (1974) analysis of institutional contributions to major business journals established the quantitative evaluation of research output as an integral part of scholarly assessment. Similar efforts appeared in accounting and finance, where Bazley and Nikolai (1975), Heck and Bremser (1986), and Heck et al. (1986) mapped author affiliations, institutional productivity, and longitudinal publication patterns. These foundational works demonstrated that bibliometrics could reveal the relational and structural underpinnings of a field’s scientific development.
By the 1980s and 1990s, bibliometric inquiry had become more theoretically grounded and methodologically diverse, expanding to journal evaluation and disciplinary mapping. Coe and Weinstock (1984) provided one of the earliest systematic evaluations of management journals, while Sharplin and Mabry (1985) introduced alternative ranking approaches based on citation behaviors in management research. In strategic management, Ramos-Rodríguez and Ruíz-Navarro (2004) and Nerur et al. (2008) used co-citation analysis to demonstrate how intellectual structures evolve as research domains mature. At the same time, Podsakoff et al. (2008, 2018) significantly advanced understanding of author, institutional, and journal-level influence by integrating productivity, citation impact, and network centrality into comprehensive assessments of management scholarship.
Parallel developments occurred in adjacent areas of business research. Inkpen and Beamish (1994) documented the evolution of international business scholarship, while Clark et al. (2014) and Krammer et al. (2024) evaluated trends in Journal of Management Studies, providing insights into conceptual transitions and editorial shifts. Similar retrospective analyses have been conducted across specialized domains such as corporate governance (Durisin & Puzone, 2009), entrepreneurship (Ferreira et al., 2019; Hota et al., 2020; Landström et al., 2012), operations management (Pilkington & Meredith, 2009), business ethics (Rey-Martí et al., 2016), innovation (Fagerberg et al., 2012; Shafique, 2013; van der Have & Rubalcaba, 2016), and the knowledge management literature (Bontis & Serenko, 2009; Serenko & Bontis, 2013). These studies collectively demonstrate the capacity of bibliometrics to identify research fronts, trace conceptual trajectories, and uncover the structural composition of scholarly communities.
Within organizational behavior and applied psychology, retrospective analyses have served a similar function. Centennial reviews of Journal of Applied Psychology (Gelfand et al., 2017; Kozlowski et al., 2017; Lord et al., 2017; Mathieu et al., 2017) mapped the evolution of major subfields—including leadership, work teams, and cross-cultural organizational behavior—by linking foundational theories to contemporary empirical advancements. These studies highlight how longitudinal bibliometric mapping can capture the interplay between conceptual innovation and methodological change in organizational sciences.
More recently, bibliometric studies have adopted broader coverage and more refined methodological tools. Reviews of cross-disciplinary domains such as family business (Benavides-Velasco et al., 2013), leadership (Meuser et al., 2016; Zhao & Li, 2019), creativity research (Castillo-Vergara et al., 2018), pricing (Leone et al., 2012), sustainability (Beske-Janssen et al., 2015), tourism (Comerio & Strozzi, 2019; Hall, 2011), and finance (Khan et al., 2022; Zhang et al., 2019), illustrate the widespread use of science-mapping techniques to reveal emerging themes and latent conceptual structures. Studies in information systems (Córdoba et al., 2012; Lowry et al., 2013) and technology forecasting (Kraus et al., 2022; Rey-Martí et al., 2016; Verma & Gustafsson, 2020) further show how bibliometrics captures intellectual diversification in rapidly evolving research domains.
Against this broader landscape, GOM has contributed to shaping bibliometric work within organizational research by publishing domain-specific reviews that bridge micro-, meso-, and macro-level inquiry. Lowe and Gardner (2000), Gardner et al. (2010), and Gardner et al. (2020) demonstrated how leadership scholarship evolves across decades through shifts in dominant theories, methodological preferences, and collaboration structures—an approach closely aligned with the science-mapping tradition. Recent GOM studies extend this trajectory: Chang et al. (2025) provided a cross-disciplinary map of family-friendly work research, and Subramony et al. (2023) synthesized how technological change reshapes the future-of-work literature. These contributions underscore GOM’s role as a platform for integrating behavioral, organizational, and societal perspectives through bibliometric evidence.
The cumulative body of bibliometric studies in business and management thus reveals a distinctive pattern: the field has progressively shifted from descriptive cataloguing toward network-based analyses that uncover the cognitive, social, and structural dynamics of scholarly communities. These developments establish a robust methodological foundation for conducting a comprehensive bibliometric evaluation of GOM, enabling a systematic examination of its intellectual evolution, research impact, and thematic contributions over time.
Bibliometric Studies for Individual Journals
Anniversary-focused bibliometric investigations have become an essential genre for assessing the historical development, intellectual boundaries, and scholarly influence of individual journals. These retrospectives establish temporal baselines that connect publication trajectories to editorial regimes, disciplinary shifts, and methodological transitions. Early exemplars in economics and business set the foundations for this tradition (Heck et al., 1986). The centennial synthesis of the American Economic Review (Arrow et al., 2011) demonstrated how long-range citation patterns and landmark contributions can be systematically catalogued to infer the evolution of a journal’s conceptual core. Similar retrospective efforts in accounting and finance used authorship counts, institutional contributions, and citation structures to delineate journal identity over extended periods (Heck & Bremser, 1986; Heck et al., 1986).
In management and organizational research, milestone studies have played a central role in tracing conceptual and methodological evolution. The multi-decade review of the Journal of Management by Van Fleet et al. (2006) and Kacmar et al. (2025), linked shifts in dominant theories to editorial transitions. Clark et al.’s (2014) 50-year analysis of the Journal of Management Studies demonstrated how scholarly communities reorganize around emerging themes and internationalize as fields mature. Krammer et al. (2024) extended this line of inquiry by mapping the thematic and methodological diversification of the Journal of Management Studies during its diamond anniversary, showing how strategic management, leadership, and organizational theory evolved under changing institutional and societal pressures.
Applied psychology provides parallel evidence regarding the value of journal-level retrospectives. The centennial series published in Journal of Applied Psychology—including Kozlowski et al. (2017), Gelfand et al. (2017), and Mathieu et al. (2017)—demonstrated how evaluation of long-term publication patterns, citation dynamics, and collaboration networks can reveal transformations across subfields such as leadership, teams, and cross-cultural organizational behavior. These multi-author assessments illustrate how journal-level bibliometrics can recover disciplinary inflection points and trace methodological maturation.
More recent retrospectives in niche and cross-disciplinary outlets continue this trajectory. Schmitt et al.’s (2024) 50-year profile of Journal of Consumer Research highlighted shifting analytical paradigms and the expansion of behavioral research methods, while Tisdell’s (2020) anniversary reflection on Economic Analysis and Policy linked impact and productivity trends to evolving economic policy debates. In the domain of organizational scholarship closely aligned with GOM’s concerns, Gardner et al. (2020) offered a multi-decade retrospective of The Leadership Quarterly, demonstrating how bibliometric mapping captures the consolidation and branching of leadership research.
Within information science, Khorshidi, Merigó, et al. (2025a) provided a comprehensive 50-year synthesis of Information Processing & Management, integrating normalized impact indicators, collaboration centrality, and science-mapping to uncover core–periphery dynamics and thematic transitions. This study represents a contemporary benchmark for journal-scale bibliometric methodology and serves as a relevant methodological analogue for the present assessment of GOM.
These anniversary studies demonstrate that journal-focused bibliometrics constitute a robust and transferable framework for analyzing how editorial direction, research communities, and thematic priorities evolve over time. The methodological precedents established across economics, management, psychology, and information science provide the analytical scaffolding for a rigorous examination of GOM’s historical trajectory.
Methods
Procedure of the Study Based on the SPAR-4-SLR Protocol
Data collection was undertaken through Scopus using GOM as the Source Title, covering 1976–2024. The search executed in November 2025 returned 1,740 documents, with 1,606 falling within the target window after excluding 2025 to ensure complete and comparable yearly records. Document-type classification for these 1,606 items identified 1,415 articles, 97 editorials, 45 reviews, 29 notes, 12 errata, and 7 conference papers. Retaining this full distribution is important for understanding the journal’s editorial structure, but not all document types are suitable for bibliometric performance analysis. Editorials, notes, and errata do not represent original research and often do not accumulate citations in a manner consistent with research articles. Including them in productivity or citation benchmarks would inflate publication counts, distort citation averages, and bias network structures. For this reason, only articles, reviews, and conference papers related to special issues were retained, producing 1,467 documents. This filter ensures that only research-relevant outputs contribute to the analytical corpus. A final filter limited the dataset to publications in the “Final” stage, resulting in 1,415 records. This removes in-press or nonfinal items, which may lack stable bibliographic metadata or citation histories, thereby ensuring data integrity for performance indicators and science-mapping outputs.
A complementary search was performed in the WoS Core Collection, yielding 1,173 GOM records, of which 1,104 belonged to 1976–2024. Restricting the WoS set to articles and reviews produced 932 documents. Excluding early-access and retracted items further refined the sample to 837. These steps ensure that WoS serves as a consistent validation source while Scopus remains the primary dataset due to broader coverage for GOM. Indicators from both databases (Clarivate, 2025; Scopus, 2025) support cross-checking of citation patterns and publication trends.
Performance analysis uses established bibliometric indicators, including total publications, total citations, citations per article, temporal citation profiles, and the h-index and its normalized variants (Alonso et al., 2009; Figuerola-Wischke et al., 2024; Hirsch, 2005). Intellectual and conceptual structures are examined through co-citation (Small, 1973), bibliographic coupling (Kessler, 1963), and keyword co-occurrence (Callon et al., 1983). Visualizations and network structures are generated using VOSviewer (Khorshidi et al., 2025b; Van Eck & Waltman, 2010) and bibliometrix/biblioshiny (Aria & Cuccurullo, 2017), with supplementary computation in Excel. In line with Table 2, the method also integrates GOM’s 50-year milestone as a foundation for identifying long-term trajectories, emergent themes, and future research directions, while acknowledging database limitations and variation in article-level citation behavior.
Publication and Citation Structure of GOM
The publication and citation structure of GOM provides a quantitative baseline for understanding how the journal’s scholarly influence has unfolded over time. Annual output reflects the scale and regularity of contributions entering the journal’s corpus, while long-run variations in volume shape later patterns in citation accumulation, topic visibility, and network connectivity. Examining these trends is therefore essential for contextualizing the impact indicators, intellectual linkages, and thematic structures discussed in the subsequent parts of the Results section.
Figure 1 indicates that GOM’s annual publication volume follows a relatively stable but multi-phase pattern from 1976 to 2024. During the formative period, yearly output typically ranges between 20 and 30 articles, with a gradual decline visible through the early 1980s. From the mid-1980s until roughly 2016, publication counts stabilize, generally fluctuating within the mid-20s to low-40s. This extended interval of consistency suggests a predictable submission flow and a steady editorial rhythm. After 2016, the annual number of papers begins to rise more clearly, reaching the highest levels in the dataset by 2024, approaching the mid-40s. This recent expansion increases the size of the yearly record, which has implications for citation dispersion and the diversity of thematic contributions analyzed later. The trajectory captured in Figure 1 thus establishes the structural context that underpins the subsequent examination of citation patterns, influential works, and the evolution of GOM’s intellectual footprint. Annual number of papers published in GOM
It is also worth noting that recent years coincide with the increasing presence of additional peer-reviewed article formats in GOM (e.g., GOM Now, GOMusings, and commentaries), which mechanically raises annual item counts and can create a structural break in volume trends. For this reason, and to preserve citation maturity and comparability across adjacent years, the bibliometric window is intentionally capped at 2024 rather than extending into the most recent years with an immature citation window.
Annual Citation Structure of GOM
Abbreviations: TP and TC = Total papers and citations; ≥500, ≥200, ≥100, ≥50, ≥20, ≥10, ≥5, ≥1 = Number of papers with equal or more than 500, 200, 100, 50, 20, 10, 5 and 1 citations.
Across the mid-1990s to mid-2000s, GOM exhibits one of its most pronounced periods of citation accumulation, with multiple years containing several articles exceeding 100 citations and a rising number surpassing the ≥50 and ≥20 thresholds. This pattern signals the consolidation of substantive research streams that generated durable intellectual traction. A second important feature is the long-tail distribution captured by the ≥1 and ≥5 citation columns. Nearly all published papers eventually receive at least one citation, and a substantial share surpasses five citations, suggesting that most contributions enter ongoing scholarly conversations rather than remaining isolated within the corpus.
In the most recent decade, citation counts naturally decline for the newest publication years due to limited time for accumulation, but the distribution across thresholds indicates that several articles from 2015 onward are already crossing mid-range citation categories. This early uptake is consistent with the journal’s increased annual output and broader topical diversification, which enhance visibility in adjacent management and organizational domains. The aggregated period blocks further clarify the structure: the 2006–2015 cohort exhibits the highest overall citation volume and concentration of mid- and high-impact papers, while earlier cohorts contribute disproportionately to the small set of articles surpassing the very high thresholds (≥200 and ≥500 citations). Together, these patterns reveal a citation landscape shaped by both historical depth and contemporary expansion.
Citation Comparison Between Special Issue Articles and Regular Articles in GOM
Abbreviations are available in Table 3 except: SI = Special Issue articles; RP = Regular papers.
Citation Comparison Between Special Conceptual Issue Articles and Regular Articles in GOM
Abbreviations are available in Table 3 except: SCI = Special Conceptual Issue articles; RP = Regular papers.
Analysis of GOM in the JCR of WoS and Scopus
Abbreviations: TCJ = Total citations in the JCR; IF = Impact factor; 5YIF = 5-year impact factor; AIS = Article Influence Score; RM = Ranking in the WoS category of Management; PM = Journal impact factor percentile in Management; RAP = Ranking in the WoS category of Applied Psychology; PAP = Journal impact factor percentile in Applied Psychology; CS = CiteScore (Scopus); PA, PB, PP = CiteScore percentile in the categories that index GOM in Scopus (PA = Arts and Humanities; PB = Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management; PP = Applied Psychology).
Figure 2 shows a clear shift in GOM’s citation distributions across time. Note that this figure uses a box-plot methodology (Tukey, 1977) for classifying the annual citation structure (Hussain et al., 2025; Khorshidi et al., 2025a). The earliest years (1976–1985) display low medians and narrow spreads, with most articles receiving fewer than 20 citations. Citation variability is minimal, though several years contain isolated high-impact publications, including a major outlier in 1977 (1,809 citations). From the mid-1980s through the 1990s, dispersion widens and medians rise, signaling increasing heterogeneity in article impact. Notable early peaks appear in 1990 (225 citations). By the late 1990s, both central tendency and spread sharply increase, marking the beginning of GOM’s most citation-intensive era. Annual box-whisker plot citation structure of all papers published in GOM
Between 1998 and 2010, annual medians commonly fall between 50 and 100 citations, and upper whiskers frequently exceed 150 citations. Several years exhibit major outliers, including 2002 (884 citations), 2006 (715 citations), 2008 (530 citations), 2011 (876 citations), and 2015 (599 citations). This period reflects the journal’s strongest concentration of highly cited work.
Post-2009, citation distributions narrow, and medians decline—an expected consequence of shorter citation windows. Yet influential early-trajectory papers persist, such as the 2011 outlier (599 citations). From 2016 onward, medians remain below 50 citations, with modest dispersion but occasional papers exceeding 100 citations. The figure demonstrates a transition from low-impact, tightly clustered citation patterns in GOM’s early decades toward a mature phase characterized by higher medians, broader dispersion, and recurrent extreme-impact publications, followed by a narrowing in recent cohorts due to time effects.
Table 6 provides a longitudinal view of GOM’s journal-level performance across WoS and Scopus, offering insight into how its disciplinary positioning has evolved. Early JCR coverage (1997–2004) shows modest citation accumulation (TCJ between 274 and 422) and Impact Factor (IF) values below 1.0, positioning the journal in the mid-ranked tier of the WoS Management category. The absence of 5-year IF and article influence score (AIS) indicators during this period, reflects the historical limitations of JCR reporting prior to the expansion of journal-level metrics (Clarivate, 2025).
A substantial performance shift occurs beginning in 2007, where the first available AIS values—derived from the eigenfactor-based framework of Bergstrom et al. (2008)—place GOM at 0.73, rising to above 1.0 from 2012 onward. These increases parallel gains in IF and 5-year IF, which reach notable highs in 2008 (IF = 2.00), 2010 (2.41), and 2012 (2.95). The 5-year IF surpasses 3.0 multiple times (e.g., 2012 at 3.55; 2016 at 3.35; 2020 at 5.68), indicating sustained citation influence beyond the immediate citation window (Clarivate, 2025). Rankings within the Management category fluctuate as the category expands. During the 2010s, GOM’s WoS positional rank generally falls between 68 and 122 out of approximately 170–230 journals, corresponding to percentiles between 46%–83%. The journal’s classification in Applied Psychology (from 2011 onward) displays a stronger percentile trajectory, often exceeding 80% (e.g., 2012 at 92%, 2017 at 77%, 2023 at 83%), reflecting GOM’s micro-organizational orientation.
The Scopus indicators show parallel upward movement. CiteScore increases from 4.8 in 2022 to 9.9 by 2024, placing GOM within the upper percentiles of its indexed categories (between 81 and 92, depending on category). The rapid rise in Scopus impact metrics from 2018 onward corresponds to a marked growth in citation density within Scopus-indexed outlets (Scopus, 2025). Across the entire period, the combination of rising AIS values, strong 5-year IF performance, and consistently improving CiteScores signals GOM’s gradual movement toward higher-impact strata within the organizational research ecosystem. The data further show that GOM’s performance is stronger in Applied Psychology than in general Management, consistent with its long-term focus on group dynamics, teams, and micro-organizational processes.
Keyword and Topic Analysis of GOM
Keyword co-occurrence analysis provides a structured view of the conceptual domains that have shaped GOM’s scholarly trajectory. By examining author-supplied terms and their relational patterns, it becomes possible to identify dominant thematic clusters, trace their temporal evolution, and observe how established constructs connect to emerging lines of inquiry (Callon et al., 1983; Khorshidi et al., 2025a).
Figure 3 reveals a dense core of mid-2010s topics shown in green and light-green, including leadership, teams, performance, organizational identification, trust, transformational leadership, leader–member exchange, and organizational citizenship behavior. These terms form the structural backbone of GOM’s keyword landscape and show strong interconnections. Older themes in blue and turquoise include organizational commitment, job attitudes, performance appraisal, organizational justice, cultural intelligence, and multisource feedback, indicating prominence in the early 2010s or before. These keywords sit at the periphery but remain linked to the central leadership–teams cluster. Co-occurrence of author keywords in GOM: minimum occurrence threshold of 3 and 100 links.
Recent topics concentrated in yellow, orange, and red mark newer areas of interest. These include stress, coordination, inclusion, gender diversity, promotion, team processes, entrepreneurship, sustainability, and counterproductive work behavior, signaling the journal’s growing engagement with well-being, identity, and organizational change themes from roughly 2018–2020. The map shows a stable core around leadership, teams, and social exchange, with a gradual outward expansion toward contemporary themes related to diversity, resilience, and organizational sustainability.
Figure 4 visualizes the temporal evolution of GOM’s prominent themes using the Bibliometrix trend-topics algorithm (Aria & Cuccurullo, 2017). The plot highlights when key terms begin to appear, how long they persist, and the relative prominence of each topic based on bubble size. Early-term activity is concentrated between 2004 and 2010, with cultural intelligence, relational demography, organizational commitment, culture, and feedback, forming the journal’s foundational micro-organizational focus. These topics exhibit long spans but relatively small bubbles, indicating steady yet moderate attention. Between 2010 and 2015, GOM’s thematic core shifts toward leader–member exchange, trust, perceived organizational support, performance, diversity, and teams. Larger bubbles for trust, performance, and diversity, reflect their role as high-frequency, high-impact research anchors during this period.From 2014 onward, the landscape expands toward more relational and identity-based constructs, including social identity, social networks, leadership, and promotion. The substantial bubble associated with leadership marks it as one of the most influential mid-2010s topics. The newest themes—primarily after 2018—cover inclusion, work engagement, and sustainability, all of which occupy the upper portion of the figure. Their right-shifted bars signal recent emergence, while the relatively large bubbles for work engagement and sustainability indicate strong current momentum and growing relevance. The trend-topics map shows a progression from early interest in attitudes and interpersonal processes toward a more diverse, contemporary portfolio centered on identity, inclusion, engagement, and organizational sustainability. Temporal evolution of major research topics in GOM based on bibliometrix trend analysis
Figure 5 provides a frequency-weighted word cloud generated using the square-root scaling method in bibliometrix (Aria & Cuccurullo, 2017), highlighting the dominant lexical patterns in GOM’s author keyword corpus. The most visually prominent terms—organizational citizenship behavior, diversity, leadership, trust, teams, performance, and team performance—reflect the journal’s sustained emphasis on interpersonal processes, group functioning, and prosocial organizational behaviors. The prominence of organizational citizenship behavior and diversity signals their consistently high frequency, aligning with the strong clusters identified in the co-occurrence network. Word cloud of the most frequent keywords in GOM
Keywordssuch as perceived organizational support, leader–member exchange, organizational commitment, social identity, social exchange, organizational justice, and transformational leadership, occupy the mid-tier size range, illustrating their recurrent but comparatively more specialized presence within GOM’s corpus. The cloud also reveals thematic breadth: emergent or niche areas—such as corporate social responsibility, knowledge sharing, top management team, counterproductive work behavior, innovation, and cultural intelligence—appear in smaller sizes yet demonstrate the journal’s engagement with both behavioral microfoundations and broader organizational phenomena. The word cloud visually reinforces the journal’s thematic core in leadership, social exchange dynamics, citizenship behaviors, and diversity-related scholarship, while also capturing the peripheral but steadily expanding topics that reflect GOM’s interdisciplinary scope.
Figure 6 presents a thematic map derived from the 300 most frequent author keywords using the Walktrap clustering algorithm (Pons & Latapy, 2006), positioning themes along two dimensions: centrality (relevance within the field) and density (internal development). Four quadrants emerge, each reflecting a distinct thematic role in GOM’s intellectual structure. Thematic map built with the 300 most frequent author keywords and minimum cluster frequency of 3 (Clustering algorithm: Walktrap)
In the upper-right quadrant (Motor Themes), organizational citizenship behavior, leader–member exchange, and organizational commitment, appear as highly central and moderately developed clusters, indicating their sustained role as conceptually cohesive drivers of research. These themes combine strong internal structure with broad connectivity, reflecting their long-standing prominence in organizational behavior scholarship.
In the lower-right quadrant (Basic Themes), leadership, diversity, gender, trust, teams, social networks, top management team, and performance, exhibit high centrality but lower density. Their position shows that they anchor a wide range of studies across GOM while remaining conceptually open, enabling integration with multiple adjacent areas. These keywords form the foundational backbone of the journal’s research landscape.
The upper-left quadrant (Niche Themes) contains more specialized but well-developed topics, including social exchange, social identity, psychological contract, personality, cultural intelligence, culture, human resource management, and multilevel. High density but lower centrality indicates focused, theoretically rich areas that contribute depth without dominating the overall field.In the lower-left quadrant (Emerging or Declining Themes), team performance, transformational leadership, and virtual teams, appear with both low density and low centrality. Their placement suggests either early-stage thematic formation or reduced recent research momentum within the journal.
The map demonstrates that GOM’s intellectual structure is anchored by broad, integrative concepts (leadership, diversity, trust, and teams), driven by cohesive behavioral constructs (organizational citizenship behavior, leader–member exchange, organizational commitment), supported by specialized theoretical niches (social identity, psychological contract), and complemented by smaller clusters that appear to be transitioning within the field’s thematic evolution.
The Most Frequent Index Keywords in GOM (Scopus: 2003–2024)
Abbreviations are available in Table 3 except: R = Rank; H = h-index; C/P = Cites per paper; D1 = Number of papers between 2003 and 2015; D2 = 2016–2024.
Several terms show comparatively high citation density despite moderate publication counts. Diversity (27 papers) stands out with 2,851 citations—the largest total in the table—and a C/P of 105.6, positioning it as one of the most influential thematic anchors in GOM. Similarly, performance (16 papers) displays an even higher C/P (110.1), while transformational leadership (13 papers) posts one of the strongest citation intensities (C/P = 148.2), underscoring its central theoretical and empirical relevance in the journal’s corpus. Other deeply embedded organizational behavior constructs exhibit strong cumulative influence. Organizational commitment (11 papers) yields 1,224 citations (C/P = 111.3), and perceived organizational support (11 papers) similarly records a high C/P (82.2). These patterns confirm the journal’s longstanding engagement with exchange-based and attitudinal frameworks.
Several high-impact but lower-frequency topics also emerge. Meta-analysis (8 papers, 1,675 citations; C/P = 209.4) and cultural intelligence (7 papers, 1,519 citations; C/P = 217)—the two highest C/P values in the table—demonstrate that methodological synthesis and cross-cultural constructs serve as influential domains in GOM. Temporal distribution (D1 vs. D2) suggests shifts in thematic momentum. For example, inclusion shows a strong recent concentration (D1 = 1; D2 = 7), aligning with contemporary diversity research. Leadership, trust, and diversity, remain consistently represented across both periods, while themes such as multilevel, organizational justice, and knowledge sharing, display more balanced temporal distributions.
The table shows that high-impact constructs in GOM are not solely those with the highest productivity but those with strong citation density, reflecting the journal’s positioning within organizational behavior, leadership, and diversity research. This index-keyword profile also complements the thematic patterns observed in Figures 3–6, reinforcing the central role of social exchange–based frameworks, leadership processes, diversity scholarship, and team-based constructs in shaping the journal’s intellectual core since 2003.
Leading Topics in GOM Between 2015 and 2024 (SciVal – Scopus)
Abbreviations: R = Rank; TP = Total papers; VC = Views count; TC = Total citations; FWCI = Field-weighted citation impact (data from Scopus); PP = Worldwide prominent percentile (according to Scopus and FWCI).
Team Dynamics and Knowledge Transfer Mechanisms (41 papers) is the most prolific topic, accumulating 894 citations (TC/TP = 21.8) and achieving an FWCI of 1.28, indicating citation rates 28% above world average. Its PP of 97.92 places it among the top globally recognized topics in its field. Diversity Management and Team Performance Dynamics shows an even more substantial impact profile: with 24 papers generating 1,253 citations (TC/TP = 52.21), an FWCI of 4.49, and a PP of 98.55, it represents one of the most influential and prominently positioned topics in GOM’s recent portfolio.
High-intensity citation patterns also appear in topics with moderate productivity. For example, Innovative Behavior and Creativity in Organizations records 12 papers and 420 citations (TC/TP = 35), an FWCI of 1.57, and a PP of 99.61—one of the highest prominence scores in the table. Employee Engagement and Job Crafting Dynamics (8 papers; TC/TP = 22.75; FWCI = 1.59; PP = 99.75) displays a similar profile, reflecting strong international relevance. Several areas demonstrate particularly high field-normalized performance despite smaller paper counts. Cultural Dynamics in Mergers and Acquisitions (8 papers; FWCI = 2.50), Mentoring Dynamics in Professional Development Programs (6 papers; FWCI = 2.26), and Transformational Leadership and Employee Engagement Dynamics (5 papers; FWCI = 1.85; PP = 99.24) highlight domains in which GOM’s contributions significantly outperform global citation expectations. Gender Diversity and Corporate Board Performance (5 papers) also appears prominently positioned (PP = 99.73) even with moderate citation totals.
Other topics reflect steady engagement while performing closer to global citation averages. Neuroscience Insights into Leadership and Decision-Making (FWCI = 1.19), Social Networks and Knowledge Brokerage Dynamics (FWCI = 1.16), and Work-Family Dynamics and Employee Well-Being (FWCI = 1.20) indicate areas of solid scholarly relevance. Lower FWCI values in topics such as CEO Influence on Firm Performance Dynamics (0.84), Toxic Leadership and Its Impact on Employees (0.55), and Perceptions of Justice in Organizational Contexts (0.47) suggest comparatively lower global citation alignment, though these topics still demonstrate strong prominence percentiles (typically above 95), indicating continuing international attention. The SciVal-based topic structure reveals that GOM’s strongest areas of influence lie in diversity and team dynamics, leadership–engagement relationships, creativity and innovation, mentoring, and cultural processes in organizational change. The combination of high FWCI and PP across many topics underscores the journal’s visibility and impact within the broader management and organizational behavior research landscape.
Leading Topic Clusters in GOM Between 2015 and 2024 (SciVal – Scopus)
Abbreviations: R = Rank; TP = Total papers; VC = Views count; TC = Total citations; FWCI = Field-weighted citation impact (data from Scopus); PP = Worldwide prominent percentile (according to Scopus and FWCI).
Several mid-sized clusters demonstrate particularly strong citation intensity relative to their output. Emotional Labor and Job Satisfaction (TC/TP = 25.14; FWCI = 1.81) and Transformative Business Models in Digital Innovation (TC/TP = 23.19; FWCI = 1.82; PP = 98.36) reveal how GOM has incorporated affective work experiences and digital transformation into its conceptual repertoire. Similarly, Fatherhood and Justice in Organizational Performance (TC/TP = 30.28; FWCI = 2.33) reflects a sustained interest in emerging forms of work–family research, fairness, and changing social roles. Strong global prominence scores (PP > 95) in clusters such as entrepreneurship, sustainability, corporate responsibility, and social media influence indicate that GOM has effectively positioned itself within conversations that are widely recognized as high-impact across disciplines. In particular, Sustainability and Corporate Responsibility stands out with remarkably high citation efficiency (TC/TP = 46) and global relevance (PP = 99.34), suggesting that work at the intersection of responsibility, ethics, and organizational outcomes has become especially influential within and beyond the journal.
Conversely, some clusters show modest impact despite thematic relevance. Corporate Governance and Ownership Impact on Performance and Sustainable Development in Higher Education Practices display citation rates and FWCIs below or near the global average, indicating that while these topics appear in GOM, they have not yet achieved the field-wide traction observed in more behaviorally oriented or ethically focused clusters. Institutional Change in Public Sector Management Accounting (FWCI = 0.25) and Intergroup Relations and Implicit Bias (FWCI = 0.69) further illustrate areas where publication volume remains low and citation influence limited, signaling opportunities for future development.
The distribution of topic clusters demonstrates a research profile in which employee engagement, ethics, group processes, team decision-making, and evolving social roles generate the most substantial scholarly impact. At the same time, rapid-growth areas—digital innovation, sustainability, family business, data privacy, and social networks—highlight GOM’s responsiveness to emerging societal and technological shifts, reinforcing its role as a journal that bridges classic organizational behavior concerns with contemporary organizational challenges.
Influential Papers in GOM
The 50 Most Cited Documents in GOM
Abbreviations: R = Rank; TC = Total citations; C/Y = Cites per year.
Table 10 shows that GOM’s citation elite spans a wide temporal range, from foundational works of the late 1970s and 1980s to contemporary contributions from the 2010s. The most cited paper in the journal’s history is Tuckman and Jensen’s (1977) Stages of Small-Group Development Revisited, with 1,809 citations and an annual rate of 37.69, reflecting its status as a canonical reference for group development research. Bell and Kozlowski (2002) typology of virtual teams ranks second with 884 citations (C/Y = 38.43), demonstrating sustained relevance as virtual collaboration emerged as a dominant organizational form. High-impact meta-analytic and leadership scholarship also features prominently, including Wang et al.’s (2011) meta-analysis of transformational leadership (876 citations; the highest C/Y in the list at 62.57) and Roberson’s (2006) clarification of diversity and inclusion (715 citations; C/Y = 37.63).
Several papers from the mid-2000s illustrate the journal’s influence on cultural intelligence, justice, and leadership theory. Barbuto and Wheeler’s (2006) scale development for servant leadership (632 citations) and Ang et al.’s (2006) model of cultural intelligence (512 citations) have become widely adopted frameworks in organizational behavior and cross-cultural psychology. Cropanzano et al.’s (2002) application of social exchange theory to justice distinctions (602 citations) remains a foundational contribution to justice scholarship.
Recent decades show a growing presence of high-velocity citation papers. Phillips et al.’s (2015) systematic review on social innovation and entrepreneurship stands out with 599 citations and a striking C/Y of 59.90, the second highest citation velocity in the list. Tims et al.’s (2013) influential work on job crafting (315 citations; C/Y = 26.25) and Lips-Wiersma and Wright’s (2012) measurement of meaningful work (261 citations; C/Y = 20.08) illustrate the journal’s increasing influence on emerging topics in employee well-being and positive organizational behavior.
Classic papers from the 1980s and 1990s continue to anchor long-term research trajectories. Cooke and Rousseau’s (1988) study of organizational culture norms (525 citations), Bass et al.’s (1987) examination of transformational leadership dynamics (356 citations), and Vandenberg et al.’s (1999) work on high-involvement processes (351 citations) have remained central references across decades. Research on team processes—including Tekleab et al. (2009), Seers et al. (1995), and Ancona and Caldwell (1988)—collectively demonstrates GOM’s enduring role in shaping group and team scholarship.
Across the 50 most cited papers, several thematic clusters emerge: group and team dynamics, leadership and transformational processes, cultural intelligence, justice and social exchange, employee empowerment, and contemporary issues such as job crafting, meaningful work, and social innovation. The presence of both historically seminal and recent high-impact contributions underscores the journal’s dual role in preserving foundational scholarship while actively shaping new research frontiers.
Figure 7 depicts the bibliographic coupling structure of GOM’s most influential papers (≥100 citations and ≥100 links), revealing several coherent clusters and a set of structurally peripheral yet highly cited works. The blue cluster, anchored by Bell and Kozlowski (2002) and Cropanzano et al. (2002), forms the methodological and conceptual core of the network. It connects virtual teams, justice, exchange processes, and team learning research through dense interlinkages among papers such as Tekleab et al. (2009), Kostopoulos and Bozionelos (2011), and Cole et al. (2002) indicating a tightly integrated body of scholarship on team functioning and organizational exchange mechanisms. Bibliographic coupling of documents published in GOM: minimum citation threshold of 100 documents and 100 links
The red cluster, organized around Roberson (2006) and Tekleab et al. (2009), reflects a strong focus on diversity, inclusion, conflict, and leadership processes. Its internal cohesion shows that these topics frequently co-occur in GOM’s literature and share theoretical building blocks. The cluster includes adjacent work on justice, feedback, and performance linkages, positioning diversity and inclusion as central connectors in the journal’s intellectual landscape.
The brown cluster, centered on Cooke and Rousseau (1988), and Adkins et al. (1996), represents research on organizational culture, climate, norms, and behavioral expectations. Its position near the blue and red clusters reflects the role of culture and climate as conceptual bridges between leadership, team processes, and justice-based frameworks.
The orange cluster, formed around Ferrin et al. (2007) and Vlaar et al. (2007), captures trust, negotiation, and relational governance themes. Although smaller, its high internal linkage density shows a coherent subfield focused on interpersonal and intergroup dynamics in organizational settings. The yellow cluster, anchored by Barbuto and Wheeler (2006) and Bass et al. (1987), reflects leadership theory, especially transformational and servant leadership, with connections extending to performance, mentoring, and motivation research. Its adjacency to the blue cluster highlights leadership’s central role in shaping team and organizational outcomes.
In contrast, the gray cluster contains structurally peripheral but highly cited works such as Tuckman and Jensen (1977) and Ng and Sorensen (2008). Their isolation reflects topical distinctiveness rather than limited influence; Tuckman and Jensen (1977), in particular, remains a foundational standalone contribution with minimal overlap in contemporary bibliographic coupling. The map reveals a strongly interconnected core dominated by team research, diversity and inclusion, leadership, and culture, surrounded by distinct but influential peripheral contributions that broaden GOM’s thematic reach.
Most Cited Documents in GOM Publications
Abbreviations: R = Rank; TC = Total citations in GOM; C/Y = Cites per year; TCS = Total citations in Scopus; SC/Y = Scopus Cites per year; A = Article; B = Book; BC = Book chapter.
aIncludes the book edition of 1986.
The most frequently cited source within GOM is Podsakoff et al. (2003) (109 citations in GOM, 62,264 Scopus citations), reflecting the centrality of methodological rigor—particularly measurement and model evaluation—in shaping the journal’s empirical standards. Classic statistical texts such as Aiken et al. (1991) (76 GOM citations, 36,939 Scopus citations) and Cohen et al. (2013) (32 GOM citations) highlight the widespread reliance on regression, mediation, and multivariate analytical foundations in organizational research.
Seminal theoretical contributions also play a prominent role. Blau (1964), with 60 citations in GOM, exemplifies the enduring relevance of social exchange theory, while Adams (1965) and Gouldner (1960) further reinforce justice, reciprocity, and fairness frameworks as conceptual cornerstones in GOM’s literature. Works on multilevel theory, including Bliese (2000) (65 citations) and Kozlowski and Klein (2000) (33 citations), underscore the journal’s methodological orientation toward nested organizational phenomena.
Widely influential organizational behavior articles—such as Edmondson (1999) on psychological safety (37 citations), Marks et al. (2001) on team processes (47 citations), and McAllister (1995) on affect- and cognition-based trust (29 citations)—demonstrate strong thematic alignment with GOM’s dominant areas of inquiry. Leadership scholarship is also prominently represented, including Graen and Uhl-Bien (1995) (41 citations) and Ashforth and Mael (1989) (37 citations), reflecting the journal’s sustained engagement with relational and identity-based perspectives.
Across these sources, Scopus citation counts frequently exceed 10,000 global citations, and several publications—such as Hu and Bentler (1999) (85,595 Scopus citations) and Baron and Kenny (1986) (65,490)—rank among the most influential methodological works in the behavioral sciences. Their prominence in GOM indicates that the journal’s intellectual development is anchored in the broader methodological canon. The table illustrates that GOM’s knowledge base rests on a mixture of foundational theories, advanced statistical tools, and highly cited organizational behavior frameworks. These external sources form the scaffolding through which GOM authors build new theoretical and empirical contributions, reinforcing the journal’s methodological sophistication and conceptual diversity.
Figure 8 visualizes the co-citation structure of documents referenced in GOM, revealing four clusters that shape the journal’s methodological and theoretical base. The blue cluster forms the methodological core, anchored by Podsakoff and Organ (1986) and Baron and Kenny (1986). Its dense internal links underscore the journal’s strong reliance on measurement rigor, mediation logic, and structural equation modeling. Co-citation of documents cited in GOM: minimum citation threshold of 20 and 100 links
The green cluster reflects foundational work in organizational behavior and diversity. Central documents such as Ashforth and Mael (1989) and Aiken et al. (1991) highlight GOM’s sustained engagement with identity, demography, and group processes, with classic organizational theories providing connective structure across topics.
The yellow cluster captures GOM’s emphasis on team dynamics and multilevel modeling. Key nodes include Kozlowski and Klein (2000) and Marks et al. (2001), whose influence illustrates the journal’s adoption of multilevel perspectives and episodic models of team functioning.
The red cluster contains broader organizational theory and sociological foundations, represented by Podsakoff et al. (2003) and Hu and Bentler (1999). These works contribute macro-level and institutional perspectives that complement the applied behavioral focus of the other clusters. These clusters show a coherent intellectual structure built around methodological rigor (red), core OB frameworks (green), multilevel team research (yellow), and foundational organizational theory (blue).
Most Productive Authors, Institutions and Countries
The Most Productive and Influential Authors in GOM
The data shows that early productivity is driven by contributors such as Kavanagh (TP = 35; WP = 34.32), Jones (TP = 31; WP = 24.05), Pfeiffer (TP = 22; WP = 16.20), and Sashkin (TP = 15; WP = 14.12), whose publications are concentrated in the journal’s formative eras, with Jones, Pfeiffer, and Sashkin almost entirely located in D1 (D1 = 31, 22, and 15, respectively) and Kavanagh concentrated in D2–D3 (D2 = 26; D3 = 9). Despite their relatively high output, their citation impact remains low, with citation-per-paper ratios below 1 (e.g., Kavanagh C/P = 0.3; Jones C/P = 0.7; Pfeiffer C/P = 0.5; Sashkin C/P = 1.0) and uniformly low H values (H = 2 across these early contributors), indicating that early contributions served primarily formative roles rather than generating long-term intellectual influence within the journal’s corpus. This interpretation is reinforced by the WP/WNC lens: WP remains high for these authors but is notably lower than TP for some (e.g., Jones and Pfeiffer), suggesting a larger share of multi-authored output where credit is distributed, while WNC remains minimal across the group (0.12–0.31), indicating that even after annualizing citations and allocating them by authorship share, their influence within the corpus remains limited.
A markedly different pattern emerges among contemporary contributors whose impact far exceeds their publication volume. Sosik exemplifies this transition, with 11 papers but 1,413 citations (C/P = 128.5; H = 11), reflecting the enduring relevance of work in leadership, team processes, and multilevel modeling. Importantly, this influence persists after both adjustments: Sosik’s WP (5.83) indicates that his credited contribution is meaningfully lower than TP due to co-authorship weighting, yet his WNC (35.32) remains the highest in Table 12, implying a strong citation velocity that cannot be explained by long exposure time alone. Similar high-impact profiles appear for Tjosvold (TC = 647; C/P = 58.8; H = 8; WP = 6.08; WNC = 15.93) and Ferris (TC = 467; C/P = 46.7; H = 7; WP = 3.09; WNC = 6.06), whose publications span D2–D4 and align with core themes such as conflict, cooperation, and organizational politics. These cases illustrate the shift from productivity-driven authorship in GOM’s early decades to influence-driven authorship as the journal matured, while WP and WNC make this shift more robust by showing that high-impact authors remain prominent even when both co-authorship share and citation-window advantages are controlled.
A substantial group of mid-range contributors combines moderate productivity with strong citation performance. Konrad (TC = 703; C/P = 78.1; H = 7) and Boss (TC = 559; C/P = 62.1; H = 7) show citation depths that exceed what their publication counts would predict, and the WP/WNC columns clarify that this is not simply an artifact of raw counting: Konrad (TP = 9; WP = 5.38; WNC = 19.22) maintains one of the highest annualized, credit-adjusted impacts in the table, while Boss (TP = 9; WP = 5.23; WNC = 6.84) combines substantial influence with a contribution profile that remains strong even under fractional credit. Armenakis (TC = 265; C/P = 33.1; H = 5; TP = 8; WP = 3.04; WNC = 3.05) similarly shows impact exceeding what TP alone would suggest, whereas Avolio (TC = 1,171; C/P = 195.2; H = 6) illustrates a particularly strong decoupling between volume and impact: his WP (1.77) is comparatively low relative to TP (6), consistent with credit dilution under co-authorship weighting, yet his WNC (14.59) remains high, indicating that his influence is sustained even after annualizing citations and allocating them by authorship share. Their temporal distribution across D2–D4 indicates continuity within themes such as organizational change, fairness, commitment, and leadership. More recent contributors including Cropanzano (TC = 920; C/P = 153.3; H = 6; WP = 2.08; WNC = 19.00), Waldman (TC = 798; C/P = 133; H = 6; WP = 2.88; WNC = 8.19), Rousseau (TC = 789; C/P = 131.5; H = 5; WP = 2.03; WNC = 13.59), and Randel (TC = 602; C/P = 100.3; H = 6; WP = 2.44; WNC = 18.46), demonstrate that GOM’s later decades are characterized by increasingly influential work in organizational justice, identity, and leadership processes, and that a substantial share of this influence remains visible under WNC, indicating that it is not solely driven by older publication age.
Institutional patterns remain heavily centered in the United States, with strong representation from Penn State, Auburn, Colorado Boulder, Florida State, and Carnegie Mellon. However, the presence of influential authors based in Canada (Konrad, Tremblay, Burke), Australia (Gibson, Bordia), China (Tjosvold), and South Korea (Choi), indicates a gradual expansion of GOM’s international authorship base, particularly in D3–D5. The WP/WNC indicators further show that this expansion is not limited to peripheral co-authorship: several non-US authors maintain substantial credit-adjusted and annualized impact, including Konrad (WP = 5.38; WNC = 19.22), Tremblay (WP = 3.07; WNC = 17.46), Bordia (WP = 2.33; WNC = 12.23), Gibson (WP = 1.90; WNC = 10.87), Choi (WP = 1.67; WNC = 10.71), and Tjosvold (WP = 6.08; WNC = 15.93), with their outputs predominantly located in the later periods (D3–D5). The evidence in Table 12 highlights a dual structure in GOM’s authorship landscape: an initial cohort of prolific but less cited contributors who shaped the journal’s foundations, followed by a later generation whose fewer but more highly cited works have played a central role in defining the journal’s contemporary intellectual identity, a pattern that remains consistent when productivity and impact are examined through TP/TC/H/C/P as well as through WP and WNC.
Figure 9 visualizes the bibliographic coupling of authors publishing in GOM, with node colors representing the average publication year rather than clusters. A clear temporal gradient emerges from left to right. The earliest contributors, including John E. Jones, William J. Pfeiffer, and Marshall Sashkin (dark blue and purple), dominate the left side of the map. Their work is foundational to the journal’s early decades but shows relatively weak coupling to later developments, which aligns with their lower citation impact and concentration of publications before 1995 as reported in Table 12. Moving toward the center, authors such as Michael J. Kavanagh, Laurie Larwood, and Russell Wayne Boss, appear in turquoise and light green, marking a transitional generation. These authors published heavily between the late 1990s and early 2000s and occupy a bridging position that connects early practice-oriented work with the emergence of more theory-driven and empirically rigorous research. Their network position indicates moderate coupling with both earlier and later authors, reflecting GOM’s shift toward more integrated behavioral and organizational scholarship during this period. Bibliographic coupling of authors publishing in GOM: minimum publication threshold of 3 documents and 100 links.
On the right side of the network, the warm colors (yellow, orange, and red) denote authors whose core contributions occurred after 2000s. This group—including Lucy L. Gibson, Arnold Bastiaan Bakker, and Vishal K. Gupta—forms the densest and most interconnected region of the map. Their strong coupling reflects convergent research agendas around leadership, team processes, organizational identity, diversity, and multi-level modeling. Authors such as Bruce J. Avolio, John J. Sosik, and Gerald R. Ferris, appear in intermediate yellow–green tones, linking mid-period developments with the contemporary research front and reinforcing their bridging role in GOM’s conceptual evolution. The figure shows a coherent chronological progression: early authors remain peripheral and loosely linked; mid-period authors bridge methodological and thematic transitions; and the most recent contributors form a tightly connected network, indicating increased topical coherence and methodological alignment in GOM’s modern research landscape.
Figure 10 shows the co-citation structure of authors referenced in GOM and reveals four tightly interconnected author communities that anchor the journal’s intellectual foundations. The red cluster forms the methodological and empirical core of the field, with Philip M. Podsakoff positioned as the most central node. His proximity to Timothy A. Judge, and Gerald R. Farris illustrates the cluster’s emphasis on measurement rigor, mediation and structural modeling, and employee attitudes—areas that provide much of the analytic infrastructure for contemporary GOM research. Co-citation of authors cited in GOM: minimum citation threshold of 40 and 100 links
The blue cluster reflects foundational work in organizational behavior and leadership, featuring influential contributions from Jerald Greenberg and Denise M. Rousseau alongside classic leadership scholars such as Gary Yukl and Bruce J. Avolio who form cyan cluster. Their co-citation density demonstrates how theories of fairness, psychological contracts, and leader–follower dynamics continue to shape the journal’s behavioral orientation.
The green cluster highlights the journal’s long-standing engagement with team processes and multilevel frameworks. Central authors such as J. Richard Hackman and John E. Mathieu anchor work on team effectiveness, role structures, and cross-level mechanisms. Finally, the yellow cluster centers on culture, identity, and diversity, with Weick, K.E., Jeffrey Pfeffer, and James G. March serving as its conceptual anchors. Their connections to Daan van Knippenberg and David A. Harrison reinforce the importance of social identity mechanisms and demographic perspectives in shaping GOM’s work on diversity and intergroup dynamics. Together, these clusters reveal a citation structure in which methodological rigor, behavioral theory, team science, and identity research jointly underpin the journal’s intellectual coherence.
The Most Productive and Influential Institutions in GOM
Pennsylvania State University leads in total publications (TP = 22) and stands out with one of the strongest influence profiles (TC = 2,109; H = 20; C/P = 95.9), driven by high-impact contributions in teams, leadership, and organizational behavior—largely concentrated in D3–D5. Its WP (18.09) indicates that this leadership is not an artifact of frequent multi-institution co-authorship alone, but reflects consistently high attributable participation across its papers, while its WNC (95.74) shows that the citation influence remains strong even after accounting for publication age, consistent with the institution’s heavy presence in D3–D5 rather than D1–D2. Binghamton University (State University of New York) ranks second in productivity (TP = 20) and exhibits the highest citations per paper among the top institutions (C/P = 105.8), with a publication footprint spanning D2–D5, indicating both early engagement and strong continuity over time. The close alignment between TP (20) and WP (16.68) suggests relatively high authorship shares per paper, and its WNC (108.74) is comparable in magnitude to its strong TC profile (2,115), indicating that its influence is not merely an “older-paper advantage” but remains robust under time normalization. Michigan State University also demonstrates exceptional influence (TC = 2,436; C/P = 143.3), reflecting sustained output in team processes and multilevel modeling, especially during D3–D5; notably, its WP is comparatively lower (12.71) relative to TP (17), implying that its large TC is achieved with more distributed authorship credit across collaborations, while its very high WNC (155.54) signals that the institution’s impact is also strong on a per-year basis rather than being driven only by citation accumulation over longer horizons. Colorado State University (TC = 1,438; H = 14) and Auburn University (TP = 17; H = 11) similarly occupy central positions, each contributing consistently across later publication periods and maintaining strong citation performance (C/P ≈ 42–85). Here, WP and WNC differentiate two distinct profiles: Colorado State’s WP (10.96) is relatively low compared with TP (17), yet its WNC is the highest in Table 13 (162.02), indicating that its institution-attributable citation impact per year is exceptionally concentrated in later periods (D3–D5, and especially D5 = 8). Auburn, in contrast, retains a high WP (15.64) relative to TP (17), implying stronger per-paper authorship shares, but a much lower WNC (45.01), suggesting that its influence—while steady—is comparatively less intense once normalized by time since publication.
International institutions play a meaningful yet more selective role. The University of Queensland (AUS) shows a strong publication pattern in D3–D5 (TP = 13; C/P = 53.9), aligning with Australia’s rising presence in organizational behavior scholarship. Its WP (10.16) indicates that this contribution is not purely nominal across multi-institution outputs, and its WNC (36.39) suggests that, while impactful, the time-normalized citation intensity is more moderate than that of the leading U.S. hubs, consistent with a concentration in D4 (9) and a smaller cumulative base in D1–D3. VU Amsterdam (NLD) and Radboud University (NLD) reflect the Netherlands’ ongoing research strength in teams, identity, and leadership, with concentrated outputs in D4–D5. Vrije U Amsterdam shows TP = 11 and WP = 8.5, indicating substantial attributable participation, and a relatively high WNC (66.82) compared with its TC (546), consistent with a strong recent-period profile (D5 = 8) where time normalization matters most. Radboud University’s TP = 10 and WP = 7.17 similarly reflect meaningful participation, and its WNC (44.39) indicates that its influence is comparatively stronger after accounting for publication age than raw TC alone (336) might imply, again consistent with a late-entry profile (D5 = 7). Seoul National University (KOR) (TP = 11 and H = 10), is a leading non-Western contributor, increasing its presence substantially in the most recent period (D5). Its WP (6.58) is lower relative to TP, which suggests that a substantial share of its presence is embedded in multi-author and potentially multi-institution collaborations, yet its WNC (37.29) remains non-trivial given the pronounced shift to D4–D5 (D4 = 4; D5 = 7), indicating that its influence is visible even when older-citation accumulation is not available. HEC Montréal (CAN) also performs notably (TC = 1,012; C/P = 112.4), supported by impactful work in leadership, compensation, and employee outcomes; here WP and WNC reveal a particularly concentrated influence structure, because WP is relatively low (5.71) while both TC (1,012) and WNC (54.03) are high, implying that a smaller attributable authorship base is associated with disproportionately strong citation outcomes, consistent with high-impact collaborative outputs in D4–D5 (D4 = 5; D5 = 2).
Institutions such as the University of Georgia, University of Connecticut, and Arizona State University demonstrate balanced productivity and influence, with h-indices ranging from 12 to 16 and citations per paper between 40 and 100. Their contribution patterns—spanning multiple periods—highlight stable, long-term engagement with GOM. WP and WNC refine this “balanced” characterization by showing whether stability is accompanied by sustained attributable credit and time-normalized impact: for example, the University of Georgia combines TP = 15 with WP = 12.8 and TC = 1,445 with WNC = 52.75, indicating both consistent fractional presence and durable, though not extreme, time-normalized influence across D2–D5; similarly, the University of Connecticut (TP = 12; WP = 9.17; TC = 808; WNC = 41.84) reflects steady participation with moderate-normalized impact; and Arizona State University (TP = 17; WP = 16.57) stands out for very high attributable participation but relatively modest time-normalized influence (WNC = 30.39), consistent with an institution that is deeply present across periods (D2–D5) yet whose average citation intensity per year is lower than that of the most influential hubs. Overall, Table 13 illustrates a field shaped by both historically dominant U.S. research universities and an increasingly diverse set of international institutions, each contributing distinct thematic strengths to the journal’s intellectual trajectory; crucially, WP and WNC show that this trajectory is not explained by publication volume alone, but by a layered structure in which attributable authorship shares and time-normalized citation intensity jointly differentiate institutions that are merely prolific from those that have shaped GOM’s influence profile most strongly in its mature decades.
Figure 11 maps the bibliographic coupling structure of institutions contributing to GOM, showing how universities cluster based on shared intellectual foundations. Node size reflects publication volume, link strength indicates similarity in citation patterns, and node color represents the average publication year. Together, these features reveal both the structural and temporal evolution of institutional influence within the journal. Bibliographic coupling of institutions publishing in GOM: minimum publication threshold of 5 documents and 100 links
At the center of the network, Pennsylvania State University serves as the primary hub, closely coupled with Michigan State University, Louisiana State University, Arizona State University, and the University of Georgia. These institutions form a dense U.S. behavioral-research core, connected through longstanding contributions in leadership, teams, and multilevel organizational behavior. Auburn University, Clemson University, and Texas Tech University further reinforce this central block, reflecting shared methodological and theoretical orientations.
International institutions form distinct but increasingly integrated constellations. VU Amsterdam, Radboud University, HEC Montréal, and the University of Queensland, cluster together through research on diversity, identity, cross-cultural processes, and team dynamics. Australian universities—including the University of Melbourne, the University of Western Australia, and Macquarie University—appear tightly interlinked, indicating the region’s growing engagement with GOM over the past decade.
More peripheral institutions such as North Carolina State University, Oklahoma State University, and the University of Memphis, show recent but less embedded activity, while long-standing contributors like University of Colorado, Georgia Institute of Technology, and the University of Georgia, maintain visible but more historically oriented ties. The figure demonstrates a U.S.-anchored structural core surrounded by an expanding global network, reflecting GOM’s increasing international reach and diversification of scholarly perspectives.
The Most Productive and Influential Countries in GOM
European research influence is further visible in the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Sweden, Switzerland, and Spain. The Netherlands stands out by combining high volume with the densest per-capita productivity (TP = 59; H = 33; P/Po = 3.28), while its WP (48.5) indicates that this position persists after fractional counting and its WNC (295.8) signals strong time-normalized influence aligned with a D4–D5-heavy trajectory. Belgium similarly shows high citation efficiency (C/P = 62.3) and an elevated WNC (143.4) relative to its scale (TP = 17), suggesting strong per-year citation intensity rather than only accumulated legacy citations; France and Germany exhibit clear expansion in D4–D5, and their WNC values (138.9 and 126.2) indicate that time normalization materially strengthens the visibility of their more recent engagement.
Asia-Pacific countries display heterogeneous patterns. China ranks fifth by volume (TP = 60) but remains modest in per-capita terms (P/Po = 0.04; C/Po = 2.12) and shows a larger TP–WP gap (WP = 44.3), consistent with a collaboration-linked footprint and a still-maturing citation density despite growth in D4–D5. In contrast, Singapore combines relatively small volume with exceptional efficiency (TP = 14; C/P = 136.6; C/Po = 313.09), and this prominence is reinforced by high attributable participation (WP = 12.7) and strong time-normalized impact (WNC = 78.6), implying globally visible contributions even after correcting for author-share and recency. South Korea and Taiwan show predominantly recent growth (D4–D5) with balanced impact profiles, while New Zealand—despite a small base—exhibits unusually strong relative productivity and influence (P/Po = 2.82; C/Po = 244.63; C/P = 86.6), indicating high-intensity contributions from a compact research community.
Smaller research regions—including Denmark, Norway, Finland, Ireland, Portugal, Chile, and Austria—show specialized but often high-quality contributions, frequently reflected in elevated C/P and, in some cases, disproportionately high WNC relative to TP, consistent with small portfolios containing highly influential papers. Emerging contributors such as India, Turkey, Pakistan, and South Africa appear mainly in D4–D5, reinforcing the widening global participation in GOM research. Collectively, Table 14 depicts an ecosystem anchored in the United States yet increasingly diversified: WP clarifies attributable national participation under co-authorship, WNC highlights time-normalized influence (especially for late-emerging countries), and D1–D5 provides the temporal structure showing when countries entered and scaled their presence in the journal’s evolution.
Figure 12 shows a strongly centralized bibliographic-coupling structure in which the United States forms the core of the global network. Its large node size with multidirectional links indicate that most countries contributing to GOM draw on overlapping reference bases with U.S. scholarship, reinforcing its role as the primary integrator of theoretical and empirical traditions across organizational behavior, leadership, and teams research. Surrounding this core is a tightly interconnected Anglophone cluster—United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—whose strong mutual linkages reflect shared methodological preferences and a high degree of thematic co-evolution with U.S. research. Bibliographic coupling of countries publishing in GOM: minimum publication threshold of 3 documents and 50 links
European countries—including the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, and Ireland—form a second cohesive group with notable bridging functions. In particular, the Netherlands and Belgium show strong coupling strength with both the U.S. and the United Kingdom, consistent with their high citation efficiency reported in Table 14. Their placement suggests the presence of a consolidated European contribution that links sociopsychological, team-based, and organizational design perspectives, with much of this activity intensifying after 2010.
Asia-Pacific contributors such as China, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, and India, occupy more peripheral positions but maintain clear, often robust, coupling ties to the U.S. and Australia. Countries like Singapore and China exhibit increasingly strong integration into the shared reference structure, while emerging contributors—including Pakistan and Turkey—display more specialized or episodic engagement. The map depicts a system that remains U.S.-centered but is progressively diversifying as cross-regional scholarly integration deepens.
Figure 13 offers a geographic visualization of international co-authorship patterns in GOM, revealing a collaboration system that is again strongly anchored in the United States. The darker shading of the U.S. reflects its exceptionally high output (Table 14), and the dense network of outward collaboration lines illustrates how U.S. researchers serve as the primary conduit linking North America, Europe, Asia, and Oceania. This aligns with the bibliographic-coupling results in Figure 12, where the U.S. also occupied the structural core of the global knowledge network. Country collaboration map in GOM
A prominent secondary hub emerges in Western Europe—particularly the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, France, and Germany—each showing multiple thick collaboration links both with the U.S. and with each other. These patterns reflect the region’s strong citation efficiency and diverse disciplinary presence (Table 14), suggesting that European institutions not only absorb ideas from U.S. scholarship but also co-produce knowledge through sustained multi-country research teams. Australia and Canada also appear as major bridging actors, forming extensive collaborative connections with both the U.S. and Asia–Pacific countries, consistent with their high TP, TC, and h-index values.
In contrast, emerging contributors such as China, South Korea, Singapore, and India show rapidly expanding but more directional collaborations, with most ties converging toward the U.S., Australia, and selected European partners. Regions such as Africa, South America, and parts of Eastern Europe display lighter shading and fewer collaboration lines, indicating lower participation in cross-border co-authorship networks. Altogether, Figure 13 reinforces a global system in which knowledge production in GOM remains highly interconnected but asymmetrical, with a small number of scientifically mature countries functioning as central collaboration anchors.
Influential Journals in GOM
Understanding the intellectual foundations of GOM requires identifying the journals that most strongly shape its theoretical, methodological, and empirical landscape. Co-citation patterns provide a reliable indicator of how scholars integrate knowledge across outlets, highlighting the journals that function as the field’s conceptual anchors and the bridging publications that connect management, psychology, and organizational behavior traditions. Figure 14 visualizes these structures by mapping journals cited together in GOM, thereby revealing the multidimensional knowledge architecture from which GOM scholarship draws. Co-citation of journals cited in GOM: minimum citation threshold of 30 and 100 links
Figure 14 shows a clear tri-cluster structure that reflects the interdisciplinary positioning of GOM. The largest and densest cluster is centered around the Journal of Applied Psychology, which forms the core of the red psychology-oriented network. Its strong ties to Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Journal of Organizational Behavior, and The Leadership Quarterly, indicate the dominant role of applied and social psychology in shaping theories of individual and group behavior within GOM research. The high connectivity of these outlets reflects their methodological rigor and their longstanding influence on micro- and meso-level organizational studies frequently referenced in GOM.
A second cluster, shown in green, represents the management and strategy literature. Here, journals such as the Academy of Management Review and Strategic Management Journal, emerge as the most central nodes. Their strong mutual co-citation links—and frequent bridging with Administrative Science Quarterly—highlight the importance of organizational theory, strategic decision-making, and firm-level analysis to GOM. The presence of GOM within this cluster indicates its role as an integrating platform of theories from strategy, organizational behavior and management science.
The third cluster, dominated by blue nodes, captures journals rooted in social psychology and behavioral science, including the Academy of Management Journal, Personnel Psychology, and Psychological Bulletin. These outlets provide foundational constructs related to motivation, attitudes, decision processes, and interpersonal dynamics, which inform much of the theoretical grounding for GOM studies. Their co-citation links with the Journal of Applied Psychology and management journals indicate the field’s continued reliance on behavioral science to understand phenomena that span individual, team, and organizational levels. Figure 14 illustrates that GOM is situated at the intersection of applied psychology, organizational behavior, and strategic management, drawing heavily from journals that define these adjacent intellectual domains.
Most Cited Journals in GOM: Global and Temporal Analysis (WoS 1992–2024)
Abbreviations: R = Rank; TC = Total citations.
The next layer of influence comes from the Academy of Management Journal and the Academy of Management Review, which remain the second- and third-most cited journals across all decades. Their persistent prominence reflects the field’s enduring engagement with theoretical contributions, empirical organizational research, and conceptual advancements originating in the broader management discipline. Notably, GOM itself holds a historically strong position—ranking fifth globally and rising to third during 2005–2014—indicating that work published in the journal has been actively reused, extended, and integrated into subsequent research cycles.
Beyond these core anchors, several journals display rising or shifting influence that reflects changes in GOM’s thematic interests. The Leadership Quarterly, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and Organization Science, show strong upward trajectories in the most recent decade, signaling increased attention to leadership, decision-making, and multilevel organizational processes. At the same time, journals such as the Psychological Bulletin, Strategic Management Journal, and Human Relations, demonstrate durable cross-disciplinary relevance. Taken together, these patterns reveal a field that is behaviorally grounded, theoretically oriented, and increasingly diversified toward leadership, ethics, decision science, and organizational dynamics.
Publication and Citation Record of Leading Journals Connected to GOM
Abbreviations: R = Rank; TP, TC, C/P and H = Total publications, citations, cites per paper and h-index available in Scopus; P10, C10, C/P10 and H10 = Publications, citations, cites per paper and h-index between 2015 and 2024; ≥500 = Number of articles with equal or more than 500 citations; IF = Impact Factor (WoS); AIS = Article Influence Score (WoS); CS = CiteScore (Scopus); Y = Year of origin: YS = First year indexed in Scopus. The numbers provided in the table only consider “Articles” and “Reviews” up to 31 December 2024.
aFormerly known as Organizational Behavior and Human Performance (1966–1985).
bFormerly known as Occupational Psychology (1922-1974) and Journal of Occupational Psychology (1975–1991).
cFormerly known as Academy of Management Executive (1987–2005).
dFormerly known as Journal of European Industrial Training (1977–2011).
eFormerly known as The International Journal of Organizational Analysis (1993-2003) and Organizational Analysis (2004–2005).
fFormerly known as Cross Cultural Management (1994–2015).
A second tier of journals—such as the Journal of Business Research, Management Science, Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Management, and Administrative Science Quarterly—exhibits a balanced mix of productivity, citation volume, and field-specific prestige. For instance, the Academy of Management Journal and Administrative Science Quarterly combine high citation-per-paper values (312 and 370, respectively) with strong recent performance between 2015 and 2024, indicating that GOM draws heavily from empirical and theoretical developments in mainstream management scholarship. Similarly, Organization Science, Journal of International Business Studies, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and Journal of Management Studies, play an important bridging role between behavioral science, strategic management, and organizational theory. The consistent presence of these journals within the ≥500-citation column further signals their status as core knowledge repositories for foundational constructs and methodological innovations.
The table also highlights journals that, while more specialized, have become increasingly influential in shaping research published in GOM. Notable examples include The Leadership Quarterly, Business Strategy and the Environment, Organizational Research Methods, Journal of Vocational Behavior, and Human Relations. Their upward trajectories in recent-period metrics (TP10, C10, and H10) suggest growing attention to leadership, sustainability, measurement and methods, career development, and social relations within organizations. Moreover, the consistent citation visibility of applied outlets such as the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, Human Resource Management, Journal of Business Psychology, and Journal of Organizational Change Management, underscores GOM’s integrative character, drawing simultaneously from psychology, sociology, management science, and human resource development. Collectively, these patterns demonstrate that GOM is anchored in high-impact behavioral science while remaining closely connected to emerging themes in organizational change, leadership, sustainability, and methodology.
Conclusions
General Findings
This study offers a comprehensive mapping of the intellectual, thematic and collaborative structure of research published in GOM from 1976 to 2024. The performance indicators, topical analyses, and network visualizations, collectively demonstrate that GOM occupies a central position at the intersection of organizational behavior, applied psychology, leadership studies, and management theory. The journal’s knowledge base is anchored in influential outlets such as the Journal of Applied Psychology, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, and Journal of Management, which consistently appear as dominant sources of conceptual and methodological grounding. Co-citation and bibliographic coupling analyses further reveal that GOM integrates both classical foundations—rooted in organizational behavior and social psychology—and contemporary streams related to leadership, group dynamics, ethics, organizational change, and methodological rigor.
Topically, the field has evolved toward increasingly diverse and interdisciplinary themes. Recent clusters show strong engagement with employee engagement, ethics, group processes, decision making, emotional labor, digital innovation, corporate governance, sustainability, and diversity. These topics reflect an expanding concern with the socio-relational and ethical dimensions of organizational life, coupled with a growing interest in data-driven, cross-functional, and global perspectives. At the institutional and country levels, the dominance of the United States remains clear, although collaborations with the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, China, and several European nations have intensified, highlighting a progressively internationalized authorship landscape.
The findings indicate that GOM has developed into a mature and influential forum that blends psychological, sociological, and managerial theories to address complex organizational phenomena. Its thematic trajectory demonstrates both continuity with foundational research traditions and adaptability to emerging issues that shape contemporary organizational scholarship.
Practical Implications
The patterns identified in this study offer several insights for practitioners seeking to align organizational strategies with the evolving evidence base captured in GOM. The prominence of research on leadership, team dynamics, ethics, and organizational change, underscores the need for managerial practices that prioritize relational competence, transparent decision processes, and psychologically safe work environments. Findings from the journal’s most influential knowledge streams suggest that effective leadership development should incorporate evidence-based approaches rooted in social psychology and organizational behavior, emphasizing credibility, fairness, and adaptability in rapidly changing contexts.
The growing visibility of themes such as emotional labor, diversity and inclusion, sustainability, and digital transformation, highlights pressing areas where organizations must invest in capability building. Managers can leverage this scholarship to refine policies that support employee well-being, foster inclusive cultures, and navigate the ethical and governance challenges associated with complex organizational systems. The strong role of methodological and analytical contributions further implies that organizations will increasingly benefit from integrating rigorous data-driven tools—such as behavioral analytics, network diagnostics, and evidence-informed HR systems—into their decision-making processes.
Finally, the internationalization of GOM’s authorship and collaboration networks provides practical lessons for organizations operating in global environments. The expanding diversity of institutional and geographic contributors reflects a widening set of contextual perspectives, indicating that managerial practices should be sensitive to cultural, regulatory, and societal differences across regions. For multinational organizations, these insights reinforce the value of context-aware management strategies that balance global coherence with local responsiveness.
Limitations and Future Research
This study, while comprehensive in scope, is subject to several inherent limitations associated with bibliometric methodologies and database-dependent analyses. The reliance on Scopus as the primary data source means that publication and citation patterns reflect the coverage, indexing policies, and historical inclusion criteria of a single database. Variations in journal indexing dates, differences in citation practices across disciplines, and the exclusion of non-article document types may therefore introduce structural biases into the observed trends. Furthermore, bibliometric indicators such as total publications, citations, and co-citation metrics capture patterns of scholarly influence rather than the substantive quality or theoretical contribution of individual works, which should be considered when interpreting the findings.
Another limitation concerns the interpretive boundaries of network-based analyses. While co-authorship, collaboration, and co-citation networks offer a macro-level representation of intellectual structures, they inherently simplify complex scholarly relationships. For example, strong citation ties may reflect thematic proximity, historical influence, or methodological alignment, but bibliometric tools cannot fully differentiate these underlying mechanisms. Likewise, the visualizations of clusters and thematic groupings produced by algorithms such as Louvain or Walktrap, depend on parameter choices that may influence the granularity and configuration of detected themes. These methodological constraints suggest that network maps should be viewed as analytical aids rather than definitive representations of the field.
Future research can extend this work in several meaningful directions. Longitudinal studies could examine how thematic clusters evolve in response to major organizational, societal, and technological shifts, allowing scholars to trace the emergence, maturation, and decline of research fronts within GOM.
Comparative bibliometric analyses across leading journals in organizational behavior, management, and applied psychology, could further illuminate the distinctive intellectual positioning of GOM relative to its peer outlets. Additionally, integrating altmetric data, full-text semantic analysis, or machine learning–based topic modeling would enable deeper insights into conceptual development, interdisciplinary diffusion, and practitioner engagement. Such extensions would enrich understanding of the journal’s scholarly trajectory and provide a more nuanced perspective on its role within the broader management research ecosystem.
Supplemental Material
Supplemental Material - 50th Anniversary of Group & Organization Management: A Bibliometric Retrospective
Supplemental Material for 50th Anniversary of Group & Organization Management: A Bibliometric Retrospective by Mohammad Sadegh Khorshidi, José M. Merigó, Claudio Muller, Chandra Shekhar Pathki, William L. Gardner, Yannick Griep in Group & Organization Management
Footnotes
Supplemental Material
Supplemental material for this article is available online.