Administrative Science Quarterly

As threats to democracy endanger the rights and freedoms of people around the world, scholars are increasingly interrogating the role that organizations play in shaping democratic and authoritarian societies. Just as societies can be more or less democratic, so, too, can organizations. This essay, in honor of ASQ’s 70th volume, argues for a deeper focus in organizational research on the extent to which organizations themselves are democratic and the outcomes associated with these varied models of organizing. First, we provide a framework for considering the extent to which organizations are democratically organized, accounting for the varied ways in which workers can participate in their organizations. Second, we call for research on the outcomes associated with democratic organizing at both the organizational and societal levels. We build from research arguing that the extent to which workers participate in organizational decision making can spill over to impact their expectations of and participation in civic life. Moving forward, we argue it is critical to recognize that questions of democracy and authoritarianism concern not only the political contexts in which organizations are embedded but also how organizations themselves are structured and contribute to society.

To access the benefits of mobility, digital nomads regularly disconnect from their physical locations, which should prevent them from forming a sense of place. Yet, they need this sense of place to work effectively and continue to work as digital nomads. Identifying this tension between mobility and work as the mobile worker paradox, we conduct a qualitative analysis of 73 interviews with 67 digital nomads and advance a theoretical model showing two paths by which digital nomads navigate this paradox. As digital nomads initially move to a new location, they experience placelessness—enjoying freedom and being burdened by the lack of structure. They use their freedom for nonwork adventures, and they address burdens via work placemaking, resulting in placefulness, which is a deep connection to their physical location. We find that digital nomads interpret placefulness differently according to their degree of wanderlust, which determines whether they navigate the mobile worker paradox through place iteration or place integration. Challenging the idea that mobility and a sense of place are incompatible, this study enhances our understanding of digital nomads and mobile workers broadly, and it contributes to the literatures on place, paradox, and flexible work. It also invites further research on hybrid workers, the importance of wanderlust in contemporary work arrangements, and the career implications of place iteration and place integration.

Prior research on data-driven innovation, which assumes quantitative analysis as the default, suggests a tradeoff: Organizations that rely heavily on data-driven analysis tend to produce familiar, incremental innovations with moderate commercial potential, at the expense of risky, novel breakthroughs or hit products. We argue that this tradeoff does not hold when quantitative and qualitative analysis are used together. Organizations that substantially rely on both types of analysis in the new-product innovation process will benefit by triangulating quantifiably verifiable demand (which prompts more moderate successes but fewer hits) with qualitatively discernible potential (which prompts more novelty but more flops). Although relying primarily on either type of analysis has little impact on overall new-product sales due to the countervailing strengths and weaknesses inherent in each, together they have a complementary positive effect on new-product sales as each compensates for the weaknesses of the other. Drawing on a unique dataset of 3,768 new-product innovations from NielsenIQ linked to employee résumé job descriptions from 55 consumer-product firms, we find support for our hypothesis. The highest sales and number of hits were observed in organizations that demonstrated methodological pluralism: substantial reliance on both types of analyses. Further mixed-method research examining related outcomes—hits, flops, and novelty—corroborates our theory and confirms its underlying mechanisms.

Prior research suggests that employees benefit from highly passionate teammates because passion spreads easily from one employee to the next. We develop theory to propose that life in high-passion teams may not be as uniformly advantageous as previously assumed. We suggest that high-passion teams also evoke pressures that lead employees to expend effort to increase their levels of passion, which negates the benefits the team provides. We first conducted an experience-sampling study at an engineering company involved in the production and maintenance of critical infrastructure that benefits the greater good, with 829 employees nested in 155 teams, which we surveyed three times per day for 20 consecutive work days. These data show that employees caught their teammates’ passion and consequently reported better performance, lower emotional exhaustion, and a stronger sense of social connection. However, these benefits coexisted alongside costs employees incurred that were associated with increasing their passion. In a subsequent pre-registered experiment (N = 1,063), we provide causal evidence for these effects and their underlying mechanism, finding that passion contagion is particularly effort-laden—more so than contagion of other states and increases in passion that are not the result of contagion. We develop a theory of differentiated passion contagion that exposes the effort inherent in contagion and the implications of that effort. Our work suggests that passion caught from others may hold less value than passion incited from within, and shifts our understanding of when and why passion for work is beneficial and detrimental. We also discuss implications for broader emotional contagion theory.

Job seekers often rely on help from social ties in the search for employment. Yet the job search is characterized by meritocratic ideals according to which candidates should be selected based on their qualifications, not their connections. How do people justify the use of connections given the conflicting cultural logics of social capital and meritocracy? We conduct an inductive analysis of 56 interviews with young Spaniards experiencing a difficult labor market and identify a novel process of justification, situational alignment, that reconciles these conflicting logics. Respondents justified situations in which connections provided assistance as legitimate when they perceived alignment among the job seeker, job, and type of help that connections provided. Respondents deemed illegitimate the situations in which these were not aligned. These justifications allowed respondents to embrace the social capital logic’s prescription to use connections, while upholding the meritocratic principle that jobs be awarded based on qualifications. We further find that situations involving close ties were more readily justified than those involving distant others. We test this inductively derived process using a survey experiment with 1,536 young Spaniards. This study demonstrates that perceptions of merit are situated, and advances the understanding of social capital by identifying a novel process of justification that contributes to labor market inequality.

Peer influence is crucial in shaping work practices within organizations, yet the impact of formal organizational structures on this influence remains underexplored. We argue that task structures, which capture how tasks are allocated and configured within organizations, significantly affect peer interactions and influence. Specifically, we examine how two features of task structures—task variety and task similarity with peers—moderate peer influence in a highly consequential setting: physicians’ decisions to perform a birth via caesarean section (C-section) versus vaginal delivery. Using data on nearly 5 million births performed by more than 16,500 physicians across 915 hospitals in Brazil, we find that working alongside peers whose practice style (enduring preference) favors C-sections leads the focal physician to perform more C-sections, even after controlling for features of the mother and the pregnancy. This influence is significantly stronger for physicians with higher task variety and with higher task similarity with peers. Through post-hoc analyses, we provide evidence that the observed behaviors are consistent with a mechanism of information sharing between physicians. This study contributes to our understanding of peer influence in the workplace by showing how the task structure within organizations can either amplify or diminish peer influence. This awareness is particularly crucial for health care organizations in which such dynamics can have life-changing consequences.