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When consumers experience a self-threat that calls their self-concept into question, the ensuing psychological discomfort motivates them to restore their self-perceptions on the threatened attribute. Although consumers can restore a threatened self-perception by consuming products and brands that possess the desired symbolic associations, this study aims to propose that word of mouth can serve to resolve self-threat and restore a threatened self-perception when the brand at the center of a word-of-mouth communication is symbolically congruent with the domain of the threat.

Experimental online survey research was conducted, inducing self-threat, manipulating brand and word-of-mouth conditions and measuring self-perceptions. Data for three studies were analyzed using SPSS and Hayes’ (2013) PROCESS macro.

Three studies show that spreading word of mouth can restore consumers’ threatened self-perceptions when the brand is symbolically congruent with the threat domain. Word of mouth about a symbolically congruent brand alleviates psychological discomfort, resulting in higher self-perceptions on the threatened attribute. The restorative effect is amplified for lower self-esteem consumers.

Participants in the focal conditions were required to spread word of mouth, which may not be an organic response for all consumers; although not spreading word of mouth is ineffective, other compensatory consumer behavior options exist. The brand option was provided to participants, which allowed for control but may have reduced some of the realism.

Positioning brands to meet consumers’ psychological needs encourages the development of consumer–brand attachments. Brands that resonate with consumers reap the benefits of consumers’ active loyalty behaviors and enjoy stronger brand equity. The present research implies a new way consumers can form brand attachments: by spreading word of mouth to resolve self-threat. As many consumers post detailed, personal information online, this research suggests firms can align their brand messages with relevant identity-related discrepancies.

This research extends the symbolic self-completion compensatory consumption strategy to the word-of-mouth context, showing that consumers can achieve the same restorative effect as consumption by spreading word of mouth. This research also contributes to compensatory word-of-mouth literature by establishing the role of brand meaning.

The purpose of this article is to share reflections about the progress toward the inclusion of race as a core analytical concept in MOS since the article. The emperor has no clothes: Rewriting “race in organizations” was published in the Academy of Management Review twenty-nine years ago.

I critically reflect upon the past and future of race in management and organizations studies drawing upon my own subjective position in what has transpired over the past twenty-nine years. Specifically, I reflect upon the past and future of the study of race in organizations and also offer some recommendations for theories that may help advance it as a core theoretical concept in MOS drawing.

Dethroning the “emperor” remains a challenge. There has been a lack of significant progress toward positioning race as a core analytical concept in MOS. There is still much to do to elevate race to a significant analytical concept in MOS. Post-colonial theory, whiteness and the literature on the sociology of race may assist scholars in making progress.

I readily acknowledge that my subjective position as the author of an article declaring the significance of race in MOS and as a Black woman whose life and career has unfolded in a world of systemic racism shape my reflections. It may be time for to consider whether positioning race as a core analytical concept in MOS can be achieved under the diversity paradigm. Perhaps it is time for a new field of study – race in organizations.

Theorizing race in organizations is central to undoing the continuing effects of racism. Otherwise, it will be difficult to develop strategies that get to the roots of racial inequality in organizations.

The confluence of resurgent white supremacy, the stark global racial inequalities revealed by the COVID-19 pandemic and calls to end anti-Blackness and systemic racism by the Black Lives Matter Movement underscore the immense importance of race in every aspect of society including organizations.

This essay is my first reflections on what has transpired since the publication of the article. The essay reveals my insights and experiences of writing the article and why rewriting race into MOS is a much larger project than the one envisioned in 1992.

Crisis services personnel are frequently deployed around the globe under highly demanding conditions. This raises the need to better understand the deployment process and more especially, sustainable reintegration after deployment. Despite recent research efforts, the study of the post-deployment stage, more specifically the reintegration process, remains fragmented and limited. To address these limitations, this review aims at (1) describing how reintegration is conceptualised and measured in the existing literature, (2) identifying what dimensions are associated with the reintegration process and (3) identifying what we know about the process of reintegration in terms of timing and phases.

Following the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses (PRISMA) protocol, the authors identified 5,859 documents across several scientific databases published between 1995 and 2021. Based on predefined eligibility criteria, 104 documents were yielded.

Research has primarily focused on descriptive studies of negative individual and interpersonal outcomes after deployment. However, this review indicates that reintegration is dynamic, multi-sector, multidimensional and dual. Each of its phases and dimensions is associated with distinct challenges.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first research that investigates reintegration among different crisis services and provides an integrative social-ecological framework that identifies the different dimensions and challenges of this process.

Conflict and resistance on the part of employees assigned to teams have accompanied the recent increase in the use of work teams in organizations. Previous empirical research identified several sources of employee resistance including violations of fairness, increased work‐load concerns, uncertain manager support, unclear role definitions, and lack of team member social support. From a literature review, we identified additional sources of employee resistance including trust, cultural values, and low tolerance for change. Empirically, we conducted a content analysis of 1,060 open‐ended comments of employees in two Fortune 50 organizations who were newly assigned to self‐managing work teams (SMWTs). The results suggest that employees' concerns did reflect issues of trust and low tolerance for change, but not cultural values. We discuss the implications of our findings for conflict management scholars as well as managers who are charged with handling increased conflict due to employee resistance to teams.

OD conceptualisation has been criticised as being both underdeveloped and too unduly narrow in its focus. Several ways that OD′s conceptualisation might be enhanced are suggested: on the one hand by differentiating its models and theories in terms of their conceptual level or scope, and on the other hand in terms of an enlarged set of fundamental organisational tasks, different levels of change agent intentionality, and the time frame involved in change. These suggested ways of reconceptualising the theoretic possibilities for OD would move it away from its mostly fix‐it, how‐to, internal problem‐solving image.

Contemporary organizations are increasingly paying attention to incorporate diversity management practices into their systems in order to promote socially responsible actions and equitable employment outcomes for minority groups. The aim of this paper is to seek to address a major oversight in diversity management literature, the integration of organizational justice principles.

Drawing upon the existing literature on workforce diversity and organizational justice, the authors develop a model based on normative principles of organizational justice for justice‐based diversity management processes and outcomes.

The paper proposes that effective diversity management results from a decision‐making process that meets the normative principles of organizational justice (i.e. interactional, procedural and distributive justice). The diversity justice management model introduced in this article provides important theoretical and practical implications for establishing more moral and just workplaces.

The authors have not tested the conceptual framework of the diversity justice management model, and recommend future research to take up the challenge. The payoff for doing so is to enable the establishment of socially responsible workplaces where individuals, regardless of their background, are given an equal opportunity to flourish in their assigned jobs.

The diversity justice management model introduced in this paper provides organizational justice (OJ)‐based guidelines for managers to ensure that OJ can be objectively benchmarked and discussed amongst diversity stakeholders to continuously improve actual and perceived OJ outcomes.

The social implication of this conceptual paper is reduction of workforce marginalization and establishment of socially responsible organizations whereby those marginalized (e.g. people with disabilities) can effectively work in their organizations.

This is the first attempt to establish a diveristy justice management model, which incorporates normative principles of organizational justice into diversity management processes and outcomes.

The purpose of this research was threefold, including to provide a four-point rationale for teaching corporate crisis management as a module within a course on ethical decision-making in business and organizations; to provide evaluative data supporting this approach; and to highlight the implications of this approach for human resource development and training.

Thirty-four undergraduates in a required course on ethical decision-making in business and organizations completed pre- and post-course assignments assessing their knowledge about crisis/management, as well as their skills in crisis recognition, evaluation and action planning. Participants also completed a survey on their perceptions of the crisis management module and its placement within the ethics course.

Statistical analyses demonstrated significant knowledge acquisition on crisis/management; significant skill development on crisis recognition, evaluation and action planning; and significantly greater “true positives” and significantly fewer “false negatives” in post-course identification of crisis warning signs. Perceptions of the crisis management module and its placement within the course on ethical decision-making were positive.

Although the sample size was relatively small, small samples are associated with a greater risk of failing to detect an effect that is present, rather than the greater predicament of erroneously concluding that an absent effect is actually present. This information, coupled with the fact that the results demonstrated not only statistical significance but also large effect sizes using Cohen’s d, inspires confidence. Nonetheless, additional assessment with larger samples would allow for the possibility of convergent evidence. Similarly, additional assessment within different organizational contexts, including applications in human resource training and development is warranted. Future research should also include assessment of specific underlying teaching strategies and evaluation of whether certain models are associated with greater learning on a broader range of crisis management skills.

Programs in business ethics education and training comprise one useful context in which to teach corporate crisis management. The program specified here addresses two training needs previously specified in the human resource development (HRD) literature on crisis management, including identifying specific methods of enhancing recognition or detection of crisis warning signs and also of providing tools and enhancing skills for assessing and containing crisis.

Despite the centrality of both ethics and HRD to crisis management, there has been a dearth of research on whether ethics education is a useful context through which to teach this topic. This research addresses this dearth and suggests new avenues for HRD in this respect.

Racially traumatic events – such as police violence and brutality toward Blacks – affect individuals in and outside of work. Black employees may “call in Black” to avoid interacting with coworkers in organizations that lack resources and perceived identity and psychological safety. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The paper integrates event system theory (EST), resourcing, and psychological safety frameworks to understand how external, racially traumatic events impact Black employees and organizations. As racially traumatic events are linked to experienced racial identity threat, the authors discuss the importance of both the availability and creation of resources to help employees to maintain effective workplace functioning, despite such difficult circumstances.

Organizational and social-identity resourcing may cultivate social, material, and cognitive resources for black employees to cope with threats to their racial identity after racially traumatic events occur. The integration of organizational and social-identity resourcing may foster identity and psychologically safe workplaces where black employees may feel valued and reduce feelings of racial identity threats.

Implications for both employees’ social-identity resourcing practice and organizational resource readiness and response options are discussed.

The authors present a novel perspective for managing diversity and inclusion through EST. Further, the authors identify the interaction of individual agency and organizational resources to support Black employees.

The purpose of this paper is to gauge the impact of the following on the share price of a firm that has allegedly committed labor abuses: the allegation itself, explanations (justifications and excuses) offered by the company spokesperson, and denials of responsibility for the alleged abuse.

The study uses archival data and an event study methodology.

Labor abuse allegations have a negative impact on the firm’s share price. Allegations that are accompanied by an explanation (a justification or excuse) have a less negative impact than those that are not accompanied by an explanation. Denials of responsibility have a negative influence on the share price.

If managers want to avoid a negative hit on the share price from an allegation of wrongdoing, they should provide an explanation (a justification or excuse) and avoid the use of denials.

Prior research has shown a negative impact from several types of labor abuse. This study extends prior research by showing a negative impact for all forms of labor abuse as a general category; it also extends findings from lab research on the impact of explanations on fairness judgments to a new context and a new dependent variable (the financial performance of the firm), which is on an organizational scale. It adds to the extreme paucity of empirical findings relative to the impact of denials and also adds to a small but growing literature on fairness judgments by third parties and their consequences.

Many of the difficulties that have been experienced by Health Authorities in this country in the examination of imported butcher's “offal”—using the term “offal” in its trade sense—would seem to have been due to injudicious methods of packing on the other side. The organs that constitute “offal”—livers, plucks, kidneys, sweetbreads, and so forth—have hitherto been closely packed into a bag, box, or crate, and the whole mass then frozen hard. Hence on arrival at the port of inspection the separate examination of these organs for possible disease conditions was rendered a matter of extreme difficulty. The exporters have now, it appears, almost all arranged for the separate freezing of the larger organs before packing, and in the case of smaller organs, such as kidneys and sweetbreads, some packers now make use of shallow boxes.