Article Review

Q Academy of Management Review 2017, Vol. 42, No. 4, 577–595. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2017.0044Invited

2016 Decade Award Invited Article

REFLECTIONS ON THE 2016 DECADE AWARD: INCORPORATING CONTEXT IN ORGANIZATIONAL RESEARCH

GARY JOHNS Concordia University and University of British Columbia

This is a reflection on my 2006 article, “The Essential Impact of Context on Organiza- tional Behavior,” which received the 2016 Academy of Management Review Decade Award. I review some studies supporting my earlier contention that the impact of context has been underappreciated in management research and then recount the genesis of the article, particularly emphasizing the capacity of context to explain anomalous and counterintuitive research findings. I offer conjectures as to why the article has been cited and present evidence that contextual appreciation is increasing in management, and that this is part of a general trend in the social and behavioral sciences. I discuss some newer theories and measures of context and consider the desirable properties of theo- ries that incorporate context. Finally, I argue that it is not easy to control away context, that context is about similarities as well as differences and about change as well as stability, and that variables and relationships vary in their sensitivity to context.

The purpose of this article is to offer some re- flections on “The Essential Impact of Context on Organizational Behavior” (Johns, 2006), the re- cipient of the 2016 AMR Decade Award. I was surprised to learn that the context article had re- ceived the award, because its contribution to theory is less traditional in approach than that of most AMR articles, and one reviewer disliked the manuscript in all of its iterations. Furthermore, the subject of the article is not my main scholarly preoccupation. However, I had visited the topic of context earlier (Johns, 1991, 1993, 2001), and I thought I had something more to say on the mat- ter, even though that initial 1991 effort was first rejected by AMR, to my distinct displeasure!

A PRÉCIS OF THE ARTICLE

The basic premise of the 2006 article was that the impact of context on organizational behavior is underrecognized and underappreciated. I rather broadly defined context as situational or environmental constraints and opportunities that have the functional capacity to affect the occur- rence and meaning of organizational behavior. Contextual stimuli can be located at, above, or below a focal level of analysis and can operate as main or moderator effects. I offered several ways

of thinking about context, including context as salient situational features, situational strength, cross-level effects, configurations of stimuli, en- vironmental events, situational shapers of meaning, and a fairly constant ambient back- ground factor. The point of the article was not that context had never been studied before. Rather, it was that it should be incorporated more mindfully and systematically into our research. In the article I argued that it is helpful to think

about context as operating at a broader, more gen- eral, more distal level (omnibus context) and a nar- rower, more specific, more proximal level (discrete context), with the latter usually roughly nested un- der the former and serving as a mediator of more distal effects. I suggested that the journalistic im- peratives to report who, what, when, where, and why exemplify omnibus context. Drawing on social and environmental psychology, I asserted that dis- crete context comprised task, social, and physical stimuli. I proposed that more important aspects of these context dimensions are theoretically perva- sive and operate at multiple levels of analysis. For instance, the task variables uncertainty, autonomy, and interdependence appear in a variety of man- agement theories and have been applied at levels ranging from individuals to industries. Despite this, there are fewer theories of such variables (Whetten, 2009) and even fewer literature reviews focusing on such variables than one might expect. And if they are not explicitly modeled and measured, they are

I thank Blake Ashforth, Aparna Joshi, and Sharon Parker for comments that improved this article.

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often simply ignored, despite their proven influence on organizational behavior.

In what I consider to be the core of the article, I provided a number of examples of how context affects organizational behavior and related re- search results by restricting range, determining base rates, reversing causality, reversing signs, prompting curvilinearity, and tipping relation- ships. A key argument was that many anomalous research findings can be explained when context is taken into consideration. Unrecognized, context effects can threaten internal validity, challenge external validity, and limit the application of management research. Recognized, such effects can identify boundary conditions for theories, of- fer opportunities to enlarge the scope of theories, and facilitate research application.

The article concluded with some ways to con- textualize research (see also Rousseau & Fried, 2001) and its reportage, along with relevant ex- amples. In design terms, I encouraged cross-level, comparative, and qualitative research, as well as the study of processes and events. I also encour- aged the provision of more qualitative data in conjunction with otherwise quantitative designs, particularly to facilitate future meta-analyses. In terms of measurement and analysis, I placed special emphasis on the choice of dependent variables, with “more and varied” being the pre- scription. The general idea of this is to identify variables that are differentially susceptible to contextual opportunities and constraints. This prescription contrasts with disciplinary conven- tions to dwell on a rather limited range of de- pendent variables (as in strategy) or to study a plethora of seemingly similar dependent vari- ables one by one, in isolation (as in organizational behavior). I discouraged the cavalier designation of contextual features as control variables, a point I will reemphasize in this article. Finally, I encouraged better reporting of context, particu- larly in the omnibus domains of who or what is studied and when, where, and why the research is conducted.

SOME DATA ON THE PROBLEM

During the review process, I was fortunate that no one asked for proof that context had been neglected in the organizational sciences, since I did not really have any data to this effect. Since then, however, some empirical evidence has emerged for the contention. Gorgievski and

Stephan (2016) examined 142 articles concerning the psychology of entrepreneurship published between 2000 and 2015. Only eight articles ex- plored context at any level of analysis. A compi- lation of 373 articles on leadership published between 1990 and 2005 concluded that only 16 percent “took into account the organizational context to at least a moderate extent” (Porter & McLaughlin, 2006: 561), and a review of 52 articles concerning knowledge sharing concluded that 31 were “context free” and only 7 were decidedly context aware (Sergeeva & Andreeva, 2016). Cronin, Weingart, and Todorovic (2011) enu-

merated the articles on workgroups and teams published in six prominent management journals in 2010. Only 16 percent of the group-level con- structs studied were contextual (e.g., resource levels, presence of intergroup competition), and over half of these were employed as control vari- ables rather than employed substantively. Simi- larly, a review of team diversity research concluded “overwhelmingly . . . contextual vari- ables were considered as control variables rather than directly incorporated into study hypotheses” (Joshi & Roh, 2007: 29). Maloney, Bresman, Zellmer- Bruhn, and Beaver (2016) rated the richness of the contextual descriptions included in 271 teams articles published between 2004 and 2013. Only 25 percent provided rich descriptions that addressed the social, physical, organizational, and in- dustrial nature of the research settings, while 29 percent provided no contextual information at all. The remaining articles simply provided the geo- graphic location of the research site. Given all of this, it is fair to conclude that “much extant research treats groups as closed systems” (Kouchaki, Okhuysen, Waller, & Tajeddin, 2012: 171). Although these findings present a rather neg-

ative picture, it must be remembered that they are necessarily looking backward rather than for- ward. As things progress, I will present additional evidence that changes have occurred in the ap- preciation of context in and beyond the manage- ment discipline. These changes should be reflected in such reviews in the future.

THE GENESIS OF THE ARTICLE

Over the years, as a reviewer of manuscripts, I had been struck by the frequency with which re- searchers attempted to test hypotheses that could almost certainly not be confirmed given the

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apparent distribution of at least one of the vari- ables in question. Technically, this is a problem of restriction of range, in which there is not enough variance in a variable to detect an underlying true-score association with another variable. In essence, researchers are studying things that don’t exist, because they have sampled from an inappropriate context. It is tempting to write this off as a methodological error and something that should have been resolved before the data were even collected (see Aguinis & Vandenberg, 2014). However, I began to discern that constraints on behavior (which lead either to direct restriction of range or to an inappropriate range of response to address the question at hand) were equally a property of substance, not just methodological choice, and were often inherent in the context chosen for a study (Johns, 1991). Hence, trying to validate the existence of a need hierarchy using respondents from a single occupation is probably a methodological misstep, but the collected data will still accurately reflect the reality of occupa- tional constraints and opportunities for that sample, such as they are. The bottom line here is that the interplay among theory, data, and method cannot be avoided (Van Maanen, Sørensen, & Mitchell, 2007).

At about this same time, I read a book chapter that cited a survey indicating a work absenteeism rate of 14 percent in Italy and 1 percent in Swit- zerland, Italy’s next-door neighbor (Steers & Rhodes, 1984). Subsequently, I read a meta- analysis of the relationship between job perfor- mance and turnover that recorded turnover rates ranging from 3 percent to 106 percent for the an- alyzed samples (McEvoy & Cascio, 1987). These data suggested strong respective effects for na- tional and organizational context. As an absen- teeism researcher struggling to account for an additional percentage point of variance in individual-level absence, I found such effects most impressive, and I knew that the Swiss were not that much healthier than Italians. This insight, of course, required a shift in level of analysis, as an appreciation of context often does, with the caution that collective rates of behavior are not reflecting the same pool of variance as individual behavior. Nevertheless, I saw the value of being attentive to levels effects (Hackman, 2003) some- what before it became fashionable, and this set the stage for thinking about context. One concrete outcome of this was the development and re- finement of the absence culture construct

(Nicholson & Johns, 1985), which specifies how individual employee absenteeism levels are markedly determined by the social context, in- cluding workgroup peer behavior, occupational norms, social class dynamics, and manifestations of national culture. This construct complemented the prevailing individual-level ethos that absen- tees were ill, unethical, or job dissatisfied. During this period, a number of surveys

appeared in the literature documenting the fail- ure of organizations to adopt various scientifi- cally validated human resources (HR) practices. It seemed to me that this paradox could be explained in part by applying the massive liter- ature on innovation to the context in which such practices are actually implemented. In particular, I argued that scholars tend to frame valid HR practices as technical innovations while man- agers frame them as administrative innovations (Johns, 1993). Practices associated with the latter are more likely to be seen as matters of manage- rial style and taste, offering more freedom of choice and more openness to nonexpert influence. All of this induces uncertainty, allowing contex- tual factors such as institutional forces, govern- ment regulation, organizational politics, and management fads and fashions to overwhelm technical merit as a determinant of HR practice adoption (cf. Birkinshaw, Hamel, & Mol, 2008). The overarching point was that not understanding the context in which organizational innovations are enacted contributes to the so-called relevance gap or science-practice gap for management research. Perhaps the most impactful factor that shaped

the genesis of the Decade Award manuscript was my collection, over the years, of a number of arti- cles revealing (sometimes extremely) counterin- tuitive results that appeared to be attributable to contextual factors. These results included dra- matic sign reversals, reversals of causality, and reversals of conventional scholarly wisdom that were understandable when put in context (Johns, 2001). Thus, workers can feel more controlled un- der self-management than under bureaucratic control (Barker, 1993), convenience stores with friendlier personnel can have lower sales (Sutton & Rafaeli, 1988), employees can choose to work off-site when they don’t really want to do so (Rockmann & Pratt, 2015), and more domain ex- perts on corporate boards can increase the chan- ces of organizational failure (Almandoz & Tilcsik, 2016).

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Similar to the investigative journalism dictum to “follow the money,” such anomalies and para- doxes are signals to look for the operation of context, and they often constitute “empirical mysteries” that can serve as a basis for theorizing (Alvesson & Kärreman, 2007), in the spirit of the recently established Academy of Management Discoveries. Consider the supply chain position paradox (Schmidt, Foerstl, & Schaltenbrand, 2017). Schmidt and colleagues correctly pre- dicted that green supply chain practices would facilitate firm market and financial performance, and that such practices would be most common lower in the supply chain. However, they in- correctly anticipated that the link between green practices and performance would be stronger lower in the chain; in fact, upstream firms profited more from going green, despite their general ret- icence to do so. Applying an explicitly contextual frame, the authors were able to theorize an ex- planation for the paradox based on factors such as stakeholder attention, green practice maturity, and economies of scope.

Sign reversals are among the most common research anomalies. Weyman and Clarke (2003) studied the degree of perceived danger of various questionable working practices among English underground coal mining personnel, finding that those who were physically and experientially closer to the actual work (e.g., miners, as opposed to managers) were most likely to view the prac- tices as risky. It is easy enough to concoct a theory to explain these results, but it is much harder to simultaneously incorporate the results of Östberg (1980), whose study Weyman and Clarke were replicating. Studying Swedish forestry personnel, Östberg found a distance-danger gradient pre- cisely the opposite—those closer to the work found the various questionable working practices less risky! Although the reason for this particular sign reversal is not clear, careful analysis of the context will often yield explanatory dividends. For instance, Bresman and Zellmer-Bruhn (2013) found that more organizational structure gener- ally hurt the external learning of self-managed pharmaceutical teams but facilitated learning when the teams themselves lacked structure. Similarly, in a recent meta-analysis concerning gender differences in negotiation, the researchers concluded that while, on average, men obtained better economic outcomes than women, this effect was actually reversed to favor women when the negotiation context was role congruent for women

(i.e., negotiating for another person, bargaining range specified; Mazei et al., 2015). This finding supports Yoder and Khan’s (2003) contention that contexts themselves are gendered and that established gender effects can be greatly modi- fied by context. All three of these examples of sign reversals

suggest how an appreciation of context can de- marcate theoretical boundary conditions con- cerning underlying processes (Busse, Kach, & Wagner, in press), but they simultaneously invite us to incorporate context into our theories (Bamberger, 2008; Maloney et al., 2016), thus en- larging their scope. For a thorough discussion of such sign reversals, see Cavarretta, Trinchera, Choi, and Hannah (2016). These rather dramatic opposite effects should

not obscure the fact that context often operates in a more nuanced way. For instance, Latham and Erez had to conduct a meticulous series of repli- cations to uncover how subtle contextual varia- tions led one of these researchers to conclude that participation in goal setting enhanced goal com- mitment while the other researcher did not (see Latham, Erez, & Locke, 1988). Sometimes, salient situational features have little impact because their effects are countervailed by other features that comprise context. In other cases, apparently minor changes in context have big effects be- cause of tipping mechanisms (Johns, 2006). For example, Konrad, Kramer, and Urkut (2008) de- scribed how the dynamic of corporate boards changes when the number of women directors reaches or exceeds the critical mass of three.

WHY HAS THE DECADE AWARD ARTICLE BEEN CITED?

The AMR editor asks the authors of Decade Award articles to reflect on the reasons these ar- ticles have been cited. In the spirit of the subject matter at hand, one reason is, well . . . context! That is, the 2006 article appeared at an opportune time, corresponding to a trend away from uni- versalism and toward a more nuanced and con- tingent view of natural and social phenomena. In addition, this trend has occurred across disci- plines, underlining the fact that context is rele- vant to a wide range of scholarly pursuits. In his book Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe Is

Just Right for Life, the physicist Paul Davies pro- poses that “the laws of physics might be just local by-laws” (2007: 166). By this he means that thelaws

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of physics might vary over the universe or over time, rather than applying universally. Many other disciplines and areas of study outside of management have been experiencing calls for greater attention to context, including soft- ware engineering and development (Clarke & O’Connor, 2012), information systems (Davison & Martinsons, 2016; Hong, Chan, Thong, Chasalow, & Dhillon, 2014; Venkatesh, Thong, & Xu, 2016), information and communication technology (Senarathne Tennakoon, da Silveira, & Taras, 2013), supply chain management (Schmidt et al., 2017), gender studies (Yoder & Kahn, 2003), com- munity psychology (Calvard, 2015), social psy- chology (Reis, 2008), personality psychology (Rauthmann, Sherman, & Funder, 2015; Rentfrow, 2010), positive psychology (McNulty & Fincham, 2012), intelligence (Sternberg, 2004), cognition (Smith & Semin, 2004), memory and aging (Hess, 2005), immunology (Morey, Boggero, Scott, & Segerstrom, 2015), health (Short & Mollborn, 2015; Weibe, Helgeson, & Berg, 2016), safety (Rosness, Blakstad, Forseth, Dahle, & Wiig, 2012), criminol- ogy (Smith, Torstensson, & Johansson, 2001), and public administration (O’Toole & Meier, 2015). Special sections and issues of Social Science & Medicine (Placing Health in Context, November 2007), American Psychologist (Geography and Psychology, September 2010), European Journal of Personality (European Personality Reviews, May/ June 2015), Journal of Personality (Contextualized Identities, December 2007), Human-Computer In- teraction (Context-Aware Computing, issues 2–4, 2001), and Journal of Information Technology (De- bates and Perspectives, September 2016) signal the thrust of this phenomenon. Given all this, it is not surprising that the management discipline has also exhibited increased interest in context, a point that will be documented below. To its credit, our discipline, in fact, served as a bell- wether in this regard, with prescient attention de- voted to issues concerning context (Cappelli & Sherer,1991;Hattrup& Jackson,1996;Heath& Sitkin, 2001; Mowday & Sutton, 1993; Rousseau & Fried, 2001). Much of this work makes the point that such attention should indeed be a core competence of the management discipline.

I believe another reason the article has been cited resides in its simple explication of levels of context. In this sense, the article complemented the growing interest in levels of analysis in the organizational sciences (Klein & Koslowski, 2000), the rise of cross-cultural research, and the

emergence of “big science” that cuts across dis- ciplinary boundaries (and, hence, levels of analysis). Some of the most elaborate applica- tions of the AMR context article to frame new theory (e.g., Dierdorff, Rubin, & Morgeson, 2009; McFarland & Ployhart, 2015) or provide advice concerning the contextualization of specific re- search areas (e.g., Bell, Fisher, Brown, & Mann, in press; Joshi & Roh, 2007; Venkatesh et al., 2016) have made particular use of the roughly nested multilevel division between discrete and omni- bus context. This division solves the practical problem of how to use the concept of context to describe something as broad as a cross-cultural comparison or as specific as the comparison of various work designs in a single organization. To some extent it also addresses the issue of where lower levels of context originate. Thus, local work designs are neither random nor the exclusive product of managerial choice but, instead, stem from contextual factors at several levels, in- cluding global, national, occupational, and or- ganizational (Parker, Van den Broeck, & Holman, 2017). Finally, and perhaps paradoxically, the article

has been cited because of the recognized impli- cations of contextual appreciation for both theory building and practice. Concerning theorization, this is perhaps best exemplified by the pace of change in the organizational landscape. A num- ber of authors have speculated explicitly about how extant management theories might not be relevant to the changing context of work and organizations, and the speed with which such change has occurred has often removed con- text from the murky background and given it a more salient, event-like status. Thus, Benner and Tushman (2015) questioned whether extant theories of innovation and constructs such as boundary spanning, absorptive capacity, and transaction costs are still applicable as the cost of information acquisition, processing, and storage rapidly approaches nil. Similarly, McFarland and Ployhart (2015) discussed in detail how current versions of social contagion theory, social ex- change theory, and social network theory might have to be augmented or revised in light of the growing dominance of social media. On the applied side of the coin, scholars have

called attention to the limitations of acontextual “best practices” thinking, as it is commonly employed (Andrews, 2012; Benner & Tushman, 2015; Pfeffer & Sutton, 2006). For instance, vom

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Brocke, Zelt, and Schmiedel (2016) discussed the prevalence of project failures in business process management (BPM), noting that BPM best prac- tices are derived from a specific structured busi- ness context that is dissimilar to many of the settings where it has been attempted with poor success; as 3M discovered, you can’t engineer creativity (Paul & Fenlason, 2014). Fostering an appreciation of the social and business context has been a particular preoccupation of researchers in information systems and technology, where one- size-fits-all information solutions have proven es- pecially untenable (Dwivedi et al., 2015).

Also in the applied domain, contextual appre- ciation alerts us to consider the most appropriate nexus for work and organizational interventions. For instance, fostering excellent service in the tourism sector could rely on individual-level training, but service is also susceptible to team, organizational, and occupational influences, as well as institutional regimes and national eco- nomic initiatives (cf. Hong, Liao, Raub, & Han, 2016; Parker, Van den Broeck, & Holman, 2017). Understanding the complex linkages among such contextual factors and effectiveness indicators is a subject of paramount concern for the organiza- tional sciences (Goodman, 2000).

A SEA CHANGE?

Although it is possible to document a lack of systematic attention to contextual issues in management research, as illustrated earlier, there is definite evidence of a change of direction in recent years. Special issues of Human Re- lations (The Context of Leadership, November 2009), Journal of Organizational Behavior (Spec- ifying Organizational Contexts, October 2007; Putting Job Design in Context, February 2010; Contextualizing Creativity and Innovation Across Cultures, October 2015), Personnel Psy- chology (The Global Context and People at Work, Spring 2014), Management and Organization Review (Country Context in Management Re- search, November 2014), Culture and Organiza- tion (The Territorial Organization, issue 3, 2013), and International Studies of Management & Organization (issue 3, 2006) all speak to in- creased interest in context, as have invited ar- ticles (Härtel & O’Connor, 2014; Johns, 2001) and editorials in the Academy of Management Journal (Bamberger, 2008; Bamberger & Pratt, 2010; George, 2014), Academy of Management

Learning & Education (Egri, 2013), Journal of Or- ganizational Behavior (Griffin, 2007; Rousseau & Fried, 2001), Journal of Trust Research (Li, 2014), Journal of Management & Organization (Galvin, 2014), and Journal of International Business Studies (Cuervo-Cazurra, Andersson, Brannen, Nielsen, & Reuber, 2016). Underlining both the perceived need for at-

tention to context and the argued increased in- terest in the subject, many “how to incorporate context” articles have appeared in the organi- zational behavior literature, spanning such subjects as teams (Maloney et al., 2016), forgive- ness (Bies, Barclay, Tripp, & Aquino, 2016), resil- ience (Kossek & Perrigino, 2016), and social status (Li, Chen, & Blader, 2016). Perhaps more surprising is recognition of a context deficit, with suggested remedies, in a field like entrepre- neurship (Welter, 2011; Zahra, 2007; Zahra, Wright, & Abdelgawad, 2014), which has its scholarly roots in the conviction that the domi- nant paradigm in business research gave in- adequate attention to the distinctive situational aspects of founding a business from scratch. Similar calls for contextual attention have been made in other more macro areas of scholarship that might already be thought to be contextu- alized, including international management and business (Jack et al., 2011; Michailova, 2011), enterprise sustainability (Shrivastava & Kennelly, 2013), corporate social responsibility (Athanasopoulou & Selsky, 2015), networks (Sorenson & Stuart, 2008), organizational politics (Courpasson, Dany, & Delbridge, 2017), knowledge management (Thompson & Walsham, 2004), stra- tegic decision making (Shepherd & Rudd, 2014), and strategic HRM (Kim & Wright, 2010). In recent years context has also been used ex-

plicitly to frame meta-analyses in such domains as job characteristics (Wegman, Hoffman, Carter, Twenge, & Guenole, in press), team diversity (Joshi & Roh, 2009), and gender differences in performance and rewards (Joshi, Son, & Roh, 2015), and narrative literature reviews in such domains as decision making (Larrick, 2016), HRM (Cooke, Veen, & Wood, 2017), and strategic decision mak- ing (Shepherd & Rudd, 2014). Finally, heightened interest in context is re-

flected by new theories and measures of context, as well as by the increased deployment of re- search designs that facilitate contextual un- derstanding. I discuss these subjects in the following section.

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SOME NEWER THEORIES, MEASURES, AND RESEARCH DESIGNS PERTINENT TO CONTEXT

The best way to stimulate the contextualization of research is to develop theories and measures that incorporate context (Whetten, 2009). Thus, it is encouraging to see the emergence of several theories that specify how context affects organi- zational behavior and several measures that capture or reflect this context. Elsewhere I review some of these theories and measures in more de- tail (Johns, in press). Here I provide several ex- amples to illustrate some desirable properties of theories having to do with context. I also consider a couple of research designs to probe context.

Theories

Promising theories incorporating context in- clude trait activation theory (Tett & Burnett, 2003), theory of interpersonal situations (Kelley et al., 2003), theory of managerial role requirements (Dierdorff et al., 2009), event system theory (Morgeson, Mitchell, & Liu, 2015), contextual the- ory of social media (McFarland & Ployhart, 2015), contextual distance theory of international stra- tegic alliance performance (Li, Tian, & Wan, 2015), theory of purposeful work behavior (Barrick, Mount, & Li, 2013), theory of work-role perfor- mance (Griffin, Neal, & Parker, 2007), too-much-of- a-good-thing theory (Pierce & Aguinis, 2013), CEO in context theory (Hambrick & Quigley, 2014), theory of communication context (Adair, Buchan, Chen, & Liu, 2016), and contextual theory of orga- nizational discourse (Sillince, 2007).

A useful theory incorporating context provides an orderly way to proceed with research. This is especially important in the case of context, be- cause situations or environments have a plethora of distinctive features that are, in principle, all open to scrutiny. A good theory addresses which contextual features are most important given the other variables under consideration and suggests how to systematically package contextual fea- tures for empirical study. For more microlevel theories, the importance of contextual features hinges on their “psychologically active in- gredients” (Reis, 2008: 313) vis-à-vis the other variables in the theory, or what Dalal, Bhave, and Fiset call the “psychological content of situations” (2014: 1413). For instance, the core of trait activa- tion theory (Tett & Burnett, 2003) is a matrix of five personality traits (the Big Five) by three levels or

dimensions of context (task, social, and organi- zational) by four nested situational mediators of these dimensions (demands, constraints, dis- tractors, and releasers) that might or might not psychologically activate the trait in question to affect job performance. One obviously cannot do justice to such a large matrix in a single study. However, it is entirely feasible to examine a sin- gle row or column: When does task, social, or or- ganizational context activate conscientiousness to facilitate performance? How does social con- text differentially activate the Big Five to affect performance? This efficient approach mitigates the common problem of a reviewer faulting a manuscript for a lack of theory because it tests an apparently random set of moderator effects. The point is to saw off a piece of the matrix for investigation, not to throw darts at it. Good theories specify the levers by which con-

text affects organizational behavior. Although specifying levers or mechanisms is important for all theories (Bromiley & Johnson, 2005), it is par- ticularly important for those incorporating con- text. This is because such theories often span levels, traverse a good bit of causal distance be- tween context and its effects, and/or consist of omnibus features at their higher levels (e.g., na- tion or culture), and these characteristics put a premium on identifying the exact mechanics of causality. In trait activation theory the nested situational features (e.g., constraints) are the proposed mechanisms. In their contextual theory of social media, McFarland and Ployhart (2015) specify a number of variables that mediate the influence of higher-level communication media context (face to face, digital, or social) on lower- level psychological outcomes, including the la- tency, synchronicity, permanence, and anonymity of communication. As suggested, the importance of specifying

mediating mechanisms is magnified when the contextual features under consideration are more distal and/or broader in specification (i.e., omnibus context). While distal context ef- fects are compelling, they do bear the greater onus of explicating mediators and ruling out competing explanations. Consider Van de Vliert, Janssen, and Van der Vegt’s (2016) provocative findings concerning climate and entrepreneur- ship. Creating a new business is perceived to be most difficult in poorer nations with cooler sum- mers and colder winters and least difficult in richer nations with warmer winters and hotter

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summers. This combination of conditions con- stitutes a three-way interaction, and such a con- figuration is a legitimate way to represent context (Johns, 2006; Rousseau & Fried, 2001). Given the archival data the authors used, no direct evidence was available for the climato-economic theory that the former nations constituted “threat- ening environments” and the latter “challenging environments” for entrepreneurship (cf. hindrance and challenge stressors; Podsakoff, LePine, & LePine, 2007). However, the authors were sensi- tive to competing explanations, examining poten- tial confounds due to degree of industrialization, education, democratization, and colonial or com- munist history.

If there has been a deficit in contextual theo- rizing, it is most apparent in a basic lack of theo- ries that treat discrete events as context, that incorporate change in (or as) context, or that allow for bottom-up as opposed to top-down contextual influence. In true Swiss Army Knife tradition, event system theory (Morgeson et al., 2015) man- ages to incorporate all three of these important properties, beginning with events as context. Events are portrayed as distinct occurrences that vary in strength (indexed by criticality, novelty, and disruption), happen at a particular time (but can evolve temporally), and manifest in a partic- ular location and level of analysis (but can spread vertically and horizontally). The interaction of strength, time, and space is said to constitute an event system. Very importantly, the theory sug- gests ways to quantify how processes unfold as events take their course, a limitation of most existing process-oriented research.

Measures

Complementing the development of several theories are some newer measures pertinent to context. These include the Work Design Ques- tionnaire (Morgeson & Humphrey, 2006), Organi- zational Climate Measure (Patterson et al., 2005), Work Context Inventory (Pignault & Houssemand, 2016), Situational Strength at Work Scale (Meyer et al., 2014), Perceptions of Social Context Scale (e.g., Borgogni, Dello Russo, Petitta, & Vecchione, 2010), and (Communication) Context Dependence Measure (Adair et al., 2016).

These self-report measures vary in their de- gree of development, and most are reviewed in Johns (in press). Perceptual self-reports of context can be useful when (1) objective measures are

unavailable, (2) researchers wish to tap more proximal mediators of distal context, (3) these re- ports can be aggregated to a higher level to proxy objectivity, or, conversely, (4) individual differ- ences in perceived context are thought to be likely and important. Illustrating the last case, for ex- ample, Powell and Baker (2014) explained how textile and apparel company founders facing ob- jectively similar business adversity differentially viewed it as a threat, an opportunity, or a chal- lenge, in accordance with their personal identi- ties. Revisiting a subject as old as psychology itself, Rauthmann et al. (2015) presented the groundwork for a theory of psychological situa- tions in which context can be objective, consen- sual (case 3 above), or idiosyncratic (case 4 above). However, they also submitted that, as- suming equivalent objective cue exposure, peo- ple will tend to agree on the nature of environmental opportunities and constraints, in part because of wired-in evolutionary forces for survival. This argument would suggest that Powell and Baker’s entrepreneurs attended to different contextual cues in accordance with their variations in identity, despite all facing objective business adversity. All of this being said, recent theories in-

corporating context show a decided bias for ob- jective context, whatever else might be measured. Thus, the authors of some of the theories listed earlier are explicit in their preference for the ob- jective representation of context (event system theory [Morgeson et al., 2015], theory of in- terpersonal situations [Kelley et al., 2003]). In other cases this preference can be inferred from the design of supporting research (theory of mana- gerial role requirements [Dierdorff et al., 2009], CEO in context theory [Hambrick & Quigley, 2014]) or deduced from the structure of the theory itself (contextual theory of social media [McFarland & Ployhart, 2015]). Furthermore, there is copious empirical evidence for the impact of objective context without recourse to perceptions. Virtually all of the examples given in the Decade Award article and many in Johns (in press) entail objec- tive context. I admit to being perplexed by the ongoing debate among entrepreneurship scholars about whether entrepreneurial opportu- nities are “real” contextual entities or mere per- ceptions on the part of entrepreneurs (see Ramoglou & Tsang, 2016). In particular, I fail to see how the latter position accounts for the nota- ble variation in entrepreneurial activity across

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states and regions, which differentially attract, shape, and reward those inclined toward entre- preneurship (Bergmann & Hundt, 2016; Bergmann, Hundt, & Sternberg, 2016; Obschonka, Schmitt- Rodermund, Silbereisen, Gosling, & Potter, 2013).

Designs

As noted earlier, the Decade Award article in- cluded some advice for designing research that can probe context, including the use of cross-level and comparative designs, the study of events and processes, and the collection of qualitative data. Here I would simply underline a couple of designs that have shown a good track record in the ensu- ing decade: multilevel modeling and configural designs.

One major purpose of multilevel modeling is the examination of the influence of higher-level entities on lower-level phenomena, perhaps the most common conceptualization of a context ef- fect. For example, Hong et al. (2016) showed how the personal initiative of individual hotel em- ployees was influenced by the initiative climate of their work departments and how this climate was itself affected by the extent to which various hotels had implemented initiative-enhancing HR systems. The study shows how organizational and departmental context cascade down to in- fluence individual motivation, and multilevel models have now become a common way of in- corporating context.

Two variations on multilevel modeling are noteworthy for their added value in studying context. One involves the incorporation of data from large-scale databases, either at the higher levels of analysis or as a basis for the entire study. For instance, Jiang and Probst (2017) used individual-level data concerning job insecurity and burnout from the International Social Survey Program and country-level income inequality data from the Standardized World Income In- equality Database to show that increasing in- equality exacerbates the relationship between insecurity and burnout. They also replicated the effect at the U.S. state level by combining their own original survey data on individual insecurity and burnout with state-level inequality data from the County Health Rankings & Roadmaps program.

The other noteworthy variation on multilevel modeling is experience sampling, which in- volves the repeated measurement of ongoing

experiences (e.g., concerning the work context and work stress) in a naturalistic setting, ac- counting for context effects both within and be- tween respondents (Uy, Foo, & Aguinis, 2010). The technique is multilevel in that, minimally, re- peated experiences are nested under individuals, organizations, or some other unit of analysis. Us- ing repeated measurement, experience sampling is particularly useful for studying two important phenomena: (1) changes in context over time and (2) the impact of specific events that can constitute such changes. The technique has been used with particular success to examine how changes in the work context (e.g., stressor events) affect health and well-being (Ilies, Aw, & Lim, 2016). Configural designs have also been used with

success to understand contextual influence. Among other things, such designs can accom- modate the complexity that can be characteristic of context effects (MacDougall, Baur, Novicevic, & Buckley, 2014). This complexity is inherent in the sheer number of contextual features that might be relevant, the possibility of synergistic or non- linear relationships, and the likelihood that more than one combination of contextualfeatures could result in a given outcome (viz. equifinality; Fiss, 2007). Illustrating the last point, Joshi et al. (2015) used a configural design in conjunction with meta-analysis to show that women employed in more routine jobs received higher performance ratings than men when the industry in question had a higher proportion of women executives or the occupation in question was characterized by gender balance. The opportunity to identify such equifinal substitution effects is a particular strength of configural designs, which represent combinations of variables as typologies or (sometimes) taxonomies. This approach has per- haps been most commonly used to identify par- ticular “bundles” of HR practices—typologies that are associated with pursuing certain organiza- tional strategies. These bundles both constitute a work context for employees and emerge from the larger organizational context in which the prac- tices are embedded, thus providing a dual lesson in context. As a case in point, Toh, Morgeson, and Campion (2008) found that organizations tended to adopt one of five distinct bundles of HR practices (e.g., oriented toward cost minimization or toward maximizing employee commitment) and that this adoption corresponded to a fit with organizational values and structure. The authors contended that the idea that organizations freely choose their HR

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practices neglects the operation of contextual constraints, not to mention the synergy or lack thereof between or among certain of these practices.

THE VALUE OF CONTEXTUAL APPRECIATION

A few examples can highlight the value of building a more contextual perspective into re- search. I can only agree with Hackman (2003) that it is useful to bracket one’s preferred level of analysis by also incorporating appropriate data from a higher and a lower level of analysis. That having been said, it is striking how often looking to higher levels can prove fruitful. For instance, the notion of work safety climate was proposed in part to deal with the limitations of viewing safety from an exclusively individual-level perspective, which is best reflected in the idea of personal accident proneness. Over the years, considerable research has accumulated showing that this work unit or organizational contextual variable is notably associated with safety-related behav- iors, as well as work accidents and injuries (Beus, McCord, & Zohar, 2016; Christian, Bradley, Wallace, & Burke, 2009). However, research also suggests the value of putting safety climate itself into context, moving up yet another level. In a twenty-one-country study, Noort, Reader, Shorrock, and Kirwan (2016) found that national variation in uncertainty avoidance was related to the safety climate responses of air traffic con- trol employees, with more avoidance pointing to a less favorable climate. Similarly, Burke, Chan- Serafin, Salvador, Smith, and Sarpy (2008) de- termined that national uncertainty avoidance moderated the relationship between safety training and safety outcomes, rendering training less effective at higher levels of avoidance. Con- textual effects can be paradoxical, and Burke and colleagues make the point: trying to ensure pre- dictability can induce rigidity of response, ulti- mately escalating uncertainty and damaging safety effectiveness.

The value of contextual appreciation in re- solving organizational anomalies should be re- iterated. De Rond and Lok (2016) explain that noncombat medical personnel exhibit post- traumatic stress at the same rate as combat sol- diers, despite the fact that medical personnel are not directly engaged in fighting and have con- siderable past experience dealing with trauma. The authors assert that psychological injury due

to war has often been “explained” by referencing individual inability to cope or by obtusely refer- encing the work setting (i.e., “war is hell”). How- ever, employing an explicit contextual frame, their ethnographic research among military medical teams in Afghanistan showed how dis- crete, specific features of the occupational and organizational context contributed to elevated psychological injury by engendering feelings of futility, senselessness, and surreality among the medics. Importantly, these factors seem action- able in terms of potential for change, highlight- ing the aforementioned relevance of context to practice. Given the premise that context has been ig-

nored or treated in a haphazard manner in the past, it can be suggested that there is consider- able scope for re-viewing traditional research topics with a more contextual lens. In Johns (in press), I discuss how our understanding of several traditional variables that have generally been treated at the individual level (personality, de- mographics, and work design) has been consid- erably augmented by a contextual perspective. Thus, some contemporary researchers see per- sonality as modifiable by context, portray de- mography as context imported into the organization, and position much work design as a product of contextual change rather than man- agerial dictate. For instance, personality has been shown to vary between nations, regions, states, cities, and life spaces (e.g., work versus nonwork) in ways that suggest considerable contextual influence, both in terms of shaping and self-selection (Johns, in press). Finally, the value of contextual appreciation

can be seen in conjunction with what has been called the “replication crisis”—the inability to reproduce previously published research find- ings, a phenomenon observed across a wide range of disciplines. For instance, in psychology, the Reproducibility Project involved 270 re- searchers in the Open Science Collaboration (2015) attempting to replicate 100 published ef- fects, of which only 39 percent were clearly reproduced. This is not the kind of finding that inspires the confidence of granting agencies, policy makers, or the general public. However, there is growing awareness that variation in contextual factors may be responsible for many failures to replicate. Van Bavel, Mende-Siedlecki, Brady, and Reinero (2016) had coders rate the original 100 Reproducibility Project studies as to

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how sensitive each research topic would be to contextual variation over time, location, or cul- ture. Contextual sensitivity was negatively re- lated to replicability and, hence, to external validity. Also, it had a larger effect than the sam- ple size of the original study, the technical simi- larity of the replication, the original effect size, and the degree of surprise of the original finding, all factors that might plausibly influence re- producibility. I will return to context sensitivity later in the article.

SOME UNDERAPPRECIATED TRUTHS ABOUT CONTEXT

It Is Not Easy to Control Away Context

It is a common misconception that it is easy to control away or remove the impact of context in a research study using simple statistical pro- cedures, and a typical approach is to include contextual variables as controls in a regression equation with predictors of substantive interest. Like most research myths and legends (Lance & Vandenberg, 2015), there is a grain of truth to this belief. However, as has been discussed in a num- ber of recent articles (well summarized by Becker et al., 2016), many deployments of control vari- ables in the organizational sciences are ill- advised. In most cases simple statistical control is inferior to more mindful procedural control in which the operation of context is explicitly mod- eled and examined, even if it is not of central in- terest to theresearcher. An anecdote by DiMaggio (1995) illustrates the point: after making a pre- sentation about network effects, a member of the audience queried why DiMaggio had not shown an interest in organizational size, which explained twice as much variance in his orga- nizational outcomes. Admitting that he did not find size very interesting, DiMaggio implied that the search for novelty often leads to attempts to control away context so as to focus on something else. In contrast to this, Maloney et al. (2016) ad- vise teams scholars to examine previous re- search for salient context effects that have been relegated to control status and systematically study these effects.

In particular for context effects, most applica- tions of statistical control make a default as- sumption that violates the basic logic of such effects. This assumption is that the relationship between substantive predictors and outcome

variables is the same for all levels of the contex- tual control variables. However, context effects can comprise both main effects and interactions between context variables and substantive vari- ables of interest. The usual approach in- corporates main effects but ignores such interactions, which can constitute critical un- measured variables. In fact, one of the most striking context effects is that of an X-shaped disordinal interaction with no main effects, where context produces a marked sign reversal in the predictor-outcome relationship. For example, Wegman et al. (in press) found little relationship between the year of publication of research studies and reported levels of task significance. However, over the years, accounting for the oc- cupational context revealed increases in signifi- cance for samples dominated by women and decreases for those dominated by men. This ex- ample calls attention to the fact that the possi- bility of context effects should be entertained even in the absence of main effects. However, in practice, interactions are seldom proposed until evidence of main effects is found. While on the subject of main effects versus in-

teractions, there are examples in the literature where the opposite problem can be observed, in that researchers examine interaction effects and altogether ignore main effects. Ployhart and Schneider (2012) indict the field of personnel selection for this. Meta-analysis has shown conclusively that cognitive ability tests predict performance across a wide range of situations. That is, context tends not to moderate selection test validity. According to Ployhart and Schneider, this important finding has somehow ended up precluding the search for main effects of context on performance, its predictors, and indeed the entire selection process, locking personnel se- lection in an acontextual unilevel prison of its own making. Accumulating evidence suggests that this is a bad idea (Djurdjevic & Wheeler, 2014). For instance, Ellington and Wilson used multilevel analysis to determine that “much of what may often be interpreted as idiosyncratic [perfor- mance] rater variance, may actually reflect sys- tematic rating variability across contexts” (2017: 87). One of those contexts is almost surely defined by workplace politics. Hence, Rosen, Kacmar, Harris, Gavin, and Hochwarter (2017) demon- strated that group politics affected the joint effects of in-role and extra-role behavior on overall per- formance ratings made by managers. The political

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contextaffected howinformation was combinedas managers strove to balance conflict avoidance with due rating diligence, with extra-role behavior having an undue influence on overall ratings in more political contexts.

Context Is About Similarities As Well As Differences

Context is most commonly invoked to denote what is distinctive and even unique about situa- tions or environments. This is apparent from ex- amining the great majority of the articles that have cited the Decade Award article, as well as many other treatments of context, and it is un- derstandable since it is one of the signature con- tributions of contextual appreciation. However, the Latin root of the word “context” pertains to weaving or knitting together (Rousseau & Fried, 2001), and a clear appreciation of context can lead to integration, not just differentiation (Johns, in press). A common example can highlight the problem of too much differentiation: readers might be familiar with scholars so immersed in a particular context (e.g., a strategy Ph.D. student fascinated by the craft beer industry or an orga- nizational behavior colleague with extensive previous experience in health care) that they fail to see commonalities with other settings, result- ing in a kind of atheoretical contextual myopia.

As an example of needed integration, consider the following variables that comprise what Potočnik and Anderson call the “change and in- novation literatures” (2016: 481): innovation, cre- ativity, proactivity, job crafting, voice, taking charge, personal initiative, and extra-role be- haviors. While the discriminant validity of these various concepts is of interest (see Parker & Collins, 2010), so is the extent to which they share common contextual antecedents, such as material resources, social resources, or specific work design features. Knowing this could inform us about the likely co-occurrence of these behav- iors, which are almost always studied in isolation. This isolation is unfortunate because the de- ployment of multiple dependent variables is one excellent way to understand the operation of context (Johns, 2006). For instance, it is most un- likely that these eight change variables are the product of eight wholly distinct contextual pro- files, and knowing the details of this smaller set of profiles would provide for integration across re- search areas, allowing for theory pruning (Leavitt,

Mitchell, & Peterson, 2010) on the one hand and combining related constructs (Newman, Harrison, Carpenter, & Rariden, 2016) on the other. Using scientific mapping, a visual bibliometric tech- nique, Parker, Morgeson, and Johns (2017) illus- trate how various traditional theories of work design (which specify the proximal context of work) tend to cluster with particular dependent variables, such as performance versus health and well-being. This clustering reflects limited in- tegration across theories, a fact being partially rectified by some more recent approaches to work design. Bell et al. (in press) apply the ideas of omnibus

and discrete context to delineate the situations faced by “extreme teams.” Such teams operate under contextual features that are atypical in level or kind, and where ineffective performance will have extremely negative consequences. Al- though such teams are often idiosyncratic or even unique in character, the authors make the case that a contextual approach can lead to the needed accumulation and integration of research results across studies. This is especially important be- cause such teams can be hard to access and often involve small samples, putting a premium on the gradual accumulation of rather sparse evidence. Multilevel theories are one way of seeking

integration (Johns, in press). Such theories pro- pose that the (in this case, contextual) anteced- ents of organizational phenomena are similar (i.e., isomorphic or functionally equivalent) across levels of analysis (cf. Morgeson & Hofmann, 1999). Thus, theories have been proposed that the basic contextual antecedents of self-serving behavior (Johns, 1999) and reputation (Ferris et al., 2014) are similar for individuals, groups, and organiza- tions. In addition, the situational antecedents of interpersonal and interorganizational trust have been identified as similar (Rousseau, Sitkin, Burt, & Camerer, 1998).

Context Is About Change As Well As Stability

Notwithstanding the earlier contention that the pace of change has put a premium on a contextual perspective, there is a tendency to view and por- tray context as more stable than it really is (Blalock, 1984), in part because context is a back- ground factor in much research. A great deal has been written about planned organizational change, and some has been written about the change occasioned by salient organizational

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events and crises. However, natural, ambient change that accrues gradually has been treated haphazardly, despite its potential importance. For example, Wegman et al. (in press) examined the reported levels of several basic job characteris- tics (Hackman & Oldham, 1980) over a forty-year period, finding increases in skill variety, auton- omy, and interdependence. These changes in job design represent notable changes in work context for job incumbents, but they also raise questions as to the source of such changes. In fact, the agentic term job design belies the truth that many jobs are “designed” by changing contextual cir- cumstances, not by managers (Johns, 2010; Parker, Van den Broeck, & Holman, 2017). The job design changes reported by Wegman and colleagues represent average effects across occupations, and a finer-grained analysis would surely reveal both winners and losers in the job design lottery as constraints and opportunities shake out. No- where is this more apparent than in the omnibus changes in work and organizational context prompted by advances in information technology and the radically reduced cost of acquiring and processing information (see Johns, in press). Thus, Barley (2015) studied how the advent of internet shopping has severely constrained the autonomy of car salespeople to manipulate customers. Such constraints (and countervailing opportunities) are the essence of context, and they vary over time.

As illustrated by a couple of examples in the Decade Award article, studies employing ex- treme longitudinality are especially suited to uncovering changes in contextual impact. For instance, Eric Patton and I content analyzed the coverage of absenteeism from work that appeared in 2,847 New York Times articles pub- lished between 1851 and 2010 (Patton & Johns, 2012). Decade-by-decade breakdowns of thematic content clearly illustrated how the ambient social context and events of the day shaped views of absence. Thus, during World War II, absenteeism was viewed as individual deviance among Americans, damaging the war effort and contrib- uting to lives lost on the front. During the Cold War, the same behavior was viewed as a social pathology among Russians and Cubans, reflect- ing anomie stemming from the communist sys- tem. Hence, context shifts the interpretation of a commonplace organizational behavior, but this has its limits. The Times study showed that, across the decades, and no matter the focus of the article, absenteeism was virtually always portrayed as

negative behavior, a point mirrored in academic research on the subject. This raises the issue of context sensitivity.

Variables and Relationships Vary in Their Contextual Sensitivity

The fact that context is important should not obscure the likelihood that some variables and relationships (i.e., effects) are more sensitive to context than others. Mapping this degree of sen- sitivity could elucidate the boundary conditions that pertain to various theories concerning con- text. For instance, on the one hand, as noted ear- lier, the relationship between cognitive ability and job performance is not very context sensitive, since the validity of selection tests generalizes across work situations. On the other hand, recent research demonstrates that ethical behavior is notably sensitive to context, illustrating the situ- ational limits of the dispositional moral compass. Thus, time pressure, tasks that sap self-regulatory energy, and even the time of day have been shown to contribute to unethical behavior. For instance, Kouchaki and Smith (2014) reported four experi- ments demonstrating the “morning morality effect”—the tendency for people to behave more ethically in the morning rather than later in the day. Resource depletion over time from coping with mundane activities is thought to underlie this and other such effects. Writing about teams research, Maloney and colleagues advised that “one approach to context theorizing, then, in- volves determining where and when teams are interdependent with the external context, or sus- ceptible to its influences, and where and when they are not” (2016: 915). Van Bavel and colleagues (2016) found that,

with minimal training, raters could agree on the likely degree of context sensitivity of various published psychological effects. For instance, a study of visual statistical learning was rated low on context sensitivity, whereas one on racial diversity cues was rated high. As explained ear- lier, these ratings were negatively related to the replicability of their associated effects. A working hypothesis might be that behaviors are more context sensitive than attitudes, and attitudes are more context sensitive than values. Similarly, states should be more context sensitive than traits. It should be appreciated that context sensitivity

will often be second-order sensitivity. That is, one

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variable will exhibit relative sensitivity to context because a counterpart variable is itself con- strained by the context (see above for the value of multiple dependent variables to understand context). For example, there is meta-analytic evi- dence that sickness presenteeism (going to work ill) is more sensitive to work design features than is sickness absenteeism (Miraglia & Johns, 2016). At least some of this differential sensitivity may stem from the fact that organizations go to con- siderable trouble to prevent absenteeism but might be completely unaware of presenteeism. Thus, organizations are stronger situations for absenteeism than for presenteeism, providing more and stronger cues as to the (in)advisability of absence.

In principle, variation in context sensitivity should be demonstrable using meta-analysis and meta-analytic regression to illustrate differential criterion-related validity. For instance, contextual variables should prove to be more valid pre- dictors of state measures than trait measures of some construct. However, in 2017 it pains me to repeat that “most site descriptions in research reports . . . can only be described as pallid, often lacking basic information about variables that might have a critical impact on the behavior be- ing studied” (Johns, 1993: 576). Thus, the above- mentioned meta-analysis of the correlates of presenteeism involved 109 independent sam- ples, only 5 of which specified the strictness of absenteeism policies in operation. Logically, strict policies against absence should provoke presenteeism, and this was indeed the strongest effect out of fifty-five included in the study. Yet absence policies were virtually unmentioned, let alone studied as substantive context, thus not much enabling post hoc coding.

CONCLUSION

It is, of course, very gratifying to have received the Decade Award and to see that the article has been of interest to a wide range of scholars in management and many other disciplines. In the very spirit of the article, I believe that a tipping point has now occurred in which the notion of context will more mindfully and systematically affect the conception, design, interpretation, and reportage of research. To be sure, many studies that incorporate moderator variables, for in- stance, can be seen to concern context. However, it is the mindful and systematic aspect that is

sometimes missing, leading to inefficiency in the accumulation of knowledge. My evidence for a tipping point comes particularly from the large number of articles that have appeared that pro- vide theories, models, reviews, and advice con- cerning the contextualization of specific research areas. The Decade Award article was necessarily somewhat generic, and the tailoring of advice to specific research domains should go a long way toward fostering contextual appreciation in every area of management.

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Gary Johns ([email protected]) is professor emeritus of management in the John Molson School of Business, Concordia University, Montreal, and adjunct professor in the Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia. He received his Ph.D. from Wayne State University. Research interests include absenteeism, presenteeism, work design, research methodology, and context.

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