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"A game-changing approach to management. Too often discussions of management practice focus exclusively on managing people and organizational issues. Rarely, however, do they incorporate a discussion about technology or address all three dimensions in a balanced way. When they do, the result is game changing. In our hypercompetitive environment, those managers who are outstanding at being plugged into their people, technology, and organizational processes simultaneously excel at coming up with effective business solutions. The Plugged-In Manager makes the case that being plugged-in--the ability to see choices across each of an organization's dimensions of people, technology, and organizational processes and then to mix them together into new and powerful organizational strategies, structures, and practices--may be the most important capability a manager can develop to succeed in the 21st century. Step by step Griffith shows you how to acquire this ability. Shows what it takes for business managers to succeed as technology and organizations become more and more complex. Profiles exceptional leaders and organizations who are plugged-in, such as Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com. Offers a fresh look at management issues. Filled with compelling case studies and drawing on first-hand interviews, The Plugged-In Manager highlights this often neglected managerial capability and the costs of only focusing on one dimension rather than all three"--

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is the primary federal agency funding nonmedical research in the United States. However, relatively few organizational researchers consider approaching the agency, despite the funds it has available. It is easy to understand why: The agency has a reputation for preferring "hard science" and quantitative approaches, and there is no obvious home for organizational studies in the agency. NSF programs appear to recognize psychological and small-group research on the one hand, and sociological research on the other, with little emphasis on organizations. There are, however, several programs that have funded research on organizations, or relevant to organizations. Additionally, the NSF regularly solicits advice and direction from researchers on new directions for focus and attention. We argue that organization researchers should indeed approach NSF with robust research proposals. We provide suggestions for finding an appropriate application "home" within NSF. We also discuss the process of proposal preparation, offering suggestions on how to prepare a persuasive proposal, with comments on how the review process works. Finally, we close with a clarion call for organization researchers to help NSF understand the importance of organizations, and thus of organization research, to the whole array of the agency's other research interests—to the effective practice of science; to organizing human activity, including economic and educational activity; and to management and governance of human activities in general. As such, we argue, NSF has a stake in organizational research—and organizational researchers have a stake in NSF.

Special issues of scholarly journals have become more common during the last decade of management research. We review this trend and assess the effectiveness of special issues for knowledge dissemination. Methods include interviews with journal editors, compiling data on time to publication and on impact and quality of special issues for five mainstream management journals, and a case study chronicling the creation of the Organization Science special issue on "Knowledge, Knowing, and Organizations." The findings show that journal special issue articles appear to be published more quickly than regular issue articles (time to publication), and for three of the five journals there is a significant difference in impact (measured as citation counts per article) when special and regular issue articles are compared. Further, we find evidence of greater variation in the quality of special issue articles compared to regular issue articles, although this reflects special issues publishing exceptional articles rather than the inclusion of substandard ones. The case analysis suggests that a series of preconferences on a common topic prior to a special issue did not appear to impact the type of papers submitted to or published in the special issue. We discuss the role of special issues and preconferences in knowledge development in organization science.

Electronic communication media usually differ from nonelectronic communication media on a variety of communication features. However, research designs typically do not allow for the most revealing examination of communication feature effects. This paper proposes a methodological framework for conceptualizing and operationalizing electronic communication research, and presents an illustrative study based on the framework. The methodological framework distinguishes among communication media, channels, and features, and emphasizes the importance for theory and research of understanding the effects of communication features both within and across communication media. To demonstrate this framework, subjects in the study participated in a sealed-bid negotiation. Communication of the bids was either paper-and-pencil or computer-mediated. The results revealed a significant main effect for medium (computer-mediated communication yielded lower individual scores), significant main effects for features (documentation and anonymity both yielded lower individual scores), and a significant interaction between a feature (documentation) and medium. For organizations, these results suggest that the accepted effects of a medium should be reexamined in light of the medium's component features; design and adoption decisions should be made with an understanding of the existence of interactions between features and media.

We theorize about human-team collaboration with AI by drawing upon research in groups and teams, social psychology, information systems, engineering, and beyond. Based on our review, we focus on two main issues in the teams and AI arena. The first is whether the team generally views AI positively or negatively. The second is whether the decision to use AI is left up to the team members (voluntary use of AI) or mandated by top management or other policy-setters in the organization. These two aspects guide our creation of a team-level conceptual framework modeling how AI introduced as a mandated addition to the team can have asymmetric effects on collaboration level depending on the team's attitudes about AI. When AI is viewed positively by the team, the effect of mandatory use suppresses collaboration in the team. But when a team has negative attitudes toward AI, mandatory use elevates team collaboration. Our model emphasizes the need for managing team attitudes and discretion strategies and promoting new research directions regarding AI's implications for teamwork.

Technology has been an important theme in the study of organizational form and function since the 1950s. However, organization science's interest in this relationship has declined significantly over the past 30 years, a period during which information technologies have become pervasive in organizations and brought about significant changes in them. Organizing no longer needs to take place around hierarchy and the collection, storage, and distribution of information as was the case with "command and control" bureaucracies in the past. The adoption of innovations in information technology (IT) and organizational practices since the 1990s now make it possible to organize around what can be done with information. These changes are not the result of information technologies per se, but of the combination of their features with organizational arrangements and practices that support their use. Yet concepts and theories of organizational form and function remain remarkably silent about these changes. Our analysis offers five affordances—visualizing entire work processes, real-time/flexible product and service innovation, virtual collaboration, mass collaboration, and simulation/synthetic reality—that can result from the intersection of technology and organizational features. We explore how these affordances can result in new forms of organizing. Examples from the articles in this special issue "Information Technology and Organizational Form and Function" are used to show the kinds of opportunities that are created in our understanding of organizations when the "black boxes" of technology and organization are simultaneously unpacked.