Blatt, R. (2009)
Resilience in entrepreneurial teams: Developing the capacity to pull through.
Resilience, or the capacity to rebound from adversity strengthened and more resourceful, is an important quality for entrepreneurial teams, yet we know little about how entrepreneurial teams can foster resilience. I develop and test hypotheses about the antecedents and mechanisms for resilience in…
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Blatt, R. (2009)
Tough love: How communal schemas and contracting practices build relational capital in entrepreneurial teams.
Entrepreneurial teams often operate under conditions of novelty—the lack of familiarity. Novelty can undermine team members’ ability to develop the relational capital (trust, identification, and mutual obligation) needed for a venture to succeed…
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Blatt, R. (2008)
Organizational citizenship behavior of temporary knowledge employees.
This study examines accounts of organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) by temporary knowledge employees. Most studies of OCB are based on the perspective of permanent employees and may not account for the unique perspective of temporary knowledge employees…
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Ashford, S.J., George, E., & Blatt, R. (2007)
Old assumptions, new work: The opportunities and challenges of research on nonstandard employment.
We review the literature on nonstandard work with three aims: to portray the breadth and nature of the research and theorizing to date, to document the challenges and opportunities this domain poses to both practice and theory, and to bring the study…
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Blatt, R., Christianson, M.K., Sutcliffe, K.M., & Rosenthal, M.M. (2006)
A sensemaking lens on reliability.
This study assessed the applicability of current theories of reliability in dynamic settings by exploring the sensemaking processes experienced by a sample of medical residents around lapses in reliability of patient care. Important differences in lapses surfaced, particularly with respect to whether actors…
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Blatt, R. & Camden, C.T. (2006)
Positive relationships and cultivating community
We begin by defining sense of community and presenting why it is important to understand its development in organizations. We then identify a gap in the organizational literature with respect to how community at work develops when workers are temporary, thereby lacking membership, a past…
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Blatt, R. & Camden, C.T. (2006)
Positive relationships and cultivating community
We begin by defining sense of community and presenting why it is important to understand its development in organizations. We then identify a gap in the organizational literature with respect to how community at work develops when workers are temporary, thereby lacking membership, a past, or a future in the organization. We then present an exploratory study of the experiences of community of 30 veteran temporary employees. Their ages ranged from 24 to 73 and their occupations spanned less skilled jobs such as retail sales or light industrial work to professional positions such as lawyers and scientists. Ten were men and 20 were women. Our methods involved in-depth interviews. All respondents generated at least one story of a time when they felt a sense of community at work, lending credence to our conjecture that temporary employment and sense of community are not mutually exclusive. Temporary workers reported that their sense of community did not develop over time, nor was it expected to last; it developed swiftly and involved positive in-the-moment connections that offered feelings of inclusion, a felt sense of importance, perceptions of mutual benefits, and the experience of shared emotions. Our study contributes to the field of positive relationships at work by suggesting that sense of community under conditions of transience is cultivated by microrelational moves–small acts of positive connecting–enacted by individuals in the context of their ongoing doing of work, rather than by the macro-organizational practices that have traditionally sought to build community in work settings characterized by permanence and stable membership.
Anderson, P., Blatt, R., Christianson, M., Grant, A., Marquis, C., Neuman, E., Sonenshein, S., & Sutcliffe, K. (2006)
Understanding mechanisms in organizational research: Reflections from a collective journey.
Social mechanisms are theoretical cogs and wheels that explain how and why one thing leads to another. Mechanisms can run from macro to micro (e.g., explaining the effects of organizational socialization…
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Ashford, S.J, Blatt, R. & VandeWalle, D. (2003)
Reflections on the looking glass: A review of research on feedback-seeking behavior in organizations
This paper presents and organizes the results of two decades of research on feedback-seeking behavior according to three motives: the instrumental motive to achieve a goal, the ego-based motive to protect one’s ego, and the image-based motive to enhance…
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