The IRIOP Annual Review Issue

Journal of Organizational Behavior, J. Organiz. Behav. 36, S1S5 (2015)

Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/job.1983

What makes excellent literature reviews excellent?

A clarication of some common mistakes and
misconceptions
GERARD P. HODGKINSON1* AND J. KEVIN FORD2
1
Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, U.K.
2
Department of Psychology, Michigan State University, U.S.A.

Summary This issue comprises the third International Review of Industrial and Organizational Psychology (IRIOP)
Annual Review Issue, following the incorporation of IRIOP into the Journal of Organizational Behavior
(JOB). In this editorial, we elaborate further on our vision to maintain the IRIOP Annual Review Issue as
the leading outlet for the publication of critical, state-of-the-art overviews and commentary on established
knowledge and developments at the forefront of the eld. In so doing, we highlight several common mistakes
and misconceptions that characterize rejected manuscript proposals and rejected full-length manuscripts and
reiterate the distinctive features that characterize the sorts of contributions that we are looking to publish,
exemplied by the ve papers appearing in this third issue. Copyright 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Keywords: scholarly excellence; crafting review articles; The IRIOP Annual Review Issue

The publication of this, the third International Review of Industrial and Organizational Psychology (IRIOP)
Annual Review Issue, constitutes a further important development in the evolution of both IRIOP and the
Journal of Organizational Behavior (JOB). As in the case of previous two issues, the papers appearing in
the present issue have survived the rigors of the two-stage double-blind peer review process that we instigated
in the transition of IRIOP from a series of annual volumes comprising invited chapters from distinguished
scholars to an annual special issue of the JOB. Continuing the tradition of the 27 volumes comprising the for-
mer book series, the mission of the IRIOP Annual Review Issue remains unchanged, namely, to maintain its
position as the most authoritative and current guide to accumulated knowledge and new developments at the
frontiers of the organizational behavior and industrial and organizational psychology elds (Hodgkinson &
Ford, 2013: S4).
The changes we have introduced are fullling their intended purpose of strengthening further the position of
IRIOP as the premier outlet for review articles in industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology/organizational
behavior (OB), evidenced by the continuing rise in the overall quality of submissions that we have received over
the past three years. Subjecting the most promising manuscript proposals and subsequent full-length manuscripts
to the independent judgments of suitably qualied experts, there is no question that the published articles resulting
from this process are all the better for it.
Following the publication of our previous editorials (Hodgkinson & Ford, 2013, 2014) in which we outlined
our vision for the IRIOP Annual Review Issue and set out the criteria against which all proposals and full-
length manuscripts are to be evaluated, the number of prima facie inappropriate submissions has gone down
markedly. Nevertheless, we continue to receive work from a number of potential contributors that are obvi-
ously out of line with the mission and purpose of the IRIOP Annual Review Issue, thus resulting in desk

*Correspondence to: Gerard P. Hodgkinson, Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL, U.K. E-mail: Gerard.
Hodgkinson@wbs.ac.uk

Copyright 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

S2 G. P. HODGKINSON AND J. K. FORD

rejection. Perhaps, therefore, it is worth reiterating the criteria against which all manuscript proposals and sub-
sequent full-length manuscripts are evaluated and reecting further on the most common reasons for the rejec-
tion of obviously unsuitable work.
As explained in Hodgkinson and Ford (2013), papers of acceptable quality invariably share seven essential char-
acteristics: (i) well-written; (ii) a targeted focus; (iii) conceptual clarity; (iv) an articulated contribution; (v) based on
sources appropriate to the task of scholarly advancement; (vi) organized; and (vii) offering a holistic and critical
perspective:

In the light of the foregoing criteria, it should be clear that we are not looking to publish papers that provide short, uncritical
summaries of existing research, or ones that focus on new research areas with few empirical studies, to build conceptual
models, derive attendant research propositions, and specify future research directions that will result merely in the testing
of the models thus proposed. Nor, indeed, are we looking to publish papers that merely review programs of research asso-
ciated narrowly with the authors of the contributions in question. Rather, we are seeking to attract well-conceived proposals
that can be developed into timely and insightful papers that review the very best scholarship addressing up to the minute
issues, as well as issues of enduring concern to I-O psychology/OB scholars, offering incisive critiques that will simulate
further progress in theory building and theory testing, fresh waves of empirical work, and/or methodological advances,
by mapping out future directions coupled tightly to the accompanying critiques of the work surveyed, thereby ensuring that
the articles we publish are both novel and wide-ranging in their signicance and reach for the research domain in question.
(Hodgkinson & Ford, 2013: S3)

Those authors whose work we have desk rejected over the two years following the publication of this clear
guidance, although, for the most part, meeting our seven criteria, still continue to make three common
mistakes:

1. Submitting proposals to review work in topic areas where there is clearly an insufcient body of scholarly
knowledge accumulated to warrant a dedicated review article. To warrant a review, there must be a sizable
body of theory and research accumulated in the primary scientic journals. Proposals to develop new topic
areas by extrapolation from more established literature pertaining to the wider I-O psychology/OB eld thus
fall beyond the scope of the IRIOP Annual Review Issue. As such, they are best targeted at outlets devoted
to the publication of reective essays.
2. Submitting proposals to review programs of research associated too narrowly with the authors of the con-
tributions in question. Rejected manuscript proposals falling within this class typically promise to describe
large programs of work completed by the manuscript proposers under contract from multinational compa-
nies and/or major government departments and agencies such as departments of health and defense agen-
cies. Clearly, more suitable outlets for such work are the many journals targeted at practitioners and
policy makers.
3. Submitting proposals to advance new theory. This is not the remit of the IRIOP Annual Review Issue,
which, as explained in our previous editorials and reiterated previously, is to publish critical overviews
of state-of-the art developments in the scholarly literature pertaining to the topic at hand. Authors whose
intention is to advance new theory should target instead outlets devoted to the advancement of new theory,
mindful that the JOB publishes this type of contribution in its regular issues. Clearly, therefore, the JOB
(among other potential outlets) and not the JOB IRIOP Annual Review Issue is a more suitable outlet to
which such pieces should be sent.
Perhaps, it is also worth reminding readers that in our most recent previous editorial (Hodgkinson & Ford, 2014),
we outlined the principal differences between narrative, meta-analytic, and systematic literature reviews and consid-
ered the potential contribution of each of these approaches to the crafting of articles for possible publication in future
IRIOP Annual Review Issues. Although it is still relatively early days, we are frustrated that intending contributors
continue to confuse and/or misapply these basic terms.

Copyright 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J. Organiz. Behav. 36, S1S5 (2015)
DOI: 10.1002/job
 EDITORIAL S3

Overview of the Papers in This Issue

We now turn to introduce each of the ve papers selected for inclusion in the present issue. Collectively, they
address the overarching problem of adaptation in the workplace, in a diverse range of interesting ways.
The rst two papers address adaptation in general from a cognitive standpoint. Departing markedly from the com-
putational perspective predicated on the cognitive miser hypothesis that has historically dominated, and continues to
dominate, much of the literature pertaining to the analysis of cognition within and between organizations
epitomized by the heuristics and biases program of Tversky and Kahneman (1974) and related work in the behavioral
decision theory (BDT) traditionSandberg and Tsoukas (2015) paper offers a comprehensive critical survey of
work rooted in the antithetical interpretative traditionepitomized by the work of Karl Weick and colleagues
(e.g., Sutcliffe & Weick, 2008; Weick, 1969, 1979)centered on the notion of sensemaking (Weick, 1995).1
Further challenges to the classical computational orthodoxy of work on managerial and organizational cognition
have arisen from an increasingly inuential body of work predicated upon a fundamentally different conception of
Simons (1956) bounded rationality notion from that construed by traditional BDT researchers, known as ecological
rationality (see, e.g., Gigerenzer 1991, Gigerenzer & Goldstein 1996). Based on the argument that many of the basic
laboratory tasks employed in BDT experiments lack ecological validity, in the second article of this IRIOP Annual
Review Issue, Artinger, Petersen, Gigerenzer, and Weibler (2015) review the evidence for a new class of heuristics,
fast and frugal heuristics, which they maintain are adaptively matched to the informational structure and demands
of decision makers everyday work environments, in ways that are more likely to lead to faster and more effective
outcomes, relative to more complex statistical procedures.
The third paper, by Jundt, Shoss, and Huang (2015), reviews the literature pertaining to the adaptive performance
construct, a construct that seeks to redress the criticism of traditional models of performance that they are static,
whereas job requirements are frequently dynamic in nature (see, e.g., Grifn, Neal, & Parker, 2007; LePine,
Colquitt, & Erez, 2000). This paper surveys comprehensively developments pertaining to the conceptualization,
measurement, and correlates of individual adaptive performance, offering insightful suggestions for future research
directions.
Naturally, the increasingly dynamic nature of work is placing ever growing demands on employees. As observed
by the authors of the fourth paper (Sonnentag & Fritz, 2015: S93), in their own words, [o]ver the past decade
researchers have identied psychological detachment from work during nonwork time as an important recovery
experience. Employing Sonnentags (2010) stressor-detachment model as an organizing framework, their review
indicates that psychological detachment, the process of refraining from job-related activities and mentally
disengaging from work during time off the job (Sonnentag & Fritz, 2015: S72), is a key mechanism that aids
recovery from job stress. Identifying interesting and potentially fruitful avenues for future work, nonetheless, they
offer a series of insightful practical recommendations to aid practitioners and policy makers in addressing the
pressing social and economic problems arising from the all-too frequent failure of individuals and organizations
to adopt practices that promote psychological detachment as an aid to recovery.
The fth and nal paper, by Jennings, Mitchell, and Hannah (2015), reviews and integrates a wide-ranging
body of work pertaining to the nature and signicance of the self in moral functioning, a topic that has grown
immeasurably in its importance in the I-O psychology/OB eld in the wake of the litany of corporate corruption
scandals that have plagued organizations in recent years, exemplied by the Enron debacle. The authors identify a

1
For more detailed discussions of the distinction between the computational and interpretive perspectives on cognition in organizations, refer
to Lant and Shapira (2001) and Hodgkinson and Healey (2008). The former perspective, exemplied by work on mental representations and
BDT research, draws attention to the fundamental information processing limitations of organizational decision makers and the strategies that
they employ in an effort to overcome those limitations, thus emphasizing the downstream choice or calculation processes at the heart of de-
cision making and problem solving. The latter perspective, in contrast, exemplied by Weicks work, emphasizes the upstream processes of
sensemaking used by individuals and groups to extract patterns of meaning from ambiguous environmental cues in the social construction of
organizational realities.

Copyright 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J. Organiz. Behav. 36, S1S5 (2015)
DOI: 10.1002/job
S4 G. P. HODGKINSON AND J. K. FORD

number of nontrivial problems pertaining to the conceptualization and empirical investigation of the role of self in
moral functioning and ethical behavior, not least the diversity of constructs that have proliferated over the last
25 years and the inevitable accompanying fragmentation of empirical ndings, often derived from studies under-
taken in contexts that render problematic their generalization to organizational settings. Little surprise, therefore,
that the I-O psychology profession, like other bodies of professional advisors, continues to struggle to provide
viable answers to the all-important question of how best to address the continuing inability of the nancial sector
to adapt to the myriad of problems currently aficting all stakeholders of the global economy and society
(cf. Hodgkinson & Healey, 2011).

Conclusion

Now entering its fourth decade, we are extremely grateful to our contributors, reviewers, and readers for the roles
that you have each played in establishing IRIOP as the most authoritative and current guide to accumulated
knowledge and new developments at the frontiers of the OB and I-O psychology elds. The continuing rise in
the overall quality of submissions that we have received over the past year further indicates that the strategic steps
we have taken to maintain IRIOPs position, amidst growing completion, are working. Going forward, as in
previous years, we will welcome innovative proposals across the full spectrum of topics that comprise this most
fascinating, eclectic eld.

Author biographies

Gerard P. Hodgkinson is Head of the Behavioural Science Group, Associate Dean (Programme Quality), and Pro-
fessor of Strategic Management and Behavioural Science at Warwick Business School, the University of Warwick,
UK. He is the (co-)author of three books and more than 80 scholarly journal articles and chapters. His work, which
has appeared in the Annual Review of Psychology, Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, Jour-
nal of Management, Personnel Psychology, Organizational Research Methods, and Strategic Management Journal,
among other outlets, centers on the analysis of cognitive processes in organizations and the psychology of strategic
management. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, the British Psychological Society, and the British
Academy of Management. From 1999 to 2006, he was the Editor-in-Chief of the British Journal of Management and
currently serves on the Editorial Boards of several major journals including the Academy of Management Review,
Organization Science, and Strategic Management Journal. With J. Kevin Ford, he coedits the IRIOP Annual Re-
view Issue of the Journal of Organizational Behavior.
J. Kevin Ford is a professor of psychology at Michigan State University. His major research interests involve im-
proving training effectiveness through efforts to advance our understanding of training need assessment, design,
evaluation, and transfer. Dr. Ford also concentrates on understanding change dynamics in organizational develop-
ment efforts and building continuous learning and improvement orientations within organizations. He has published
over 60 scholarly journal articles, 25 chapters, and 4 books relevant to industrial and organizational psychology.
Currently, he serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Applied Psychology and Human Performance. He is
an active consultant with private industry and the public sector on training, leadership, and organizational change
issues. Kevin is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Society of Industrial and Organiza-
tional Psychology. He received his BS in psychology from the University of Maryland and his MA and PhD in psy-
chology from the Ohio State University.

Copyright 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J. Organiz. Behav. 36, S1S5 (2015)
DOI: 10.1002/job
 EDITORIAL S5

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Copyright 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J. Organiz. Behav. 36, S1S5 (2015)
DOI: 10.1002/job

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