Establishing a Contribution: Calibration, Contextualization, Construction and Creation

Riikka Sarala, Shuang Ren and Paul Hibbert When we commissioned this editorial symposium we had two principal aims. The first was to provide guidance for authors who are new to the journal and those with more experience who are seeking to develop impactful contributions to our field. The second aim was to showcase the experience and insights of the team of associate editors at the British Journal of Management (BJM): all of the team are pivotal in the journal's mission and work hard to help authors make the most of their research. With our twin aims in mind, we gave the team a broad remit. They were free to approach the task of offering guidance from their own standpoint and with their own choice of focus within BJM’s field. We also encouraged our colleagues to work in the way that they found most productive: independently, with other BJM associate editors or with colleagues from within their own networks. While other commitments and the heavy burdens of academic life meant that some of our colleagues could not participate in this symposium (but will hopefully be able to take part in further editorials), eight of the team took part, along with some collaborators. They covered a wide range of themes from BJM’s broad and inclusive take on the field of business, management and organization studies: a perspective on upper echelon decision-making and digital transformation (Arndt, Chang and Aharonson); a balanced view of artificial intelligence (Chowdhury and Budhwar); a standard-setting survey of trends in organizational behaviour (Costa and Daniels); a generative ‘take’ on religion in the workplace (Cullen); emerging directions in research on fintech and digital finance (Momtaz and Vismara); opportunities for new research in the management, knowledge and education space (Rigg); and a wayfinding view of equality, diversity and inclusivity research and practice (Śliwa). If you are developing your research in any of those areas, you will find the advice invaluable. Taken as a whole, our colleagues' work proved to be diverse, instructive and generative. Reflecting on their contributions and themes allowed us to construct the framework for guidance shown in Figure 1. As you can see in the figure, the contributions from our editorial team members helped to show that there are two key aspects of the journal's terrain: the foundations, a set of principles and standards that show how to construct rigorous research in the field; and the frontiers, the emerging debates that allow the field to be extended – or for unmapped territory to be charted. The contributions also showed that there are two ways of engaging with these aspects of the terrain: through exemplifying, which roots guidance in key principles and particular exemplars in the journal's recent articles to show standards; and through exploring, which finds new opportunities through uncovering and characterizing a latent theme in the journal or making helpfully speculative projections from established debates. While we have mapped out the contributions from our colleagues in this way, it is important to note that you will find that each contribution covers much more than one of these areas – our aim is simply to highlight how authors might usefully focus their attention on each. Submissions that meet all of these criteria are likely to make the strongest kinds of contribution. That is, they are likely to leave readers surprised – but convinced. To reflect on and understand all of these criteria in depth, along with focal advice for your area of disciplinary specialization, we encourage you to read our colleagues’ helpful contributions below. We hope that you find them as insightful, useful and instructive as we did: the individual contributions follow below, in the order presented in Figure 1. Ana Cristina Costa and Kevin Daniels The purpose of this editorial is to outline the recent trends in micro-organizational behaviour (micro-OB) in BJM for 2023–2024. As a core discipline in management studies, micro-OB focuses particularly on how individual and group behaviour in organizations evolves and adapts, while shaped by work norms and multilevel relationships and dynamics, governance and technological structures. Within this broad remit, micro-OB draws heavily upon work and organizational psychology, although not exclusively so. With the globalization of the economy and the aftermath of the recent pandemic, the very nature of working relationships has been transformed. The articles in this editorial provide insights into how research reflects some of these broader challenges and areas where future articles in BJM could make contributions. We focus on two broad areas that reflect the majority of micro-OB studies published in BJM recently. In total, we analyse 10 articles clustered around two major areas: individual behaviour and leadership. 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