Twenty-third International Conference on Knowledge, Culture, and Change in Organizations

Abstract

We perform an integrative review of 109 academic articles on organizational slack published in influential journals between 1983-2022. Our analysis makes explicit the contrasting and even contradictory conceptualizations and operationalizations, which have produced inconclusive results, as well as the lack of a comprehensive explanation of the specific conditions (antecedents and modifiers) in which it is strategically desirable. Our basic diagnosis is that the present state of the art not only hinders theoretical advancement on the topic, but also limits its usefulness for practitioners. With this background in mind, we integrate four overlapping and inconsistent typologies of slack into one theoretical framework, in which we also introduce antecedents and modifiers to comprehensively explain the slack effect. The framework also helps to justify why future research should delve into the antecedents of slack, the role of informal institutional contexts on its effect, and the operationalization of organizational slack at a subunit level within firms.