Anthony C. Klotz’s research while affiliated with University College London and other places

To access the benefits of mobility, digital nomads regularly disconnect from their physical locations, which should prevent them from forming a sense of place. Yet, they need this sense of place to work effectively and continue to work as digital nomads. Identifying this tension between mobility and work as the mobile worker paradox, we conduct a qualitative analysis of 73 interviews with 67 digital nomads and advance a theoretical model showing two paths by which digital nomads navigate this paradox. As digital nomads initially move to a new location, they experience placelessness—enjoying freedom and being burdened by the lack of structure. They use their freedom for nonwork adventures, and they address burdens via work placemaking, resulting in placefulness, which is a deep connection to their physical location. We find that digital nomads interpret placefulness differently according to their degree of wanderlust, which determines whether they navigate the mobile worker paradox through place iteration or place integration. Challenging the idea that mobility and a sense of place are incompatible, this study enhances our understanding of digital nomads and mobile workers broadly, and it contributes to the literatures on place, paradox, and flexible work. It also invites further research on hybrid workers, the importance of wanderlust in contemporary work arrangements, and the career implications of place iteration and place integration.

Increasingly, transactions between firms and customers are typified by the co-creation of value, wherein customers play an active role in the development of new products and services. Over the past two decades, research on co-creation has flourished across multiple disciplines, largely highlighting its benefits for firms and customers. Importantly, though, while customer engagement in the creative process may be viewed positively by customers and improve organizational performance, it may not be experienced as universally positive by the service providers who must respond to it. To gain a more complete understanding of both the positive and negative sides of customer creativity, we take an approach-avoidance perspective to build a theoretical model explaining how and why customer creative behavior can lead to divergent responses by service providers. Specifically, we describe how creativity by customers can inspire service providers, driving them to act more prosocially toward customers in return. Simultaneously, customer creativity can cause performance anxiety in service providers, leading them to withdraw from their work. Adding nuance to these predictions, we draw from interpersonal complementary theory to explain why the approach-avoidance processes triggered by customer creativity should be contingent on service providers’ creative-role identity. Across an experience-sampling field study (Study 1), a critical-incident experiment (Study 2), and a scenario-based experiment (Study 3), our results largely align with our theoretical model (overall N = 647). We close by discussing the theoretical and practical implications of our work.

In modern organizations, key sources of competitive advantage are embedded in employees. Management theory has traditionally viewed employee exit as the end of firms’ relationships with employees and, consequently, the end of access to human capital and other resources embedded in departing individuals. However, recent research suggests that firms can benefit from the continuation of relationships with alumni employees. We argue that how organizations create and maintain connections to alumni is critical, as it shapes the nature of potentially valuable organization-level alumni resources. We develop a theory of firm value capture from alumni that explains how firms’ norms and policies before, during, and after employee exit affect firms’ alumni relations climate—a shared perception among a firm’s current and former employees that the firm values alumni. We further theorize that the alumni relations climate will lead to creation of firm-level alumni resources, with the configuration of these resources shaped by alumni identification. That is, the extent to which firms’ alumni identify with the firm versus with members of the firm’s remaining workforce (or balanced between the two) will have implications for the configuration of alumni resources that are potentially accessible to the firm. Our theory describes how these different alumni resource configurations come with inherent benefits and costs when it comes to the value that firms are able to capture from their alumni resources. We illustrate the value of this theoretical perspective by identifying meaningful practical implications and avenues for future research.

The emergence of gig work (e.g., freelancing, rideshare driving, food and parcel delivery, travel nursing, virtual assistantship) and the gig economy challenges organizational researchers to consider how they should revise traditional theories of work behavior to consider the dynamics of new work arrangements. As a prime example that is central to this review, organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) is a form of job performance whereby motives stem from the quality of work relationships with direct supervisors, coworkers, and other organizational agents. However, gig workers experience very different work relationships and may perform OCB for different reasons (if at all). In this review, we address the question of how OCB theory should evolve to be relevant to gig workers. We summarize traditional motives for OCB performance and review current research describing and classifying gig work. We conclude by ( a) identifying gig worker citizenship (GWC) as a form of citizenship behavior that better fits the reality of gig work and ( b) offering a revised model of how OCB motives may help predict GWC performance. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, Volume 11 is January 2024. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.